Last week, I began exploring a concept known as “Moral Inversion.” Moral Inversion describes how what has traditionally been seen as immoral can, in certain contexts, be accepted as moral by human beings. The philosopher Michael Polanyi critiqued modern totalitarian regimes on both the right and the left, noting how the the loss of connection with a moral tradition caused the abandonment of traditional ideas of justice with alarming consequences. Recently, we’ve witnessed how our society’s emphasis on material wealth and power has led many people to experience a moral inversion. There has been a loss of confidence in our institutions, making fundamentally immoral actions appear justified in the eyes of a moral consciousness that has gone adrift, unanchored by any long human moral tradition. I believe this modern tendency to adopt repressive political stances is deeply connected to the focus on materialistic power I have mentioned before.[1]
It is helpful to think of moral inversion as akin to a ship struck by a torpedo, capsizing and settling upside down on the seabed. This process essentially flips our moral senses, making them susceptible to being turned upside down. As society becomes increasingly influenced by the materialistic moral reductionism Polanyi discusses, more people find themselves with an upside-down morality — where anything seems acceptable in pursuit of money, power, and similar goals. That’s the core of moral inversion.
Polanyi set out a schema of social organization showing that, in society and government, power is not primary but rather derivative and secondary. The structure of the process of institutional evolution is as follows:
- Shared common convictions, which are embodied in a tradition and form of life;
- Shared social interaction and fellowship centered around common ideals;
- Cooperation towards common goals of the group; and
- Structures of authority and social coercion needed to maintain order.[2]
This schema describes a society and its institutions operating on the basis of what he calls “conviviality,” or shared life. While common beliefs, social interactions, friendship, and cooperation are vital to a healthy social life, every human group and social structure has ways of wielding influence—whether legal, moral, intellectual, or physical. For example, in nonprofits, moral authority plays a key role in leadership, while in business, economic strength is crucial. Governments rely on laws and police as tools to uphold social harmony. However, coercive power, though necessary, should be used carefully and only as a secondary option, with awareness of its potential risks. The main issue with totalitarian regimes is that they rely on coercion as their primary tool, ignoring these dangers and overlooking the other essential elements that help societies thrive and allow people to grow.
A wise leader in any social institution always aims to promote harmony and to lead others with moral authority. At the same time, every social institution has structures in place to help nurture its members. For example, private groups can choose to remove someone from membership if they violate the rules. It’s also important to remember that all commands, including laws, carry some degree of coercion, because without it, rule-breaking individuals might go unpunished. Given human nature, coercion and the exercise of power are natural parts of any society or social institution.[3]
As social institutions grow in size and complexity, the use of power becomes both more necessary and more dangerous. That power grows as an institution’s size increases can almost be taken for granted. At the level of national governments, power and its exercise begin to dominate the life and leadership of those in charge unless definite steps are taken to avoid excessive reliance on power to achieve social ends. Unfortunately, in the political arena and in the management of governmental affairs, power can become the principle of first resort, which is the stock in trade of all totalitarian, terror-based governments.[4]
The 20th century saw many leaders who, after coming to power through revolution, remained in control through sheer force and, in the process, destroyed the moral and spiritual foundations of their society. These include figures such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ayatollah Khomeini, and others. Governments built this way can last decades or even a century, but they are inherently unstable at their core. They rely solely on force and power for their legitimacy. A recent example is the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is currently facing significant challenges. In all these cases, the regime’s core support rests on the overwhelming exercise of power and the fear it engenders.
Power Politics, Subverted Morality, and Moral Inversion
Even in dictatorships, where freedom is almost completely absent, governments generally attempt to create some kind of moral justification for their existence. They do this by creating reasons to legitimize their power and by preventing opposing views from being expressed in the media or academia. (This is why, in the Middle East, where there are few functioning democracies, there is a definite reliance on antisemitism and anti-Americanism to justify repressive regimes.) Interestingly, no matter how repressive a government is, it tends to accept a certain level of legality and consistency in applying laws, mostly to avoid provoking a revolution. Without such measures, a revolution might almost be inevitable.[5]
Moral Inversion as a Symptom of Totalitarian Ideology
Recent developments in Western culture have opened a new way of thinking about morality, sometimes even inverting it. A Christian, and specifically Protestant, insight holds that all governments act immorally. Since Machiavelli’s time, the notion that all governments and their leaders are entitled to act immorally has been a feature of Western political theory. With the advent of social Darwinian thinking, leaders increasingly focused on power and victory to the exclusion of social and moral factors. Too often, politicians believe they’re entitled to act immorally simply because they have the position and power to do so.
During World War I, both sides believed they had the moral high ground, each claiming moral authority for their actions. In World War II, Hitler openly acknowledged that the desire for power and conquest, inspired by Nietzschean admiration for strength, was a driving force behind the Nazi movement. Meanwhile, the Allies, despite employing many of the same unjust tactics as Hitler, still claimed the moral high ground. In both conflicts, the pursuit of power and violence lay at the heart of the struggles.[6] The result has been an acceleration of the loss of citizens’ confidence in the legitimacy of their governments.
Marxism took this insight into the moral force of immorality and made it a central element of its system, thereby eliminating any moral constraint on those wielding power to create a better society. Polanyi argues that modern people have been attracted to Marxism because it offers a means of engaging in immoral behavior without the constraint of moral self-doubt. In other words, the effect of materialist Marxism is to destroy the human conscience.[7]
Scholars often note the internal contradictions within Marxist thought. Although driven by a kind of moral passion for economic equality, Marx derided traditional morality as “worthless cant” and the product of elites’ attempts to justify their rule. Instead, he employed the vocabulary of historical necessity, resulting from the operation of mechanistic economic forces. Having eliminated traditional moral norms (which, in the European context, were Christian but Confucian in China), practitioners of Marxist ideology are free to disregard morality, justice, truth, and other ideals in the pursuit of power. This aspect of Marxist thought, though popular in the modern world, contradicts all historical thought that regarded values such as truth, justice, and goodness as independent noetic realities, yet real. Worse, this inversion of morality allowed the worst kind of persecution and eradication of those viewed as “enemies of the people.”
Paradoxically, although Marxism dismisses traditional morality, it is fueled by innate human moral passions that are impossible to eradicate. Marx himself appealed to the natural moral outrage people feel toward unfair working conditions as a driving force behind his ideas. In reality, the strength of his agenda and revolutionary movement relied on an endless moral longing for a perfect society, a concept that many critics compare to the Christian idea of a perfect world, which has been wrongly applied to politics, where it doesn’t fit.[8]
Contemporary Thought and Critical Theory: Marxism Rebooted
Though fundamentally capitalistic, contemporary America is deeply shaped by Marxist ideas, especially through the widespread influence of scholars across nearly every field who are impacted by what we call “Critical Theory.” Critical Theory originated in the ‘Frankfurt School,’ a group of thinkers who sought to respond to Marxist ideas in the context of German society and the struggles involved in implementing Marxist principles before World War II. The school’s founding leader was a Marxist thinker. Over time, under the guidance of its second leader, Max Horkheimer, this approach expanded to include insights into the economic and political effects of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, influenced by Erich Fromm (1900-1980), who worked to blend Freudian analysis with Marxist thought.
Critical Theory has developed as a diverse approach to exploring society and culture, drawing on Marxist ideas about the economy and politics. More broadly, it offers a thoughtful critique of post-Enlightenment modernity, liberal democracy, and Enlightenment thinking. In the context of modern capitalist society, Critical Theory seeks to identify ways to help Western culture move beyond what it perceives as oppressive and alienating social systems. Unfortunately, its impact has been to embed materialist and Marxist prejudices in academia and the professions, most seriously in law and political theory. In particular, Critical Theory, in almost all its forms, is anti-supernatural and anti-traditional religious beliefs, especially Christianity. [9]
Nevertheless, Critical Theory and Marxism have this in common:
- Limitless moral demands for social perfection
- A mechanistic reductionist vision of human society and approval of social engineering to achieve a just society.[10]
The phrase “social engineering” is important because it highlights the materialistic, mechanical way of thinking that arises from post-Newtonian ideas. This kind of thinking often overlooks the natural, organic aspects of human society and the unseen family and social connections that are essential to people’s well-being. Unfortunately, because of this tendency to seek a perfect society through political power, such attempts are doomed to failure. Worse, they degenerate into some form of totalitarian state, which in Western democracies is too often what is sometimes called “soft power.”[11]
Materialistic Marxist and Capitalist thinkers often separate morality from political choices, presenting themselves as purely scientific. This can allow those who hold these views to avoid moral accountability by bypassing conscience, leading them to endorse actions that are clearly oppressive and disrespectful of human dignity.[12] Such fanaticism isn’t limited to Marxist countries. For example, is also evident in today’s radical left in America with its glorification of radical action to achieve some hoped-for social change.
This kind of intense belief is fueled and distorted by a materialistic worldview, which deeply influences human behavior in troubling ways, ultimately resulting in a loss of moral conscience. This is particularly evident when a group of people who claim to be interested in economic equality begin to dominate and divert productive capacity in ways that impoverish the country and destroy wealth.
Polanyi goes on to describe the terrible effects when personalism, combined with a moral conscience, is translated into social action:
The philosophic nihilist’s hidden moral passions are always available for political action if this can be based on nihilistic assumptions. He can safely indulge his moral passions by accepting the intrinsic righteousness of an unscrupulous revolutionary power. Injected into the engines of violence, his humane aspirations can at last expand without danger of self-doubt and his whole person responds joyfully to a civic home of such acid proof quality. At last he is engaged. He is safe.[13]
Unfortunately, because the entire world universe of such people has been perverted by loss of contact with the transcendent reality of such intangible realities as truth, goodness, beauty, and justice, the result is an inevitable authoritarian misery for those trapped in a society governed by such people. This is the problem created by modern, materialistic, and bureaucratic governments of the left and the right. The worship of power and the belief that unlimited power can bring about a perfect society are doomed because they rest on a false assumption about human beings, human life, and the reality of transcendent values.
Conclusion
In the next blog of this series, drawn from Personal Knowledge, I explore how moral inversion can distort moral thinking among intellectuals. Since moral inversion damages the inner sense of justice and moral judgment, resulting from the loss of independent moral factors that should guide the actions of citizens, when intellectuals are impacted, there is societal impact and decline.
Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved
[1] See, G Christopher Scruggs, “Moral Inversion and America Today” (June 4, 2020) at www.gchristopherscruggs.com.
[2] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1974), 212.
[3] Id, 224.
[4] Id, 225.
[5] Id, 226.
[6] Id, 227.
[7] My analysis centers on Polanyi’s critique of national socialism and Soviet Communism, but the same critique applies to some Western capitalist attacks on traditional morality as “undemocratic” or ungrounded in reason. Where all that matters is profit, the same moral inversion that Russia experienced can occur in the West.
[8] This is embedded in Polanyi’s insight that Christian faith created in the West a deep moral sense—and one not pragmatically grounded but ultimately eschatologically grounded in the hope of a “new heaven and new earth” (Revelation 21:1). In modern, materialistic societies, that channel has been revolutionary action designed to create a new society along strictly materialistic lines. Communism or some form of national socialism has been the preferred channel. The political disasters of the 20th and now 21st centuries are often powered by moral energy resulting from this destructive rechanneling of moral passions
[9] See, David Stanley Caudill, Diagnosing Tilt: Law, Belief and Criticism (Amsterdam, Holland: Free University Press, 1989).
[10] Personal Knowledge, 229.
[11] “Soft power” involves the use of modern technologies that enable a form of totalitarianism, which one might call “Soft Totalitarianism.” This is a regime that perpetuates its rule with relatively low levels of physical violence while controlling individual lives through various forms of social control, using computers, social media, closed-circuit television surveillance, facial-recognition software, digital payments, data mining, national firewalls, and other digital technologies to enable a high level of control over people. For example, it can use “debanking” people, as has been tried in America, and other techniques to prevent nonconformists from being employed or holding political offices.
[12] Personal Knowledge, 231.
[13] Id, 237.