Most of the podcasts I hear about Charlie Kirk drive me crazy because they focus on morality.
Everyone has their morality. Unless we share a moral referent, I’m not particularly interested in your views on morality.
Stephen Turner’s book Explaining the Normative helps.
ChatGPT notes: You’re frustrated that political/moral language—freedom, justice, dignity, fairness—is treated as if it were self-evident, when in reality its meaning depends on the hero system (Becker’s term) or tradition in which it’s embedded. Turner comes at the same issue but from a sociological-philosophical angle:
What Turner means by “the normative”
Turner has argued that the “normative” is not some timeless, universal set of moral rules.
Instead, norms are socially sustained practices: patterns of expectation, sanction, and shared background that make certain terms and judgments intelligible.
Words like freedom or justice only have force because a community sustains a practice that gives them that meaning.
How that connects to your point
When you say “freedom means nothing without reference to a hero system”, you’re describing the same dynamic Turner tries to unmask. Norms aren’t floating universals—they are anchored in traditions and communities.
The “endless moralizing” you find exhausting is, from Turner’s lens, people talking as if their normative framework were universal. But because we no longer share one, the language becomes friction and noise.
What you’re longing for—people describing their experience of reality—is closer to Turner’s own corrective: don’t treat “the normative” as metaphysical truth. Treat it as situated practice, grounded in lived life.
What Turner’s book adds
It gives you a vocabulary for why moral debates feel futile: the normative order that once made terms like justice and freedom “common currency” has fractured.
It shows how sociology of norms explains the emptiness you’re pointing to: norms require communities, sanctions, and practices. Without shared anchoring, the same words get filled with different meanings.
Turner is less moralizing, more descriptive: he asks what sustains normative expectations in practice, not which morality is right. That lines up with your preference for “reality over morality.”
In plainer terms
Turner helps you understand that the shouting match isn’t just bad faith. It’s that Americans no longer live inside one shared normative universe. Words that once carried a stable meaning because of a common story now float free, open to endless reinterpretation. That’s exactly why you hear “freedom” used three ways in one debate—and why it drives you crazy.
GEMINI says: The book explores why public discussions centered on moral terms like “freedom” and “justice” often feel like a “waste of time” and “talking past each other” when a shared moral universe is absent.
The text you provided outlines a key problem: words like “freedom” and “justice” are “empty vessels” without a common reference point, or as you put it, a “hero system”. Turner’s book delves into this very concept, calling it the problem of normativity. He explains that normative terms are ubiquitous, but there is “huge disagreement about the source and the authority of norms”.
Here is how Turner’s work can help you understand the situation:
The “Double Game” of Normativity: Turner explains that normativists often play a “double game” by explaining social realities in terms of a deeper, hidden, non-empirical reality. This “hidden reality” provides the normative standards, which are different from what actually occurs. This is similar to your point that a word like “freedom” is not “self-evident” but is “tethered to a story, a tradition, a framework of meaning”. Turner argues that this double game provides the opening for “disenchanters”—like social scientists—to deny that there is anything “intrinsically there”.
The Conflict with Social Science: Turner argues that the current philosophical debate around normativity is a self-conscious attempt to reclaim ground lost to social-science explanations. Social science, for example, can explain why certain beliefs are accepted as a causal phenomenon without considering if they are “rationally or justifiably accepted”. This parallels your observation that the focus on “righteous” vs. “evil” in public debates bypasses the more productive discussion of shared reality or a “purely naturalistic enterprise”.
The Problem of Local Normativity: The book specifically addresses the issue of different groups having different norms. It states that what is considered “correct, true, or valid” varies from one social setting to another, which compels us to recognize that this variation is “social”. Your analysis that “freedom means something different to me than it does to a secular socialist and a wounded Palestinian” is a perfect illustration of this “problem of local normativity”.
Ultimately, the book suggests that the breakdown you’re experiencing in public discourse isn’t just a matter of personal frustration; it’s a deep-seated philosophical and sociological problem rooted in the very nature of normative language and the absence of a shared framework to give those words meaning.
Can you expand on this? The “Double Game” of Normativity: Turner explains that normativists often play a “double game” by explaining social realities in terms of a deeper, hidden, non-empirical reality. This “hidden reality” provides the normative standards, which are different from what actually occurs. This is similar to your point that a word like “freedom” is not “self-evident” but is “tethered to a story, a tradition, a framework of meaning”. Turner argues that this double game provides the opening for “disenchanters”—like social scientists—to deny that there is anything “intrinsically there”.
Stephen P. Turner’s concept of the “double game” of normativity is a way to describe how we use normative language—terms like “freedom,” “justice,” and “rights”—in our daily lives. It’s a key part of the problem you’re describing, where moral arguments feel hollow because they lack a shared foundation.
Here’s an expansion on that idea:
The “Double Game” Explained
In essence, the “double game” refers to the act of a normativist (someone who believes in and uses normative concepts) doing two things at once:
Observing reality: They see how things are in the world—the “empirical” or observable social realities.
Referencing a hidden reality: They then interpret these observable realities in terms of a “deeper, hidden, non-empirical reality” that provides the standards for judgment.
This hidden reality is not something you can see, touch, or measure directly. It’s the ideal, the standard, or the “hero system” that provides the meaning for the normative terms.
For example, when a person says, “That law is unjust,” they are playing the double game. They are observing the law (the first reality) but judging it against a hidden, non-empirical standard of what “justice” should be (the second, hidden reality). This standard is not part of the law itself; it comes from their specific moral universe or hero system.
How it Creates a Communication Breakdown
This is where the concept directly connects with your observation about public debates. When two people from different “hero systems” engage in a debate about “justice,” they are each playing the double game, but they are referencing different hidden realities. They both agree on the word, “justice,” but they are basing their arguments on different foundational beliefs. As a result, they aren’t having a real conversation; they are simply talking past each other, each assuming their own hidden reality is the universal standard.
The “Disenchanters”
Turner argues that this “double game” creates a major vulnerability to disenchanters, such as social scientists. A social scientist, when confronted with the claim “that law is unjust,” would not try to find the hidden reality of “justice.” Instead, they would ask a different question: “Why do you believe that law is unjust?” They would then explain this belief in terms of a causal, empirical reality—for example, the person’s upbringing, their social group, their economic situation, or their specific cultural traditions.
By doing this, the social scientist “disenchants” the debate. They reveal that the normative term (“unjust”) is not a statement about a universal, objective truth but a social phenomenon rooted in a specific context. They are, in effect, denying that there is anything “intrinsically there” in the normative claim beyond its social origin and function.
In short, the double game is the fundamental move that makes normative debates possible, but it is also the reason they fall apart when the underlying, hidden realities are not shared. It’s the root cause of the “noise” and “endless moralizing” you correctly identified in your initial text.
CHATGPT:
The Double Game
Level One – Social Reality (what people actually do):
We observe people acting, speaking, invoking words like freedom, justice, dignity.
These are empirical: they show up in speech, rituals, institutions, sanctions, practices.
Level Two – Hidden Normative Reality (what’s said to “really” guide us):
Normativists claim there’s something “behind” the practices—a non-empirical layer of moral reality.
This is presented as the “true” standard: the essence of freedom or justice, independent of messy human practices.
Example: “Freedom” isn’t just how a community uses the term—it really means autonomy of the rational will (Kant), or non-domination (neo-republicans), or divine obedience (religious thinkers).
The double game is: you describe people’s messy actual practices, but then posit an invisible, deeper realm of “the normative” that sits above and corrects those practices.
Why Turner critiques this
Once you posit a “hidden normative reality,” you’ve created a gap between lived practice and supposed true meaning.
That gap is an opening for disenchanters (social scientists, anthropologists, sociologists) to say:
“Wait a second. I don’t see this hidden essence. All I see are practices, sanctions, traditions, stories. The ‘deeper normative layer’ is just mystification.”
In other words: by insisting on a transcendental “real normativity,” philosophers actually make it easier for empiricists to dismiss normativity altogether.
Your “freedom” example
People invoke freedom all the time, but its meaning is tethered to different hero systems: libertarian minimal state, progressive self-expression, religious obedience.
The double game move is to say: but beyond these usages, there’s the real Freedom, the true normative essence.
Turner would say: that’s just smuggling in metaphysics. All that actually exists are the practices and traditions that give the word content.
So what Turner is doing
He’s trying to strip away the double game—to say: stop pretending there’s a hidden normative layer.
Instead, treat normative language as socially sustained: tethered to practices, stories, traditions.
This lines up perfectly with your frustration: the endless moralizing feels empty because everyone is pretending their “freedom” is the “real” one, when in fact each version is anchored in a different framework.
The practical upshot
Once you see the double game, you stop asking “what does freedom really mean?” and start asking “what framework is this person’s usage anchored in?”
That shift lets you drop the illusion of a shared moral universe and instead pay attention to actual lived realities, traditions, and practices—the only place meaning really resides.
LF: Freedom and every other moral term such as justice, law, love, equality, rights, respect, dignity, good, evil, fairness, loyalty, honor, integrity, is meaningless without reference to a particular hero system. The term “Freedom” on its own means nothing.
I am tired of our public discussions centering on morality when we don’t share a morality. I just wish people would share their experience of reality, their view of reality, a little more, and do less moralizing. All these arguments about the morality of public events and policies are largely a waste of time. We have no common referent in America, and so “freedom” means something different to me than it does to a secular socialist and a wounded Palestinian.
What wears people down today isn’t disagreement—it’s the endless moralizing. Every debate is cast in moral terms: who’s righteous, who’s evil, who’s on “the right side of history.” But here’s the problem: we don’t share a morality anymore. The words—freedom, justice, dignity, fairness—are hollow because they mean different things in different moral universes. So when we moralize, we aren’t actually conversing. We’re talking past each other, shouting into our own echo chambers.
What I long for is less of that and more reality. Less “you’re evil, I’m good” and more “this is what I see, this is what I’ve lived, this is how reality looks from where I stand.” We don’t have to agree on a moral framework to talk about the world as it is. We might actually learn something from each other if we compared our experience of reality instead of competing for moral high ground.
Every judgment is a narrowing. To judge is to draw a line—this is good, that is bad; this is true, that is false. It’s necessary, of course. Without judgments, we can’t act, choose, protect, or build. But judgment always comes at a cost. It tightens us. It contracts the field of vision. It locks us into one angle of reality. Your neck and back and spine tighten when you judge and your breath becomes labored. You don’t move as easily and your range of reactions to stimuli are diminished.
Most of the time, life goes better when we spend less time contracting and more time expanding—easing into awareness, letting the world be wide, allowing experience to unfold before we rush to carve it up. In that state, the mind is supple, curious, open. We can see more, feel more, connect more. Our head rises forward and up allowing our back to lengthen and widen and our breath to ease.
Judgment is essential for survival. But expansion is essential for living. The trick is not to eliminate judgment, but to know when to put it down—to return to a world that feels wide rather than narrow.
Moralizing without shared morality is just noise. But sharing lived reality—that at least gives us a common ground to stand on. The more we have in common, the stronger we are and the higher our quality of life. Diversity means we celebrate having next to nothing in common but some woke imperial nonsense.
We live in a world awash with moral language. Freedom, justice, equality, dignity, rights, love, fairness, respect. These words are invoked as if they were self-evident, solid, universally understood. But in truth, they mean nothing on their own. They are empty vessels. To carry weight, they must be tethered to a story, a tradition, a framework of meaning—a hero system, in Ernest Becker’s terms. Without that anchoring, they become weapons in endless cultural shouting matches, where each side uses the same vocabulary but speaks different languages.
Take freedom. For the libertarian, freedom means freedom from interference—no one telling you what to do. For the progressive, freedom often means freedom to live authentically, without systemic barriers. For the religious, freedom might mean freedom through obedience to God. Three visions, three worlds. Which one is “real freedom”? The word alone doesn’t answer. Only the referent—the story in which it sits—can tell you.
The same is true of justice. To some, it means punishment proportionate to wrongdoing. To others, it means redistribution to correct inequities. To still others, it means covenantal faithfulness or divine order. “Justice” does not stand on its own; it hangs on a tradition.
Becker’s insight was that all cultures are “hero systems”—shared moral universes that tell people what counts as good, evil, honorable, shameful. Within a warrior tribe, honor might mean courage in battle. Within a liberal university, honor might mean intellectual honesty. Within a religious tradition, it might mean faithfulness to God. Strip away the hero system, and the word itself collapses into vagueness.
This is why our culture wars feel so bitter. Progressives and conservatives both claim to fight for freedom, justice, dignity. But they are not disagreeing about details. They are loyal to different hero systems. To the progressive, canceling a public figure preserves justice and dignity. To the conservative, resisting cancellation protects freedom and truth. Both are sincere. Both believe they are defending the moral order. But because their referents differ, the words no longer connect.
The danger comes when we treat these terms as if they were self-evident universals. That illusion allows them to be manipulated. Equality can mean equal treatment, equal opportunity, or equal outcomes—and politicians slide between definitions to suit the moment. The word looks stable, but its meaning is entirely dependent on context. Without a shared referent, moral terms become unstable currency, open to inflation and fraud.
Healthy societies anchor their moral language. Judaism grounds its terms in covenant. Christianity in Christ. Liberal democracy once anchored them in natural rights and the civic religion of the republic. America’s current fracture comes from losing that common referent. The words remain, but the shared story has dissolved. That’s why we shout the same terms at each other and cannot be heard.
Moral terms are not free-floating universals. They are meaningful only inside a tradition, a people, a story. To argue about “freedom” or “justice” in the abstract is futile. The real question is always: freedom according to which story? justice according to which tradition?
Until we face that, we will continue mistaking noise for conversation. Moral language without a referent is empty air. Anchored in a shared hero system, it becomes the glue of civilization.
ChatGPT says: Here’s a list of moral terms that are notorious for having contested, shifting, or deeply subjective meanings depending on culture, politics, religion, or personal worldview:
Justice – Can mean fairness, equality, punishment, restoration, or desert, depending on the framework.
Freedom – Some see it as non-interference (“freedom from”), others as empowerment or capability (“freedom to”).
Equality – Equal treatment, equal opportunity, or equal outcomes all pull in different directions.
Rights – Can be natural, legal, human, civil, or divine, and people disagree on which “rights” are valid or fundamental.
Responsibility – Interpreted as personal accountability, collective duty, or social obligation, often in tension with freedom.
Respect – Sometimes deference to authority, sometimes mutual recognition of dignity, sometimes tolerance of difference.
Dignity – For some, rooted in autonomy and choice; for others, in inherent worth regardless of choice.
Good – Can mean pleasure, virtue, utility, divine will, or personal authenticity.
Evil – Sometimes absolute wrongdoing, sometimes simply “what harms me or my group.”
Fairness – Can mean impartiality, proportionality, or equal shares, depending on the situation.
Loyalty – Seen as virtue by some (duty to family, tribe, nation), but as blind allegiance or moral weakness by others.
Honor – For some, about integrity and self-respect; for others, about reputation, status, or adherence to tradition.
Integrity – Either strict adherence to moral rules, or consistency with one’s own values (even if those values are contested).
Tolerance – Can be “live and let live,” or indifference, or even a patronizing stance.
Compassion – Sometimes unconditional empathy; other times, tempered by justice, merit, or “tough love.”
Obedience – Seen as moral in some religious or military frameworks, but as morally suspect in others.
Sin – In secular contexts, just “wrongdoing,” but in religious ones, it’s tied to divine law and eternal consequences.
When people today argue about freedom of speech, cancel culture, or justice after Charlie Kirk’s murder, they talk past one another. That’s because moral words—freedom, justice, rights, equality, dignity—don’t have universal meanings. They only make sense inside a given framework, what Ernest Becker would call a hero system.
A hero system is the moral universe you inhabit, the story that tells you what counts as good, evil, honorable, shameful. Within Christianity, “freedom” might mean freedom from sin through Christ. Within liberal Enlightenment thought, it means freedom from coercion. Within progressive politics, it often means freedom from systemic barriers that limit one’s self-expression. Each uses the same word, but each is talking about something different.
The Contest of Meanings
Freedom: For the libertarian, it is the absence of interference. For the progressive, it is empowerment to live authentically. For the religious, it may be obedience to God’s law. Which one is “real freedom”? That depends entirely on which hero system you accept.
Justice: Retribution for some, equity for others, divine order for still others. In one frame, punishing the murderer is justice. In another, dismantling the social conditions that bred violence is justice.
Loyalty, Honor, Integrity: To a tribal culture, these are the highest goods—keeping faith with one’s people. To a liberal individualist, loyalty can look like blindness, honor like vanity, obedience like servility.
We don’t disagree because we misunderstand each other’s definitions; we disagree because we live inside different worlds.
Why Universal Definitions Fail
The Enlightenment dream was that reason could give us universal definitions of freedom, justice, equality—valid for all people, everywhere. But in practice, every society embeds these words inside its own narrative. Strip away the hero system and the words collapse into emptiness. That’s why arguments about “free speech” are endless: people aren’t arguing about speech; they’re arguing about what freedom itself is and which hero system gets to define it.
The Cultural Impasse
Cancel culture, censorship debates, “freedom of speech” fights—they all expose this hollow core. When a progressive cancels someone, they believe they’re defending justice and dignity. When a conservative resists cancellation, they believe they’re defending freedom and loyalty to truth. Neither is lying. Both are faithful to their hero system. And because these systems are incommensurable, the argument feels existential.
The Way Forward
The question is not “what is freedom?” in the abstract. That has no answer. The real question is: which hero system are we living under? Whose story sets the boundaries of meaning? That’s what’s really at stake in the culture war.
If we don’t admit this, we will keep pretending that words like “freedom” or “justice” are self-evident, when in fact they are tribal signals. We don’t fight over words—we fight over worlds.
America is not fighting about policies. It is fighting about hero systems. One side believes freedom means protection from offense, safety from harmful speech, liberation from inherited constraints. The other believes freedom means the right to speak dangerous truths, to offend, to resist conformity. Both call it freedom, but they inhabit different moral universes.
The same with justice, dignity, equality. Progressives see justice as equity, conservatives see it as desert. Progressives see dignity in self-expression, conservatives see it in restraint and honor. Each side thinks the other is insane or malicious, but really they are loyal to different gods.
That’s why the debates never resolve. They can’t. You cannot argue someone out of a hero system with definitions. The terms only have weight inside their own sacred order.
So when we fight about free speech after Charlie Kirk’s murder, or about cancel culture, we are not fighting about the First Amendment. We are fighting about which moral universe rules America.
This is why the culture war feels like a civil war. It is not a dispute over how to apply the same principles. It is a dispute over what the principles are, and who has the authority to define them.
Until we recognize that every moral term is tribal—anchored in a hero system—we will keep screaming “freedom” or “justice” at each other, wondering why nobody hears. We don’t hear because we don’t share a world. And sooner or later, one world will have to give way to the other.
