The word degeneracy gets tossed around from time to time, often as an insult or an ill-defined concept. A 4chan anon talks about degeneracy in more detail as follows:
At the risk of a serious comment, I might suppose that the term degeneracy relates to the fact that these activities are more prevalent in a community when that community’s higher, more noble and less hedonistic principles have degenerated. Likewise, submission to vice is nothing to be proud of, it is facile and achieves enjoyment without contributing good for others.
A bit like homosexuality and masturbation. Doing it is not bad, it simply isn’t good. Where it becomes a problem is when people dismiss the deleterious effects accumulated over time and move even further to promote it as something good, thru upsetting peoples values that build and sustain civilization, and thus degenerate. When abused, it robs the person of time and effort spent on more enriching pursuits. If a culture celebrates these things, they suffer, as the only thing separating us from animals is the learned discipline by our peers and elders that must be re-taught every generation, that more can be achieved for a community if we don’t succumb to every temptation for gratification at every opportunity. This isn’t a judgment, it’s just a historical fact.
Vices can be present, as they emerge naturally. But to glorify them or celebrate them as worthy ideals equal to or greater than their abstinence is simply harmful, and thus degenerates their potential to enjoy better things in life reserved for humans. When you encourage someone ta enjoy vice, something they can discover without encouragement, you are not giving them anything they couldn’t discover themselves for enjoyment
You are instead deceiving them through advocating a false premise, the equality of indulgence with abstinence, and doing them a disservice and promoting harm to them. In essence, whether you mean to or not, you are hurting them by messing with their mind and values and using peer suggestion to subvert their pre-existing values that took time and discipline to create for their own benefit, and the time and loving efforts of others that helped that person build them. It is ultimately a hurtful thing to do to someone, and especially cruel to attack a child or teen with such false equations who will suffer the most if he accepts doubting his own virtues because if he succumbs, he will suffer the longest, as well as anyone he then encourages out of loneliness in his new vice, thus his community.
This is why “degenerates” have always been a social joke and punching bag. They cease to be when the culture has become too corrupt to know the difference.
I apply these same standards to any industry or agenda of vice. To mock them as a joke may be comical, but to be honest, it belies how much pain and hurt it causes the poor humans compromised with these false ideas.
Even sadder is that it may not affect the one who promote such ideas as badly as it will effect the one he promotes it to, as people have different resources, constitutions and tolerances, both physically and psychologically. Then it is not only false at a social level, but individual level as well, and cruel.
This is a really good and logical explanation of what qualifies as degeneracy and why it is considered bad, beyond the typical arguments I’ve heard when I was younger which only emphasized equality, the vague “let people enjoy what they like” statements and people’s freedom to do as they pleased so long as they broke no laws.
The whole pornography industry is a good example of this, I think. When I was a child, porn was presented often as just a cool, edgy thing whose consumption represented one’s freedom of speech and freedom in general. Few people discussed its potentially addictive qualities and harmful effects on one’s brain.
Originally screen cap:
Temple of Zagan 