Saturday, September 30, 2006

Who's there? Hamlet and America.

Who's there?!

To paraphrase the melancholy Dane, "Ah, America, I knew him well!"

How like the dark Dane we are these days; who's there?

Our true heads of state, not the President, but our 'Intellectuals' (I find it impossible to write that without quotes), those who fill our heads with thoughts to think and point out the deeds worth doing, are themselves too involved with their own morbid thoughts of weakness to provide any wisdom at all.

We've got numerous Polonius's wandering about the stage babbling platitudes of advice "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and "Above all else to thine own self be true" as if giving advice to poeple departing on the journey of life, as if "Ok, turn left, don't borrow, go 200 miles then turn left and after the dell be true to thine own self, and make a right around the old Oak and you're there."

Nonsense. "Bush is a fascist”, “Bush has done more damage than 9/11!", "Dissent is the higher Patriotism". Utter nonsense to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear - to anyone with even a cursory understanding of history - even to those in possession of a dictionary - utter nonsense.

You can see the leftist moonbats reflection in Hamlet trotting out the mousetrap play, for intrigues sake, trying to catch the King - as if he hadn't known his guilt already, just trying to line up a little nudge from reality so he wouldn't have to make a decision himself. The ultimate cop-out of determinists - waiting for occurrences to happen and then decry them, rather than taking action and responsibility for the results you create.

How many times does Hamlet ponder and ponder, but never connect thought to deed?

When he does act, it is sporadic and without thought as when he see's a body behind a tapestry and knowing nothing but his snap assumption, stabs it with his sword and killing poor befuddled Polonius.

Who's there? It is his self indulgent moroseness and indecisiveness that ultimately brings about the deaths of Polonius, his daughter Ophelia, that enables the King to mislead Laertes into a plot to kill Hamlet, which not only kills Hamlets mother, but brings about his own death too - just after that of poor hornswaggled Laertes and the King.

Listicism, endlessly analyzing opposing lists of alternate points of view, seeking after deterministic happenings to "Occur" on their own and relieve the burden of judgment and independent action from them.
How like moonbat America today.

As the first line of the play "Who's there?!" asks, who is there? Who are you truly? There is much that you know, but little that you understand and even less that you believe.

Your fancy thoughts have left the ground so long ago, that they produce no value, reveal no truths, and prepare you to take no actions but that of endless whining and indecisive harrangues against reality. But it is reality that persists in insisting that you DO something to earn your existense, not being willing to "Occur" for your benefit.

Who's there?

To all of the Leftist's so fixed on "The Iraqi distraction making the Islame-o's angry" and 'Bush lied and people died", put down Uric's skull and offer up some solid and integrated ideas of your own, together with the concrete steps you're willing to take to bring them into reality.

Reason is a fine thing, when it is directed to encompass all of your knowledge, enabling you to bring all of your skills and abilities to bear on a problem - but when it is shorn of those roots in reality which alone make it possible to connect the otherwise not apparently related dots, then it becomes a weight around your neck, and it draws you ever downward.

They have bound themselves to impotent inaction by their eager beliefs of themselves as being unworthy oppressors, of there being no true Right and Wrong, of multi-cultural relativism - cultural Marxism, that makes endless pondering upon the miseries of the day, as itself the ideal ends of their thought; and action - especially any action to do what is right in and for the West, such things are deemed as being forever distaseful, losing propositions, one and all.

Having discarded thoughts of there being such things as selves, and especially of souls, they believe that all is only the result of chance and unknowable forces acting in society. In their minds we are all powerless in life - be it before Katrina or the Caliphate, we are only able to yield to it and They, always to They who are presumed lesser, so that we can appear generous and admirable (and oh so subtly superior) to them.
Gagdad summed it well again, noting on his post of 9/30/2006 that:

“For you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but
to them it has not been given.... Therefore I speak to them in parables, because
seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.'
Therefore, Jesus is identifying and highlighting a perennial problem with
spiritual knowledge: many who hear hear it do not hear it, and many more who
understand it do not comprehend it."

As with many moonbat Trols, they love their pretty words, but they don't comprehend their meaning. Their speech's take impressive sounding and pretty words and just line them up in attractive arrangements, stuffed animals on display, but without life and meaning beyond their appearance, their integrated concepts torn out and tossed aside.

They criticize endlessly but offer no criticism, or rather, criticism bereft of its meat - a reasoned judgment and suggestion of more grounded alternatives; Carping only. Apparently so focused on lost elections, that they've lost sight of what the elections are for - to lead America through perilous times to more freedom and prosperity - to lead with well rounded Reason and Action.

Who's there? Moonbat city offers no reply but endless sound and fury signifying nothing.

Friday, September 29, 2006

Spiritual Economics Part 3

True Or False
Good intentions and seeking ‘truths’ in our musings is a relatively easy thing to do, as compared to putting them into practice, which is hard - but unless you do both, you haven't really achieved the truth you are seeking. Not only is wrong done by taking from someone what is not yours, but giving it to someone who has not earned it deprives them of a necessary step, a life skill, without which they will likely lose their balance and crash on the heights.

We are that which makes it possible to bring the Vertical into contact with the Horizontal, but unless both are brought together through our thought & action - the truths we muse, will never make it into reality - they won't truly exist - within us, or without us – and if they can’t be brought together properly in reality – they probably weren’t truths to begin with.

As we are judged not by our intentions - the thoughts we profess - but by our actions, it is because it is only through our bringing our thoughts out from the depths and heights within us, and into practice out into the world, that they become our true abilities, habits, and traits by which we are known.

Theories and truths that are only thought, but not put into practice, are Truths to no one. The attempt to get someone to a particular point on the spiral without their having put in the effort needed to make the climb upwards, can only be accomplished by jumping down to that same point on a lower level of the spiral. Truths must be enacted, people must "become them" by merging action and thought into reality, and so back into yourself, that is how a soul is chiseled into reality, that is the spiral of Vertical progress.

That fusing of the inner and outer worlds into deep etchings upon our souls is probably the only thing that we can take with us when we leave this world - and they will be the true marks of who we are and what we have become.


Economics pervades your entire life, supporting a policy that is unaware of the true source of wealth, your mind and soul and their relation to truth and its unfolding in reality, will be incomplete and false. Error and lies obscure and truth and will force progress downwards in an ever accelerating tragedyectory as power less and less diluted with truth, drives your progress. As Gagdad Bob noted in a recent posting on One Cosmos :


"For when truth is denied, raw power fills the vacuum, destroying love and everything else in its wake."

Power is something that always will break its bounds unless held tightly in place, and it takes strong convictions, truths, principles to keep it in control. Power when allowed to drive, will point its path closest to the ground. Whenever lofty motives are mixed with contradictory lower ones, it is the lower one that will win out in the end, they weaken your conceptual grip - the wider lines forced out by the inner details no longer integrated with understanding and conviction.

Lets look at our Cones lines within lines in a different light. If you've ever seen steel wires sprung outwards in a flower shape, springy, resisting being pulled together, straining to spread out wide again from within a tube you attempt to contain them in. As you slide them into their tube they're contained, if the tube frays, they begin to spring out again. Think of our wider lines as concepts that are able to contain the particular lines, bound as they are with your understanding. It is that understanding that constrains the power of the particulars of reality into your control. As you lose that understanding, or weaken it with falsehood, or contradictory desires for the shimmering particulars beneath your grasp, they will strain their bounds open, widening, and forcing you down the slope of the cone.

Those powers loosely understood are released pulling your life left and right and downwards, always downwards, because power seeks the most solid stance it can take, closest to the vertical ground floor. Whichever of the contradictory concepts are the least conceptual, the most concrete bound, that is the one that power will take to be its foundation and motive point, and that will involve using Force to pull you with it. Liars are not the only means of spreading falsehood - political and economic policies that obscure the truth, and mislead people into thinking falsehoods to be true, are depriving entire peoples of a proper grasp of their lives - they mobilize 'innocents' to spread falsehood with their every well intentioned effort.

A moral life can only be fully lived through the free choices enacted in the life of an individual, and thwarting that freedom to live as you see fit, enforces false actions, even if not law – think of how many times you, or someone you know, has not said what they wished to, because of Political Correctness Truth is further obfuscated by every half hearted action a person makes - the lie spreads the spirit sickens, and the economy, the culture and love itself are suppressed and forced down the spiral towards its base.

What Good can be done with force? Nothing will result as the allegedly well intended intend it to. Force is Tolkien’s Ring of Power; to use it to DO, to initiate (which separates it from force used in response to force initiated against you – no pacifism allowed here, if someone initiates force against you, you are in the Right to smash them as best you can), Force for some supposed good in the world, it will inevitably corrupt and destroy the good it attempted to Do. It must be so, because of the nature of human beings Free Will. You can’t do as Rousseau proposed, "Force them to be free", you will only enslave those you think you are freeing. Free Will must be free to choose - without that a person can not develop themselves or achieve anything of worth in the world.

To the extent that you try to protect someone from the realities of life and the repercussions of their decisions, you lessen their experience of living their lives. Life can only be experienced through Experience - attempting to lessen the experience MEANS to remove that person from Experiencing a portion of their Life, and the lessons they might otherwise have learned, which must be learned for them to progress above where they are on their particular part of the spiral of life.



Spiritual Economics Part 2

Unnatural Goodness
I agree that it is true that Private Property is not a "Natural" state to man. Most things of value to man, do not come to him "naturally", if by naturally, we mean intrinsically, and innately planted into his brain by some higher power. The state of man which comes to recognize a concept such as ‘Property’ is something which his developing soul only comes to conceive, comprehend and adhere to after the long and hard lessons of history have been experienced and learned from. Humanity is not a Natural state for Man - Man in the primitive state, is but a clever animal, skittish, sly, ravenous, and to any outside it's immediate "family", hostile and ferocious.

The sentiments and values that we have come to praise as decent behavior, do not come naturally to man the horizontal animal, he is lifted to Man the Vertical being only through the slow accumulation and passing on from the parent to the child, to the society at large, those thoughts, conceptions, beliefs, practices and habits that serve to create that enlargement of soul which is visible as a Civil and Decent Human Being. And the progress of Man from the flat line horizontal savannah level that we apparently began from, has only been achieved one step at a time and then only when large swaths of a population have caught up with their cultures leaders and so improved themselves, have learned new truths of foresight (as with the agricultural revolution), civic respect and division of labor(as with the development of cities), Philosophical truths (as with the Greco/Roman & Judeo/Christian revolutions), and that of Individual Rights (which made Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution possible). All of this Progress has taken History forward, but the long and winding paths between these revolutions have not always been upon a trajectory marked by a Vertical lift.

Reason (not the modern conception which would have it to be synonymous with an isolated non-contextual logic chopping, but the traditional conception which included searching the depths of your Soul to be integral to its operations) is the faculty that enables men to discern and expand his store of values from the world out there. It is the guiding light of humanity, and like a candles flame, one which is easily gutted, even snuffed out, if not dutifully monitored and upheld by the individual and the community at large.

How are these ideas lost? Neglected? How can they be learned? Taught? What is the effect of not having this knowledge? Ignorance is bliss? Nah, ignorance can corrupt your very soul. Lets try out a metaphor, or analogy, for what knowledge does, how it moves you through life, for better or worse for your spirit and your life.

Round And Round We Go, Whether Up Or Down Only The Thoughtful Know – The Cone Of Plenty
It has been noted that the progress of human development, individually and societaly, bears a resemblance to that of a spiral, but to me it seems less like a spiral that of a cylindrical slinky, and more like what could be described as a cone. Your route around it might begin with a general idea, travel forward around the cone, filling in details and corrections, until you arrive back at the same position that you started from, but with a now solid well thought out idea, so that though you are back at the same left-right position, you find you've actually risen up the cone, having traveled in an upwards spiral, rather than just a level circle. That reaching for understanding of where you are and what you do, of gathering together details and finding the common unifying principle among them, is what lifts you up the cones slope.

For instance there is a sense of a full circle being drawn as you progress from the original concept of "Wheel" developing conceptually within a persons mind, and progressing from there to actually acquiring materials such as wood & iron, and on to fabricating them into an axel and a circular spoked object, and finally physically as a Wheel on a cart. It is through the merging ot inner form or idea with material matter through the alchemical actions of your actions, to create the physical wheel; this progression takes you forward from the point of conception to its manifestation, in a circular fashion, returning back at the point of the ideas origin - but on our conceptual Cone this would not occur in a merely linear circle, such a new idea wouldn't leave you on the same level you began from. How does it lift you, and why?

Lets try to illustrate this better by thinking of a circle, in geometry we look at a circle as having 360 degrees, which if you traced 360 lines evenly spaced from the tippy tip top of the cone, downwards to the wide bottom, you would see that the surface area that fits within one degree at the bottom will seem quite large, as compared to one degree half way up the cone. If you attempted to draw an additional, say 36 lines from base to tip within each of those individual degrees, you would probably see these smaller detail lines would begin to blend together as they neared the top. And if you continued this surface division by tracing 36 more lines even thinner and lighter in appearance, squeezed within each of the smaller lines, and 36 in each of those and so on, and so on... you get the picture, a lot of lines, continuing on for how many? Well I’d continue subdividing the lines with thinner and lighter lines until you have enough lines to represent each particular fact in the world… I won’t, but that’s the idea. Picture neutrino’s, electrons, protons as thin lines within the darker line for Atoms, and collections of Atoms within the darker lines of Molecules, and “your time, effort and possessions conveniently portable, and preservable” as thin light lines within the darker line of Economics. Particulars within Concepts within Principles within Truths, and so on.

If you stood back from the cone, it would likely appear to be one solid colored shape, but as you neared it, the darker lines would begin to stand out, and then the lighter ones, and more so as you neared the surface, until with your face pressed right up against the surface you would see only a gazillion individual lines running up and down the surface within the scope of your vision at that close proximity. We can’t live that close, we have to live back from the detail at the level where the lighter lines blend into larger ones, concepts. But it is important that you understand that those details are still there, they exist whether or not you are ignorant of them. Errors will mislead you and keep you down – literally, at least with our Cone analogy.

Take that cone and extend it up to the sky… if you leaned your head back a bit and lifted your vision from the bottom of the cone towards the top, you'd see these smaller detail lines seeming to merge into wider lines as you rose up the slope of the cone. While there maybe 36 particular lines within each original degree, and within each of those lines and within... as they converge up the slope of the cone, you'll see them integrating together into wider lines, and wider concepts and principles, as you rise up the surface of the cone.

Apparently Less Is More
If you've ever seen something like an elastic hair band, stretched and pulled down over a cone shaped object like a megaphone, and then released it, you’ve seen the band draw its shape together seeking its seemingly contradictory state of being tighter and also more relaxed in shape, and as it does, it rises up the surface of the cone. Though the area that makes up a ring around the cone higher up its slope is smaller, what actually is contained in your grasp is more knowledge than what is at the wider base. This is what concepts and principles do for you.

In like fashion, what appears to be a rate of climb is really a lessening of cognitive distance needed to encircle the cone by gathering the individual lines together and sliding upwards until they merged. With a wider, more elevated perspective, the tighter you will be able to see the detail lines merge into wider individual lines the higher you'd rise, and do the same with a number of these merged lines merging into an even wider lines farther up the cone, and so on, as you move forwards and slide your grasp a littler further upwards with each step.

A completely new idea might seem to provide a steeper angle of climb - but remember what might appear as climb, is really more of a lifting which comes of grasping how a section of apparently separate detail lines of surface reality, integrated together - you in effect shrink the surface area you need to traverse the cone, and the higher you find yourself rising. Understanding how particulars integrate into concepts – like 11111111111111111111 integrates into 20, makes human life and progress possible.

From a left-right perspective, your progress may appear to be back at the same point, but when looked at from the a farther removed perspective, you’ll see that the progression took place in a spiral trajectory which does circle back to the same left-right point, but on a different vertical level. Your progress forward comes from utilizing the things before you as you progress around the cone.

As you discover new aspects of Truth, new interpretations, applications for it, wider integrations, you lift your path in a tighter spiral up the cone, approaching closer to the one point from which all other conceptual angles descend, here, principles and Truths integrate into a single focal point - the one truth, from which you would be able to comprehend all with a single grasp, just as you are able to easily grasp the top of a cone.

On the other hand, by forgetting or neglecting the wider integrations you’ve made, you will find that you begin to slip, your elastic band being yanked back open as the surface expands with un-conceived details splaying out beneath your grasp. At first, those details might seem beguiling in their shimmering fine lines, but as you continue to descend, to disintegrate the concepts within your conceptual grasp, you will slip at a faster and faster rate of speed, grasping less and less of the cones circumference. To rise back up, you will need to relearn how the pieces integrate.

Speed Climbing
Our Cone is a 3-Dimensional shape, it has a surface area, and an interior area. From the surface area alone, any position you look at, but from the very top, you won’t be able to see more than a small section of the surface, and the closer to the bottom, the less noticeable its curvature will be. Lifting your gaze up the surface will help to see how detail lines merge together, and progress will be made.

Remaining focused on surface details, discovering new physical objects such as a wheel, will enable some progress in your enlargement/shrinkage area - since any integration brings you closer to a larger truth. But leaving your attention on appearances only, neglects even more of the Cone than is seen on the surface. As with Humans, what is inside you, your spirit or soul, though unseen, is a larger and more important part of you than your physical appearance.

If however, you manage to draw your gaze not only upwards but inwards, in effect poking your head into the interior of the cone – that will enable you to gain a much wider grasp of surface and height at once, seeing as you would, all around the surface of the cones circumference at your level and above, which from the outside can't be possible except from the very top of the cone.

Looking within the cone however, think of what you would see. You would be able to see across the intervening 'space', to see all sides are actually not sides, but one surface which can be observed all at once and perhaps even see how their slope unites into the focal point, at the tippy top tip far above, where all truths and sides converge into that One Truth. You might also note, that with your attention or insight within the cone, that there is something within the cone, not a vacuum... what... a larger spirit in and of the cone, something that is at all places of the cone at once, a spirit within, a in-spirtation.

It would be a bit strange as well, the curving of surface space being concave, rather than convex, but with some thoughtfulness, you would be able to apply this inner vision to your outer world, grasp more integration, and rise higher up the cone. People down below might marvel at how much you were able to grasp within your hands, their eyes filled with the multiple individual lines within lines within degrees – they might not understand when you would call down that your grasp was no greater than theirs, you only had hold of wider truths that themselves contained the details that overwhelmed their eyes.


The Wheel Goes Around
A completely new concept, such as first discovering the wheel, would provide a wide range of details integrated together, and lift, or focus your progress upwards. Learning of the wheel the first time for yourself would provide what would seem to be at the same time a widening of your reach while simultaneously shrinking your grasp. And as you repeated this process and learned it more thoroughly, you would eventually cease to learn new details & principles, until finally your grasp would remain unchanged with each repetition.

If you were to learn nothing new, day in and day out, repeating what has always been done, you might merely circle around and around like the Stone Age aborigines still living in parts of modern day New Guinea.

This brings about what I don't think is often appreciated, the fact that there is no guarantee that your 'forward progress' is taking you UP the spiral - you can as easily circle downward on the spiral & mistake your forward left-right progress for improving your position on the Vertical scale. If your someone who keeps their eyes fairly close to the ‘ground’, if you look not up, but backwards or even down, for easier pickings, more glittering details, you will by the direction of your gaze, descend the cone, the lines will splay out in wider separation and the path around the cone will become longer, and as the cone becomes wider, the less of its circumference you will be able to grasp.

As someone discards principles to grasp at particulars, individual lines that may be glittering in their gaze, baubles such as redistribution of wealth (thieving) rather than creation, they are discarding wide ranging principles, loosening their cognitive grip on reality, and so are dealing directly with seemingly more and more particulars, being pulled down the slope of the cone as it widens under your grasp.

Spiritual Cash Value
The same may be seen societaly, such as with the founding of the United States of America – it began with “All men are created equal” as its founding truth – but it took another one hundred or so years to move forwards and upwards from that belief to the realization of what it fully meant, through disagreement, upheaval and war in order to come around to implementing it, and still the spiral continues on towards its being fully understood and accepted by all.

With the concept of gaining goods, you can go forward to get 'goods' but depending on whether or not you incorporate the Vertical guidance & progress of that truest private property, your soul, you may progress upwards, or regress downwards. To rise upwards, you need to create values, and that is done through the forging of the values of your inner vision with an outward physical action, to produce gains both material and spiritual. This process can only occur unimpeded through the recognition of Individual Rights, the ability of a person to act as their conscience sees fit, which is the method of Capitalism. People free to do as they see fit, as long as they don’t infringe on the proper rights of others in their society.

What enables you to make choices and decisions enables you to integrate – denying that ability will cause you to reach less integrations, and slow your ascent more and more. It also is going to keep your attention fixed on the surface issues, rather than being able to contemplate the heights and inner reaches and from gaining insights from them, lifting you less and less.

A rapid descent down the slope of the cone, however, is ‘gained’ by taking the more easy path of least resistance, spiraling down by focusing on taking by force the existing values produced by others, claiming grievances and injustices, so that you can call that action 'gain'. This is the preferred method of the leftist, Marxist, Progressivist, collectivist Statist. Hello moonbat city.

Note that although what I’m describing here applies to the physical realm, more importantly it applies to the Spiritual realm.

As I've noted in earlier posts, the person who is a "self made man", has developed the traits & mastery of their own self to act responsibly, productively, and morally. In so doing they create a means of support for their family, a warm supportive family life too, the likes of which Norman Rockwell painted so well.

This will be a far different man from that creature so prone to demonstrating en masse with an uncouth rabble, loudly and violently demanding ‘action’ in their protests (for peace no doubt) and government 'limits' to be placed on business & for 'programs' to support the poor (helping to ensure that they remain poor) – Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol – two peoples separated by a common humanity.

This applies equally for such rarified concepts as Humor. P. G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves" stories are of an elevating humor, whose plots weave the stories concepts and situations into an inner building of humor which bursts out of you from unexpected, but oh so logical, implications within the story coming together in a way that lifts and makes you feel good, it puts you into a good humor.

Its opposite can be found in something such as "The Simpson's" whose humor relies mainly on perceptual shocks and new lows of manners. To be sure, it produces loud guffaw’s of laughter, but focused as it is on the downwards perceptions of guttural shock, it leaves you not in a good humor, but in a more savage state, more likely to pass on caustic sarcasm than warm thoughts - hardly a good humor.

The 'Progress' you make on your spiral path, though it may move in a forward direction, if it is lacking in the Vertical orientation of conceptually integrating and spiritually elevating aspirations, but is instead more focused and concerned with exclusively perceptual goals that you can grasp, 'Practical' aims alone, then your forward progress is going to be down the spiral, a decapitated progression and you shouldn't be surprised at the mindless hell that it delivers you to.


Sunday, September 24, 2006

Spiritual Economics Part 1

What is it that people mean when they say that Money is the root of all evil?
What is it that people are intentionally attacking with that statement? It seems to be used as a way of saying that Envy is all that people are capable of in regards to money... as if they implicitly, and arrogantly, believe that money is something that can only be taken from others or that you must keep others from taking from you.

What does this say about people, their beliefs about Value, and ultimately Truth and Spirituality? People often say that what you value, affects your heart and soul. Fine and true enough, but how often do you hear that what you don’t value, can also have a significant affect on you heart and soul?

The normally thoughtful Deep Thought is promoting "Distributionism", apparently the Catholic Church’s approved economic plan - other than his posts on it I admittedly know nothing of Distributionism, but it seems that his posts reveal much. He lists a number of well meaning points that it promotes, “You should seek to avoid middlemen, credit unions are to be preferred over banks, Avoid Usury" and sums up the error of Capitalism as “…thinking that the goal is to maximize profits with the goal of accumulating the greatest possible capital”, but in my opinion all of these points sum up to "This is what we have determined to be the best way for you to behave", rather than "Refrain from committing crime, and live your life as you see fit, knowing that you are responsible for your actions." . As far as accumulating ‘too much’ capital being a mistaken goal – the purpose of Individual Rights (the cornerstone requirement for laissez-faire Capitalism) is not to achieve Happiness, but to ensure that people are free to do so if they are capable. It is the goal of Philosophy, not economics or politics, to achieve Happiness. As advice, some may see some value in this, but as Economic Policy? However holy the intent, I can’t see any ultimate destination for these good intentions, other than a new Utopian hell on earth.

And at root here, the viewpoint that Money is the root of all evil reveals to us much about those who hold it. It is this viewpoint that valuables’ (and Values!), wealth and luxuries are just things already “out there" which are pursued only by Brutes, whose lives are focused on all that glitters, and to seek or deal in Money, is to covet that which another has. This is not just a leftist viewpoint; most conservatives hold it as well. While conservatives are wary of Governmental regulation of the economy, they too think that there is little good in either money or the economy, but are instead necessary evils, made still worse by governmental interference and power.

Money is nothing but a tool to help make your time, effort and possessions conveniently portable, and preservable. It does it by measuring out something that nearly everyone agrees is of value to them, or because it is to most others feel certain that it can be traded for what is valuable to them, something that won’t rot on the shelf but will be valuable today, tomorrow 50 years from now, and which you can be fairly certain will be as valuable today and 50 years from now, come what may. Gold, Silver, Diamonds are the most common materials that fit these parameters. The dollar that the Founding Fathers fixed as our measure of currency was 100th of an ounce of Gold.

When you, say, agree to build a table for $50, you agreed that the time, effort and materials you’d put into building that table, were pretty much equivalent to the time, effort and materials that you’d trade for ½ an ounce of gold. That common understanding simplified the lives and calculations of everyone in the civilized world. With that common agreement, you were now able to set a few dollars aside each week until you had enough to support yourself for a week, and then with just those dollars in your pocket, you could travel to another city, exchange those dollars for food and shelter instead of trying to cart perishable food and clumsy materials with you, or hoping you would be able to find someone who would want your services when you got there, before you or your family got hungry. That’s it. Yes, government’s try to muddy the waters with some smoke ‘n mirrors such as paper money, but it still doesn’t change the fact that that is all there is to it. All of finance, stocks, bonds, money lending, are nothing but more and more sophisticated ways of enabling people to trade or store their skills using a common yardstick of measurement.

N-o-t-h-i-n-g M-o-r-e.
So what is it about this marvelous tool which enables these abilities and freedoms, that people (you?) like to posture so righteously about condemning?

And don’t give me any BS about some people having too much of it, there is nothing in its nature that is degraded by quantity – the principle and reality of it is unchanged by quantity. Also, please don’t bother with any BS about Actors and Athletes’ being paid more than ‘valuable’ people like school teachers, etc. If my Son goes to college next year, I’ll be paying $15,000 to $40,000 for him to sit with 5 or 6 teachers, and some support staff, for 9 months.

There are NO Actors or Athlete’s who we pay nearly as much money to, as we do to a school teacher or college professor. NONE! You want to argue about that? Been to a movie lately? How much did you pay to see it? $8? $12? Of that ticket cost, how many Actors were involved in the movie? How about crew? Related services & special effects people, etc? Over what period of time did it take to make that movie? 3 months? 12 months? If you could slice a pie into that many pieces, what portion would go to the “Star’ of the movie? A Penny? Oh, they’re a superstar? Well, well then, maybe $1? Lets get extravagant and say they get $4 of that ticket price – so you’re saying that you were willing to pay mister or miz bigshot glamour person $4 for 3 to 12 months of work, so you’d be entertained for 90 minutes – my oh my, aren’t you the big spender.

Do the math for the Athlete, it’s the same deal. The only way they collect such large amounts of money a year, is because hundreds of thousands of people are willing to pay them a fraction of a penny for an hours worth of amusement. They make FAR LESS than any school teacher or college professor. And you can bet, that once someone figures out how to make a decent school teacher or college professor able to provide their services over the internet for millions of people to see – they won’t say another word about earning obscene profits.

The view that wealth is Bad and a guilty pleasure to have (and to hold), is astounding and I contend that it is entirely unsupportable. The idea that through the redistributionist (thieving) policies of 'those who know better', that they feel that they are redeemed in their own eyes, and in the eyes of their fellow citizens, and even deserve thanks from both those who 'benefit' from their criminal efforts, and even from those whom they redistribute (steal) from, is incomprehensible. In these actions there occurs no creation, no development of self responsibility for anyone’s actions, no engagement of inner and outer worlds in the creation of wealth (the only way for wealth to be created or to do any good), for anyone they ‘help’, or even within themselves.

And don’t say that it’s not the people who actually earn a living that you condemn, only those who take profits for pushing papers around that you condemn. More ignorant BS. Lets take a look at the ultimate archetype of this idea, the moneylender. A money lender doesn’t make money for pushing paper, he risks ALL the money he lends (ever hear of a bank or savings & Loan collapse? The risk is real, and it takes real skill and judgment to avoid disaster and turn the risk into profit for all) He doesn’t lend suck money out of a transaction, he makes it possible for you to live in your house years before you’ve earned enough to build it. For the loan of using his money NOW he charges… what, $0.05 cents on the dollar? 6? Maybe 7? He makes your world possible and in return he receives your spin. Fortunately he doesn’t need the little sense you may have, only your cents. As soon as you hear someone deride moneylenders (middlemen too) you can assume 2 things:

  1. Either they know nothing about money, and spend little time among abstract thoughts, or
  2. They assume you don’t know nothing about money and hope to swindle money, authority and/or power from your ignorance.
The assertion that money is Evil, or in any way unworthy, is itself Evil, it is sick, and I think that it’s high time that people stand up and say so. I believe that, contrary to claims made by Rousseau, Marx & others, Money and Private Property actually ennobles an individual, and their society.

To have the opposite of Private Property, property that is claimed by all of the public, then it will be seen as something that is just there and its use will be claimed by all, but the responsibility for care and maintenance of it felt by none, to be treated as something of an afterthought. No one will have any sustained interest in its care or improvement, or a sense of responsibility for it.

Yours, Mine And Nobody's
When property is said to be "mine", not merely in possession of, but owned by a rational person, it gains an aura of worthiness in that persons eyes; psychologically, the person transfers a little piece of their self to the property, like God imbuing life into the clay of Adam – and that is not far off, it is made possible because of some portion of your time and effort – your LIFE being spent on it. Property that is private property is cared for, is improved, and also serves to establish value and regard amongst (rational) individuals in a society. Respect for your own property, requires a reciprocal respect for others property, else how could anyone manage to keep property private, unless all agreed to respect another’s claim to their own property? A society whose economy is based on money requires a society that understands and respects the rule of law – without that, it’s back to trading (and raiding) cows.

Those of a savage nature, who are violently grasping of "THEIRS!", but are covetous of that which is claimed by others; not only do they not yet have an understanding of what Private Property is and means - but I suspect that they do not have a properly developed sense of their own soul and self worth, or of how reason operates in their lives and of how their soul interacts with the world through the actions they take (or don’t take) to develop their lives. As a result, I suspect that you'll find that the development of their private selves, their conceptual, spiritual selves, their souls integration with their own mind, body and world, will be much less developed and full of contradictory desires, urges and behaviors as well.

Not having a complete & accurate experience & understanding of living their lives, is similar to a balance being removed from, or added to, a spinning wheel. Slowly but surely the wheel begins to not only spin and occasionally bounce, but to wobble from side to side, and not be able to correct itself back to true center. Soon the wobbling is pronounced and devastating to not only the wheel itself, but its bearings, axle and eventually the entire car will shake, and if not pulled to a stop, will crash to one.

And so even the oldest economic bogeyman of money lending, and what may be the well intentioned regulation of Welfare Statism, of Compassionate Conservatism, of Distributionism and "Usury is to be avoided", means that those with money to lend, who might be willing to risk a gain for a large enough return - will not, and those who might have benefited & prospered & elevated the situations of themselves and others - will not - and much wealth and potential wealth will be lost and destroyed.

Think of what must result from any policy concerning something as all pervasive to your life as Economics, which limits your freedoms and is to be enforced by the Government; which attempts to take it upon itself to force your choices into what it approves & disapproves of, is destructive to the Spirit, and removes self responsibility from it's citizens, forcing "choice" on those who, if free, would choose otherwise. I think that it must be a guarantee that eventually the citizenry will be reduced to savagery and a totalitarian state - that place where the path of good intentions so often leads.

To denigrate money and private property is to denigrate and devalue your own soul – and I think that there are many more of us out here who know that – and who know what you really are, those of you who think such rot - than you might think.

(For an excellent excavation of the “Money is the root of all evil” silliness, see Francisco's Money Speech excerpted from Atlas Shrugged, at CapMag.)

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Ahminijihad - "I have nothing against Jews or Americans, in fact some of my best friends are Apes, Pigs, Dogs & Devils".

The U.N. Freak show that came to town this week took the Multi-cultural manifesto to new inverse heights. Ahminijihad and Chavez (Castro is out on the injured player list) are the latest UNMSM stars to learn to use the vacuous platitudes of the Western anti-western elites against them while smiling in their face.

This time though, the AWE's (AWE - Anti-Western-Elites) seemed a little discomfited when they sat down to Hordevours with the scruf-jihad - who refused to chummily pretend the things he believed in didn't have any meaning or value, only that the AWEstruck's beliefs, standards and knowledge was useless, worthless, and false and of no value.

To the face of an 81 year old who helped liberate death camps, he maintained that the holocaust didn't happen, and needed to be reinvestigated to get past worthless facts. He had the Gaul to state that he wished countries wouldn't meddle in the internal affairs of Lebanon & Iraq. The Fort Wayne News Sentinel ran a truly disgusting report saying that :

"Ahmadinejad mentioned God at least 15 times in his address, which actually was a brilliantly formulated sermon befitting a member of civilization that had been old during Emperor Constantine, who built the capital of Byzantium. It was a sermon that surpassed the boundaries of Islam and touched on the principles that are the
same for all religions that originated in the Holy Land, and all "People of the Book" - Christians, Jews and Muslims."



Chavez may have been close to being correct when he said that the Devil had been in the UN the day before, but he didn't mean Ahminijihad, but President Bush. Said he could still smell the sulphur. Chavez was rewarded with giggles from the audience, and also applause when he called Bush the devil. He also accused Bush of being a fool, incompetent, alcoholic, dangerous, Hitler... etc, and, fresh from his talks with those luminaries of Human Rights and Freedom, Iran, Syria and Cuba, he said that America was evil and the greatest threat to world peace in the world today.

Brian Williams and other MSM's gave respectful and even at times fawning interviews to Ahminijihad & Chavez, while at the same time one of their compatriots - Wolf Blitzer, held an argumentative interview with President Bush, interrupting him several times, and most definitely NOT treating either Bush or the office of The President of the United States of America - with the same respect given to Chavez and Ahminijihad.

Danny Glover escorted Chavez to a speech in Harlem where he could make other equally lucid comments about Bush and America, and he even pledged to give free heating oil to villages in Alaska.

Take a look at Bush's speech, and theirs, and decide which one makes more sense to you.

How can these things be said without being shredded by anyone in possesion of just a few of the facts involved? Simple, the AWEstruck by virtue of their belief that there are no facts, no truths, and no culture that is better than any other culture - cannibalistic or capitalistic (well that's not quite true, capitalism is the one exception that is worse than any comparison), have not only no defense to offer, but no urge to defend the West at all.

How did the moony AWEstruck get to a position of fawning admiration for these looney Thugocrats? The book that Chavez held up and promoted might lend a clue - "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project)" by our old buddy Noam Chomsky, the most quoted and admired Academic in all of Western Intelligentsia.

The AWEstruck are self-destructed.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Fighting the Method of Intelligent Stupidity

Not To Fight For Your Values Is Stupid
Why do we fight, and why do we not? We are in a War, why?

Why do people fight? To protect their values from the danger of assault - so if you think that someone should be fighting to protect their values, but they don't appear to be, then you need to reexamine what it is that you think their values are, and when you do I'll bet you will find that their values are not the same as yours.

One way to discover their values are to look at what it is they do attempt to defend.

We are clearly under attack by Islamofascists - the Islamofascists are clear on the fact that they are at war with us, they say "Death to America" as they behead our citizens. There is room for disagreements on how best to fight a war with a group who has no "home base" nation which we can declare war upon. But the leftists do not debate the strategy of how best to attack. They do not wish to attack at all, at best they wish to imprison or rehabilitate, or better - to negotiate with the Islamofascists (who gleefully encourage such talk).

What is the target of Leftist rhetoric during this time of the "War on Terror"? The targets of their rhetorical attacks are the actions that those who would defend us, are trying to take in order to defend us. It is the sum of those actions that the Leftist's attack, those actions that the conservatives (not Democrats or Republicans) are trying to take in order to defend us from an external threat.

How will you determine what the proper actions & decisions should be, to defend your values? You identify the threat, determine how best to destroy it, and then do so. Key to that process is the act of Identification - of identifying what Reality really is. Proper thought and resulting actions must flow from your best and clearest assessment of Reality; and so the next question which may seem odd at first, needs to be - will the method you use to view Reality be based upon an attempt to see how things really are, or will it be based upon how you want things to appear to be? If your examination of reality is deliberately viewed through the lens of a pet agenda, then you are not focused on reality, and you are going to miss out on the actions and requirements that reality dictates.

Someone using common sense is left flabbergasted at most leftist comments, and inevitably gasp "How can they say ... THAT? They can't be that STUPID!?"

Ah, but they can. It isn't only biomechanical error that makes someone stupid - in fact that is rare. Philosophical Method makes Stupidity far more commonly and efficiently than anything else, and the intelligent are the most susceptible to it because it masks itself in complexity, which draws the intelligent to it just as a crossword puzzle does. The result is an enemy far more dangerous than even the terrorists - intelligent stupidity dictated truly stupid counsel from those we accept as enlightened leaders - professors, economists, political leaders.

If you are listening to people for instructions to tell you about how to think and act in reality, who are not themselves referring first to reality, but to their pet agenda - then you are in danger - FROM REALITY!

If all of your thoughts and actions are dictated not by an unmediated reality, but firstly by a desire to see a particular agenda reinforced and complied with - then it shouldn't be too surprising to realize that there will be some stupid decisions being made - but they will appear to be stupid ONLY to those standing outside the views of the agenda - and to those who do accept the agenda, you will be seen as reactionary and as a threat.

Most people look at Leftist or Politically Correct actions (don't profile, negotiate with terrorist organizations, etc), and see little more than willful stupidity - because those actions so obviously do not flow from a common sense evaluation of the facts - and the re-explanation of the issue offered on their being questioned, doesn't bring to light any hitherto unrealized information - but only a reinforcing of the fact that it is their pet agenda that is driving their statements and actions, and not reality or even an attempt to grasp it.

This is baffling to someone holding a common sense viewpoint.

Again, why do people fight? To protect their values from assault - so when you think that someone should be fighting, but they don't appear to see what you see as being dangerous, then you need to reexamine what it is that you think their values are, and pay attention to what they see as being dangerous.

Why do the actions of Leftists - most blatantly visible is the creed of Political Correctness, seem so Stupid in the face of common sense? Why do they attack those who are trying to defend Right and Wrong - those who are trying to take the concrete actions necessary to defend those conclusions - those who are trying to engage in an attempt to identify the truth and take the actions necessary to properly defend it? Because at root, all of Leftist rhetoric and actions are taken with the intent to alter or hide reality as it is, in favor of how they want it to be.

Quite simply, there is no greater threat to the values of Leftists than that of objective truth.
What is it that they DO defend? What do they attack in support of? It boils down to the elevation of how they wish things were, and a willingness and even the desire, to force others to assert those same desires.

Their beliefs require stirring up agendas of class war, which requires ignorance of economics. They seek to impose welfare statism, which requires ignorance of Property Rights. They seek to indoctrinate our children with a disdain & sense of disrespect for America, which requires ignorance of History. They seek to "value" people based on their collective minority status, which requires an ignorance of any individual sense of self and respect for your own judgment.

In short, they see and support first before all else their vision of Marxism, Hegelianism, Kantianism – whose root cause is Kant’s philosophic motive "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith." Kant set that method as the root motive power of his philosophy, and all succeeding variants that have followed from it. I matters not whether you substitute "State Spirit" (Hegel), "The Collective" (Marx), or anything else for "Faith", the principle that he established and all "philosophers" have accepted since, is that of "Deny truth to further THIS cause".

This is the reason that leftists worship complexity and dismiss simplicity. The drive towards error & obfuscation necessarily breeds disunity, disintegrated concepts of the world and the necessity for more and more elaborate 'explanations' to fit them within the party platform agenda, and to squeeze them into your head.

The drive towards Truth tends to reduce complexity as principles are identified, and eventually wider principles are identified which relates one to another, below still another larger principle. Principles identify and simplify the process of understanding the world - and they make unprincipled falsehood untenable, exposed and silly, and blatantly stupid.

Truth and Principle is unifying, falsehood is dis-unifying, disintegrating and reflects itself in your soul. Faithfulness to reality will eventually call into question, as Thomas Jefferson noted, even your belief in God, and if you are not secure in your beliefs correspondence to reality, then they will crumble before it. Immanuel Kant had beliefs, which he dared not examine, and so he created an elaborate shell game of philosophy to establish the illusion of man forever being separated from Truth in Reality - in order to protect his fragile faith. In so doing, he placed it in even greater danger from his followers than he ever had to fear from those pursuing a comprehension of reality.

Gagdad Bob recently noted that 'If you don't worship a creator, you worship a creation', in other words, if you don't seek after the one in the many, then you seek the shattered pieces of the One Truth. If your goal conflicts with or even opposes an ultimate truth, then what you seek after is a lie, a lie which must beget more and more lies to try to keep the first lie unexposed. Take a close look at the leftists, look at their personalities, their words and their deeds. Do the same with the conservatives – which seems more whole, secure, confident?

By their deeds will you know them. You would be smart to examine them more closely - it would be Stupid not to.

Monday, September 11, 2006

It will be remembered, whether or not you forget...

The following is from an editorial I sent in prior to the start of the war in Iraq. I think its main points still stand, and with Israel being criticized for using bombs that actually cause death and destruction, and leaders still arguing over whether or not it was and is right to attack terrorists and their sponsors, and of course the fact that it is the 5th anniversary of 9/11, it seems like a good time to post it here.

The only legitimate function of Govt. is to protect the individual rights of it's citizens. The degree to which a Govt. fails in that function, or even violates the rights of it's citizens, is the degree to which that Govt. is illegitimate.

Any Govt. that as a matter of policy violates the rights of it's citizens, physically abuses them, employs false imprisonment, torture, terror and execution, against it's own citizens, is entirely illegitimate, and has no claim to sovereignty. Any legitimate Govt. has the right to overthrow that Govt., since if they don't support the rights of their own citizens, they are not going to care a whit for the rights of other Govt.'s and their citizens. However, any legitimate Govt. considering whether or not to overthrow such an illegitimate Govt., must first consider whether that Govt.'s existence is enough of a threat to it and it's citizens, as to justify the expense to them, of overthrowing it.

Iraq has repeatedly attacked neighboring Govt.'s, some of which, American Citizens have real interests in (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia). It has declared its hatred for, and the desire to destroy, both America, and it's friends, one of which is Israel - the only Govt. in the region with any semblance of support for the individual rights of it's citizens, and so the interests of American citizens as well.

Iraq publicly, as a matter of policy, supports terrorism, especially terrorism towards Israel, bestowing rewards on the families of suicide bombers, and exhorting others to follow in kind.

That in itself, would be enough justification for our overthrowing the Iraqi regime, though perhaps if this were the only information in our possession, it could be legitimately argued whether the cost would justify the expense of doing so. However, there is additional information abundantly available to further weight the argument for war.

Terrorists have struck at American interests, and American citizens overseas deliberately, since the 70's. They have gotten bolder as time has past and we have done nothing substantial to stop them, other than pinprick retaliatory attacks.

They have kidnapped and murdered our citizens, they have bombed our troops housing, our embassies, our airplanes, our warships.

If there was any legitimate argument over whether the cost outweighed the expense, it should have been put to rest when the USS Cole was bombed. It should have been blindingly clear that terrorists had declared war on people of the United States of America, it was then high time that we recognized it and returned the war to them. At that point, the only legitimate function of the Govt. of the USA, had been struck at, and that we did nothing in return was unforgivable, an act of irresponsibility and cowardice which has already cost the lives of thousands.

But wait, there's more.

Terrorists seek Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). WMD are horrifyingly portable, their possession by terrorists, would swiftly bring the assault on American's from overseas, to our own shores faster than the INS could say "Visa Approved".
Any illegitimate Govt. which supports terrorists, and which also has or seeks to create WMD, are clearly an obvious threat to the safety of Americans and our Govt. - they are a clear and present danger.

After 9/11, any argument, that any nation which openly supports terrorists should not be destroyed, borders on treason - certainly moral treason, if not actual treason against the people and Govt. of the USA.

The only argument I have with the Axis of Evil, is that it has too few members.

Iran, Iraq, N. Korea, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, PLO( or whatever sham acronym they are currently operating under), should be charter members, one and all. A serious investigation should be begun to determine whether China should be included as well.

I hope that their names have been left off the list only as a matter of logistical implementation, and that as one is knocked off, another will immediately take its place.

For anyone in possession of these facts, to argue that we mustn't war upon any of these nations, and even worse, that we mustn't because it might anger the terrorists and cause them to step up their attacks on us (implying that they recognize that they are, in fact, already attacking us), is such a craven act of willful stupidity, such a blatant case of turning away from the facts of reality, as to make replying against it almost too disgusting an act to engage in, since it makes it appear as if it is a point worthy of argument.

The pre-war activities have already been commenced in Afghanistan. It is now time to begin the real war, Starting with Iraq, and ending only when every terrorist and terrorist sponsoring illegitimate Govt. has been wiped from the face of the earth.

Friday, September 08, 2006

As it is above...

The eternal question over at One Cosmos: Struggling With the Issue of Faith

I've been left to wonder this before...

Forget about why are we here... we are.

Forget the "which faith to follow?"

If God does exist, he didn't see fit to leave a "made in china" label anywhere to be seen. Didn't leave an instruction manual either. No, the Bible, Upanishads, etc were not written pen & ink by the suddenly corporeal hand of God, they were written by men, undoubtedly inspired men, but men all the same. Written by men, in the language of men - if you really think that they were written by God through men - do you think that God didn't know that the language of men is less than fixed and precise? For example, look at the near incomprehensibility of the original 'English' of Chaucer just a few hundred years ago, let alone of something spoken in Hebrew, written in Greek, then Latin, then English over the course of two thousand years... sorry, can such a 'literal word of God' really be taken seriously? If such a God does exist, we have two very different conceptions of who and what such a God might be.

And yet...

The Universe is here, it is discoverable, and it is immensely logical and integrated beyond the ancient Hebrews, Greeks & Orientals wildest imaginings.

If God exists, THAT is his handwriting.

We don't find peace in it though - we find fascination, and the ability to elevate our circumstances all about us, by applying our minds, behaving morally - which means logically drawn from and in align with a respect for nature and ourselves.

But IT out there doesn't lead to peace, it leads you out if you let it - but if you reflect on how it exists, and on how your own thoughts integrate when reflected through it, it can be peaceful.

"As it is above, so it is below."

When you turn your thoughts inward - not to "ME Want!" but to "I see the connection between within and without". The more you become aware of how things integrate, and your mind does the same, and you try to reflect on "I", "Free Will", "Soul?", that something that can't be identified, touched or examined or in any other way held up for review - and yet you are unmistakably there... here... Are...Am

The more I learn, the more I realize that what is valuable is within, and it is strengthened and made more manifest by how I exercise that understanding without.

Once, the more I learnt of without, the more I found that "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors ass" is just quaint and more than a bit silly. And then the more I realized of the existence, the necessity of a seamless, reality reflecting, integrated thought, then I found that the soul is settled and soothed with truth, integrity, honesty... and it becomes apparent that there is more to the "Thou shalts" than meets the sophists first glance.

"As it is above, so it is below."

The inspired stories illustrate, connotate, reveal more as you read into them, not just of them.
And what if we are wrong? Our desiring the world and the hereafter to be or not to be - will not make it so, either way.

The world will be as it will be, whether we like it or no.

And yet here I am, and there is something within me that wants to know, and yet I do not know whether within each of us is an individual light formed of the slow rubbing and bubbling of DNA swelling into cells & babies & bodies - individual lights that blaze and burn down and out - or lights that slowly work their way into the physical world from a wider spiritual realm, slowly wriggling into reality through the slow rubbing and bubbling of DNA swelling into cells & babies & bodies - individual lights that blaze alike in this world then withdraw and return.

I don't know - and again I can not help but imagine that if there is a God, then this operation is by design.

Everything else in our world that can be discussed is physically examinable in one form or another, and it is only because of that that it can be discussed, argued, speculated upon and proved or disproved.

The world can be objectively discussed - your soul cannot. All knowledge can be written and stored, but it is but marks on paper, it can only be learned within, it remains only marks, until You gather it within you as information, and then slowly with effort it becomes knowledge, and even more slowly and with more attention it becomes understanding - and you can not give that TO someone else. Anyone who has ever tried to teach a lesson to someone who doesn't quite grasp the meaning, knows the truth of that frustration.

And if there is a God, and he wants us to know and understand him, he knows that as well, we can not understand except by doing and learning and choosing to persist in the effort to do so. If....

The Universe IS - but it couldn't have been created, or else it must have been created out of something, it must have begun, but that would mean it must end, but what before or after could there be?...it must have boundaries, but it cannot, for what would be beyond?

There, here, Are, Am....

We can go within and grope about, and return and discuss with each other what we felt as we made our way in the dark, hands feeling the surfaces - but we can't bring those surfaces out to show each other those we can feel, but not see, the closest we can ever get is to describe what those depths seemed like, but all the while feeling like the blind man trying to describe color to a deaf man.

Our discoveries are ours - we may be able to get or give clues to each other, but we have to do the exploring ourselves, and no amount of detailed description will do it for us or anyone else.

I gotta assume that if there is a designer, the design wasn't by accident.

We have to venture within the depths ourselves, alone, but all the while feeling... something... ahh, something I feel... it's there but not - just like me, there... here... Are... AM.

"As it is above, so it is below."

Sigh.

Monday, September 04, 2006

What never was and never will be - Modern Madness Part 7

In the Country of the blind, the one-eyed man is King... and the two-eyed man is a threat.
Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian

A startling and dramatic improvement in American education requires only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools.
H.L. Mencken

Facing Reality
Despite what you may have been told about the Pilgrims, America was born of the first stirrings of the Enlightenment through the union of Commerce and Exploration, not the Pilgrims seeking religious freedom. And if you had heard this, then despite what you may also have heard, it was not founded by these Merchants and Explorers on an atheistic or agnostic footing. For good or ill, these people held varying degrees of belief in some form of a God, which was for the most part one of the Christian varieties, or some version of an Olde New Agey Diestic conception.

Queen Elizabeth granted Humphrey Gilbert the first English charter for settling a colony in North America, in 1578, the idea being to find a northwest passage to Russia & China, and to settle a half-way station and trading port in Newfoundland. After an initial venture in 1578 was forced to return by bad weather, Gilbert risked his money and his life by personally leading another venture in 1583, which did land at Newfoundland, but no permanent base was established. He died when his ship disappeared on the return journey.

Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half-brother, obtained a renewal of the charter in 1584, and sought to settle a colony further south on Roanoke Island in 1587, but those colonists disappeared without a trace. Another group of investors spurred on with hopes of profit, sponsored the Virginia Company, chartered in 1606 and reached the Virginia coast in late April 1607, founding the first colony that survived (through incredible hardships) at Jamestown.

To generalize them, they were what you might call “whole people”, believing in both the need for and existence of the Spirit, and in the value and potential pleasures of the world – tempered by grievously hard experience of the abundant miseries which the world could subject you to without notice, and Reason was recognized as the tool with which you could best experience the world and protect yourself from its dangers, both seen and unseen.

The portion of the Enlightenment which the colonists achieved critical mass from, was that which still held Man to be a creature of marvelous design, imbued with a soul whose key attribute was that of Free Will, waking up to a fresh view of the world which was theirs to shape and create. It wasn’t until after the U.S. Constitution was written that the fading Enlightenments belief in the Emotions superiority over Reason, and the soulless doctrine of materialism and determinism were established as the new intellectual fashions.

When the Pilgrims did arrive in this country in 1620 at a distance further north, they found a land with nothing to mediate between them, their beliefs & desires and Reality. And in this new land they attempted to establish a new Jerusalem, which they thought would be best expressed as a Communist society. They were among the first to try it. Marxist professors always complain that we can’t discount Communism because no one has ever tried to properly implement it – well they’re wrong. The Pilgrims tried Communism in 1620 – and with no pre-existing culture to interfere with them, and it nearly wiped out. As with every attempt since, the system is done in by the same old foe: Reality and Human Nature. William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony from 1620 to 1647, made reports which citizens of East Germany would have recognized “For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense”. It wasn’t until after Governor Bradford privatized the communal property and made each responsible for, and able to benefit from, their own behavior and property in 1623, that the colony began to flourish.

This stark land permitted no rationalistic foolishness. One hundred years later, even as Rousseau glamorized the image of the “Noble Savage”, he didn’t dare to come here for a reason (as Voltaire taunted him); his ideas would have gotten him killed – either by the elements, or by the inhabitants. In that harsh reality, it was only the early Enlightenment ideas of a well balanced Reason which could prevail, and which made a quality education so self evidently a necessity for the survival of both individuals and civil society.

Since before the Founders time, local populations had through agreements in Town Hall meetings, established public methods for schooling their children; experts & their estimates vary quite a bit on how widespread literacy was in the early colonies, but I think it's safe to say that America had from the beginning been a remarkably literate society. Remember, the Federalist Papers were written mostly for the benefit of the normal citizen in the street (!), and most of them DID NOT ATTEND formal schooling.

Unfortunately Thomas Jefferson helped provide some legitimacy for the idea of a public education, when he had proposed an elaborate system for implementing such a system, but the system he had in mind was one which held its reason for being as “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be”, and he suffered under the impression that government could be used to Do Good. It’s important to remember though, that such American lights as Franklin, Lincoln and even later with Edison, were just a few examples of quality intellects in our history who had little or no formal schooling, and yet WERE educated. The citizens of the US saw to it that their children received an education, either at home, or together with other parents, they found someone of good character, who could do it better than they could themselves.

Rewriting Reality
That belief in, and reliance upon the responsibility and ability of individuals to see to their own lives had begun to fade as the new century progressed into the 1800’s, and in 1852, Massachusetts passed America's first compulsory school-attendance law; but even then it was still being handled locally, with local ideas of what education & curriculum would consist of, and with local control being held nearly at the parental level.

It took nearly a century after the Founders time to change, but with the state legislation of 1852, the agitation for federal action and involvement increased, spurred on by the Civil War. In 1862 Federal involvement and control finally did find its way into Education by way of the Morrill Act, to establish Land Grant colleges. There had been land grant colleges before (colleges funded from an income derived from an allotment of land in its name), but this was the first act to begin to remove control and authority from the local level, and place it at the Federal level instead. It was the Morrill Act "that revolutionized American higher education" The Act, as passed by Congress, granted public lands to states for the sites of institutions teaching “agriculture and mechanics,” to prepare students for “the ordinary pursuits and professions of life.”

Ironically (in view of today's political scene), public education was begun on the Federal level, by a Republican President, Lincoln, at the instigation of a powerful Republican Senator, Morrill who, in 1855, was one of the founders of the Republican Party in Vermont. He served 12 years as a Representative in the House, and 31 years as a Senator. He first put forward the act in 1857, but it was vetoed by President Buchannon (D), who was concerned about the implications it had for states rights, and its threat to private property. However, it was reintroduced in 1861, primarily as a War Measure! In Morrills words: “The role of the national government is to mould the character of the American people." and, "Ignorant voters endanger liberty. With free schools in the South there could have been no rebellion in the future...when our youth learn to read similar books, similar lessons, we shall become one people, possessing one organic nationality."

The Governments job was to “mould the character of the American people”? Where did such ideas come from? Did no one stop to ask what kind of ignorance might come of education directed by a bureaucrats removed from a caring parents interest? Sadly for us, there was no one left around of the caliber of a Patrick Henry or either of the Adams’ cousins (Samuel or John), who were able to distill from these seemingly benevolent actions, the principle of tyranny looming over us, had there been, they might have saved us from the 20th century. The act was strongly fought against by private colleges and others who foresaw and feared the federal control of education that would surely follow, but they were not skilled enough to win the debate.

This was partly because the publics conception of Higher Education, as it was in Jefferson’s time, was still understood to be in the "Liberal Tradition", as Montaigne put it “A traditional liberal arts curriculum of history, language, and literature--the arts that liberate," of educating one to be worthy of Liberty. It was concerned with imparting to its students a broad, Ethical, integrated understanding of the world; the principles which drove it, and which in turn also molded themselves. An Educated person was expected to be enabled to inquire, discover and integrate knowledge systematically, to know how one seemingly distinct part of one's life integrated with and affected another. As Aristotle negatively put it, a persons "... Inability to distinguish arguments germane to the Subject from those foreign to it, is a lack of education." How could a measure that extended such understanding, be bad?

“Liberating The People” rather than educating one to be worthy of Liberty
Morrill and the public may have thought they would be promoting Education with a capitol "E", but unfortunately the Colleges had for some time been quietly slipping away from the direction of the Educated, as that term had formerly been understood. The Educational Ideal that had shaped the Founders generation was one which focused on learning, discussing and disputing the texts of the Classical Humanities of Greek & Latin culture as well as biblical studies, in order to foster a comprehensive and principled view of the world and of human nature. However, such an “old fashioned” education was by this time beginning to be dismissed as un-scientific by the new German Philosophies of Kant & Hegel, and later Henri Saint-Simon, Comte, which had begun to filter back into America through its most affluent members, who themselves sought to acquire a more prestigious name and educated credentials in the Universities of Europe.

The intellectual fashion of the day became the ability to boast of a European (especially German) education and even a “Phd” (initially minted in Germany by a colleague of Hegel), and of course the most likely place of employment for such educated Elites, were within the colleges, whose institutions also sought to enhance their intellectual respectability. Soon the colleges were falling under the sway of the Hegelians and Progressives, which would be later typified by Harvard's President Elliott and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson.

This was the initial infusion of poison which spawned the “Progressives” movement, which held a fervently materialistic and deterministic view of education. The Progressives saw the purpose of a college as being chiefly to produce students able to earn a living, which would enable the colleges to further research, all the while creating a more dis-integrated, unsystematic view of the world in general and Human Nature in particular. The Progressives can best be summed up as an strident and emotional set of convictions based on at best, a surface level pseudo-scientific analysis of issues followed by knee-jerk conclusions that recommended action to help others (whether they liked it or not) at the expense of the public, through the actions of the State, a type of Sophistic assertion that "WE know all, and know best", or what Thomas Sowell calls the "Vision of the Anointed" in his book of the same name.

Where Jefferson’s ideal was educating one to be worthy of liberty, the progressives were focused on merely liberating people at the lowest “democratic” level as possible, in order to best suit them to be guided and contribute to the society the progressives deemed most appropriate. Woodrow Wilson, prior to becoming President of the United States, was President of Princeton College, and he typified the progressive goal with his advice to the Federation of High School Teachers: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." What could be better than an entire class of slaves, who didn’t realize that they were slaves?

The Progressives realized that there was no way to stop "the masses" who persisted in educating themselves, except by convincing them that their autodidactic educations were inferior to the thoroughly modern educations they would gain from entering their new high schools. Within 50 years of the sheep entering the pen, it was simplicity itself to prevent them from learning anything liberating once they got there. The new educational leaders formed their new secondary schools to offer vocational training in particular and something called industrial education in general. When the influential Douglas Commission said in 1905, that this was a "new idea" in education, they were correct, until ordinary Americans began attending secondary school, no secondary school in the civilized world had ever seen teaching its students a trade, as being a part of a worthwhile education.

The true new idea was that while the public schools posed as institutions to train citizens, the country's leading educators were insisting that pupils be trained not for citizenry, but primarily only as future workers. Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, even urged teachers strive to "sort" students by their "evident or probable destinies." – the start of High School guidance counselors.

Redefining Democracy
Educational Reformers such as John Dewey, with their “Modern, Scientific, Democratic” methods and ideals, reassured anxious Teachers that training students for their industrial "destiny" was the heart and soul of "democratic" education. Dewey wrote in 1897 that schools must be adapted "to the circumstances, needs, and opportunities of industrial civilization." Fitting students for economic interests rather than Republican interests was far more realistic and important to their daily needs. Where Jefferson had urged education to teach future citizens "how to judge for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom.”, Dewey said that the new object of "democratic" education was to teach every child "to perceive the essential interdependence of an industrial society." and to develop "a socialized disposition."

When Progressives then, as with the Leftists of today, say "Democratic", what they mean is "Socialistic".

With students now being taught the need for "interdependence" by an educational system geared towards producing "socialized" workers as the new "democratic" goal, History presented a problem for the curriculum. For History, political history in particular, is concerned with the thoughts and actions of men, and that didn't present the proper collective image. Jefferson had urged teaching children political history so that Americans would "know ambition under all its shapes and [be] prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purpose." A proper understanding of History would teach them to spot would-be despots in demagogues cloaked in popularity, and of an oligarchy masquerading as the enlightened and the elect. History would teach them that liberty always has ambitious enemies, and that just wouldn't do.

Conveniently, Dewey felt that political history was "undemocratic” precisely because it deals with the deeds and intentions of ambitious men, of the high and mighty, which common people weren't fit to consider. "Social studies," would replace such "elitest theory" with what was more appropriate for the modern division of labor ("how milk is brought to the city") and about the "evolution" of American industry. Do-Gooders such as Jane Addams wrote in her 1902 "Democracy and Social Ethics" that " American children would not only develop a cooperative disposition, but they would find their adult toil "much more exhilarating," as they fit into their place on the national industrial "team."

The Morrill Act opened the chink in the national character & government, which the government control oriented Progressives had been seeking for several decades. Prior to that, they were stymied by the fact that such actions were blatantly unconstitutional. As, on a different subject, James Madison said to congress (quoting from memory here, might be a bit off) "I find myself unable to place my finger on the text of the constitution that justifies taking funds from the people and giving them to refugees or anyone else". But in the patriotic fervor of the Civil War, where the constitution was already being overridden (necessarily so), the little infringements of the Morrill Act were seen as no big deal, and as a necessary public good.

Land Grant colleges weren't the cause of the Progressives; they were the tool that the Progressives used to spread their rot through the sales sizzle of “Progress!”. It spread the lure of a college education. Land Grant colleges popped up across the country, where it would have taken decades for private funding to become worth the while to build. Torrents of students, who otherwise (not having the drive to achieve it on their own) would not have gone to college, and not been exposed to the bad Philosophies in them, and in turn spread it further into the culture themselves. "Free" education brought far more victims and influence into the realm of the Progressives than they otherwise would have received on their own power, for several decades to come. I also think that “Free” or subsidized education, in and of itself, was and is a cause of deterioration to the American system & character - it plants the evil seed of desiring, even expecting, the unearned. People who really didn't want (or deserve) it enough to put forth the effort to earn or achieve a proper education, were suddenly, easy prey for the Progressives. This accelerated & I think intensified, the infection rate. At that point the populace and the body politic was infected, and it really didn't matter whether you went to public or private school – since all the teachers were created in the Progressive image in the Teachers Colleges mandated by the Progressive elites in order to certify them as being “Qualified” (indoctrinated with the Progressive “scientific” agenda). In a shortened matter of time, they were going to get you. It was the mechanism which enabled an essentially good Diestic Enlightenment philosophy to be driven out by an essentially bad Deterministic/Materialistic Enlightenment philosophy.

As one paper approvingly puts it (http://www.nmsu.edu/president/commentary/Newsletter8-04.pdf) the Morril Act represented a

"...profound innovation in higher education for several important reasons.
First, it enabled the creation of accessible equalitarian “people’s”
universities. The Morrill Act reflected the belief that American social and
economic development could be best served if higher education were made broadly
available to the citizenry. Second, the Morrill Act established a public,
federally assisted system. Third, Congress chose not to use federal funds but
rather federal land as a means to encourage states to accept the land-grant
charter. Finally, the land-grants were charged by law with promoting “without
excluding other scientific and classical studies ... the liberal and practical
education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in
life.”
- (note: promoting “without excluding other scientific and classical studies” is bureaucrat-speak for Not A Priority”)

Once the precedence was set, it didn’t take long to be repeated. By 1874, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that local governments could use tax money to support elementary and secondary schools. By 1890 the U.S. Congress passed the second Morrill Act, which withholds grants from states that deny admission to land grant schools based on race.

The Progressive Elites (who soon abscond with the name "Liberal", after the public began to catch on to the meaning of the Socialism they espoused) which were churned out by the explosion of Public Vocational or Elective Colleges which followed, spread the views of Rousseau, Kant & Hegel, Henri Saint-Simon, Comte, Mann and later, Dewey into the populace, who in turn grew into the Legislators and Judges of the next generation. By 1917, the Smith-Hughes Act provided Federal funding for Industrial, Home Economics and Agricultural courses, and by 1936 the George-Deen Act extended the trend further, to include teacher education and training for certain other occupations.

In other words, it established the precedent for Congress to manage & control & take property at the state level, for its own purposes of the public good.

The Slide Towards Today
By 1918, every state in the Union had laws establishing compulsory education. If a citizen, a Parent, didn't have complete say so over their most valuable possessions, their children, what was the fuss over such trifles as Income Tax, the Federal Reserve, or how Senators should be elected?

Some years ago, I listened to a series of lectures on Education by Dr. Leonard Piekoff & I didn't quite understand his disgust, disdain and outright hostility towards the Teachers colleges. I, like those of a century before, couldn't imagine how you could be against colleges... seemed a bit out of character for him, so I began to take a look into the matter, and I can now only say that I am impressed with how Dr. Peikoff kept his cool so well. The history of Education in general and Teachers colleges in particular is intellectually horrifying, and a better accelerator couldn't be found, as Nitrous Oxide is to a dragster, so has the Educational establishment been to spreading the Kantian/Hegelian/Marxist slop into our culture & government and laws.

By the time of the 1930's, the concept of Education as integrated systems of thought which made the generation of the Founders possible, had turned to one which made "the old Men" of the supreme court (the thorns in the side of FDR, who tried to prevent the Welfare State), into the last holdouts of the Founders view; oddballs, who thought property rights had some strange connection with freedom and Individual Rights.

As another paper states(http://www.civiced.org/papers_butts02.html)

"If I may draw upon Lincoln's memorable phrases, it is for us the educators and
legislators "to be dedicated here to the unfinished work so nobly advanced" by
Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for
Religious Freedom, by Madison in the Preamble and the Bill of Rights of the
Constitution, and by Lincoln's view of the role of government at Gettysburg. It
is for us "to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us" begun by
Jefferson's "creed of our political faith" in which he stressed the goal of
liberty and the role of education and the people's government in sustaining it,
and which Lincoln carried on by underlining the goal of equality as a goal of
the people's national government."

The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
- Abraham Lincoln

The roots, and the true meaning behind what has developed into the modern "Multi-Culturism" expressed in all textbooks today, not just Social Studies, is the image of every citizen being a "team member", or more honestly a tribesman, each and every one of which is but the hapless subject of powers and dominions he does not comprehend, but which governmental agencies alone can manage for the betterment of the ecology, the economy, the community of nations. I don't think that Jefferson would recognize this concept of "good citizenship", or rather he would, as a new version of the tyranny and slavery he had fought against, merged into one new monster.

John Dewey wrote in his 1897 My Pedagogic Creed, that "I believe that the schools is primarily a social institution.... Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child/s fitness for social life..." and later in 1916 in Democracy and Education, he wrote, "There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual.... It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone - and unnamed from of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world.", and even more clearly in "Earlier liberalism regarded the separate and competing economic action of individuals as the means to social well-being as the end. We must reverse the perspective and see that socialized economy is the means of free individual development as the end".

What do these people of the 19th and the early 20th centuries have to do with our world today? Well, Dewey's views became the views of the Educationists, and in particularly those of the NEA, which as early as 1946, formed their educational goals in their Journal under "The Teacher and World Government" "In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children for global understanding and cooperation. At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher and the organized profession."

And if that is not clear enough for you, in 1948, in "Education for International Understanding in American Schools: Suggestions and Recommendations” produced by the NEA, contained the following statements: "The idea has become established that the preservation of international peace and order may require that force be used to compel a nation to conduct its affairs within the framework of an established world system. The most modern expression of this doctrine of collective security is in the United Nations Charter. Many persons believe that enduring peace cannot be achieved so long as the nation-state system continues as at present constituted. It is a system of international anarchy, a species of jungle warfare. Enduring peace cannot be attained until the nation-states surrender to a world organization the exercise of jurisdiction over those problems with which they have found themselves unable to deal singly in the past."

Freedom has no place in such a philosophy, and consequently America has no place in such a philosophy. If you wonder why the Leftists of the United Nations, and of our own countrymen seem to be Anti-American, it is because they are.

The supreme irony is that out of the Civil War which Lincoln fought to preserve the Union, came legislation to enforce and mandate Public Education, which Jefferson had proposed as a way of preserving a people worthy of, and able to hold onto their Freedom; and it has become the instrument which has created the Educators, Legislators, Judges and Executives who have come so perilously close to destroying it.

I think Shakespeare was a bit shortsighted when we said "First thing we do is hang all the Lawyers"... I'm more inclined to H.L. Mencken, who observed, "a startling and dramatic improvement in American education requires only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools".

Friday, September 01, 2006

Spreading The Flames - Part 6

Interviewer:”How does a Man learn to get himself into the frame of mind where he's willing to go into a situation where he is likely to die, in order to try to save the life of another?”
911 survivor/rescuer: “How does he learn not to?”


He is exactly right, people are educated to learn what to do, and what not to do, and also what thoughts they should pretend not to have until that becomes habit and Belief. How does he learn not to? We’re closing in on just that lesson – but first a quick review of the last 5 posts. So we’ve wandered down the dark lane from Descartes to Rousseau to Kant, how did it get from then and there, to the moonbat Leftists of today?


As the period of the Enlightenment grew, it enlarged men’s knowledge by clarifying their methods for acquiring, and defining what knowledge actually was. If it also drew too much attention to physical appearances, some excuse may be had in that it was the first “Time” in hundreds of years, that life here on earth was thought of as being of Value, as opposed to a mere set of sinful snares.

As with any extensive explorations into terra incognita, some false trails were opened up. One such false trail was blazed when some tried to analyze not only the world, but the analyzer himself. In trying to take the mind apart, they could not find something identifiable as “consciousness” in it’s several pieces, and so they concluded that a new piece of knowledge was that there was actually no knower there to know anything as knowledge, and the roots of Determinism were born.

This was a false trail that would have soon corrected itself, since it still sought correspondence to reality. However, the second major false trail found a way to extend itself into all maps, threatened even to remove the idea of the compass of reality from all cognitive cartography.

This second false trail was blazed by those such as Kant, who claimed to believe in Christianity, and who were very much concerned for what the growing body of knowledge would do to the faith of their fellow men. They felt that were they to be given reasons to question their faith, it would be found lacking, and all would then be lost for what they felt everyone else should think and believe.

The first false trail began with the false start made by Descartes, who in trying to find a foundation from which thought could begin thinking from, thought that by resurrecting the Cogito Ergo Sum, “I think, therefore I Am” that it would be just such a position. What he didn’t see, was that a mind that held itself to be the root of reality, in actuality pulled its very roots out of reality, and set them floating about in a haze of its own creation. You can’t get to “I Think…” you can’t even get to “I”, to the idea of Identity – something unique and differentiated from other Stuff, without first having had experience of a larger reality from which to begin differentiating entities, and yourself, from.

But as the history of Modern Philosophy demonstrates, thought cut free from reality must rapidly lose the ability to Reason with a capital “R” – which is the process of comparing and analyzing reality, experience, thought and feelings to arrive at conclusions supportable by reference to reality, experience, thought and feelings, in such a way that it can then in turn be corroborated by others following in the same steps. These floating thoughts must, and did, tilt into a method which was no longer self correcting, a method which asserted whims and increasingly erratic emotional and irrational systems and declarations, through thoughts wholly unmoored from reality.

Where Reason, properly practiced amongst peoples with differing views, can ultimately find not only agreement between them, but advancement for all as previously held errors are exposed and corrected, finds its most powerful tool to be Words. On the other hand, Irrationality when practiced amongst peoples with differing views, can only find unity through emotionally reactive words, ultimately backed up not by reference to reality, but to the threat of and the actual application of force, as people are made to tow the party line or face derision or violence from the view backed with the most weapons.

The modern degradation of the Liberal tradition began with the naive good intentions of some of the last of the Philosophes’, Condorcet in France, and William Godwin in Britain, both exceedingly admiring of Rousseau, and among the most prominent among them. Condorcet helped get the determystic ball rolling by removing responsibility from individuals and placing it with society (but isn't society made up of individuals? Shhh...). He said “ Is there any vicious habit, any practice contrary to good faith, any crime, whose origin and first cause cannot be traced back to the legislation, the institutions, the prejudices of the country wherein this habit, this practice, this crime can be observed?”. Godwin stated that “It is impossible that a Man would perpetrate a crime, in the moment when he perceives it in all of its enormity”, echoing Socrates who said that no one would knowingly do wrong. One wonders what people they ever met – and how well they knew themselves.

Of Godwin, William Hazlitt noted in his essay, "A New Theory Of Civil And Criminal Legislation":

"... he [Godwin] makes no distinction between political justice, which implies an appeal to force, and moral justice, which implies only an appeal to reason. It is surely a distinct question, what you can persuade people to do by argument and fair discussion, and what you may lawfully compel them to do, when reason and remonstrance fail. But in Mr. Godwin's system the 'omnipotence of reason' supersedes the use of law and government, merges the imperfection of the means in the grandeur of the end, and leaves but one class of ideas or motives, the highest and the least attainable possible.”


Since neither had a strong understanding of Justice beyond the emotional moaning of it, it is not surprising that neither Elite had much of an opinion for the poor masses of humanity they wailed to help, rather they treated them as little more than human billiard balls. Condorcet said that the “human race still revolts the philosopher who contemplates its history”, Godwin declared that “the peasant slides through life, with something of the contemptible insensibility of an oyster”.

Well intentioned as these Enlightenment lights may have been, you should bear in mind as a rule of thumb, that if someone thinks you incapable of doing wrong of your own accord, you can rest assured that both they and their followers will think you of being incapable of doing right of your own accord – and they will soon conclude that since you are incapable all around, that you will need to be “guided” to “choose” correctly by outside sources. First up in that capacity was Rousseau, who Godwin credited as being “the first to teach that the imperfections of government were the only perennial source of the vices of mankind”, Rousseau compared the masses of the people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid” and that “They must be forced to be Free”, which his student Robespierre & Co. brought to bloody reality in the French Revolution.

Rousseau explicitly stated in very high sounding and eloquent words, that it was unreasonable to expect people to Reason, they should instead act on what they Feel what their Natures urged them to do instead (as long as it agrees with what his urges declared that they should feel). He applied this exhortation to politics, and more ominously and destructively to education, and his influence helped propel the French Revolution and its extremely self revealing use of Terror as a legitimate tool of persuasive power.

Whim Becomes Code
Kant came along at this point, after stiring from his dogmatic slumbers over the bumbling’s of Hume. Hume, though wrong in his characterization of reality, still at least assumed some connection between mind and reality, however low level; and so was still correctable by reference to reality. Kant saw that, and that in Humes grasping at the legitimacy of both Reason and Religion, red flags for his revered Rousseau and his literalized religion. He set about intentionally and explicitly, to lie for the betterment of all(“I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”), to forever drive a wedge between mans mind and reality, so that even those who disagreed with him, would unwittingly buy into his methods and assumptions, and reinforce the core of both even in their attacking him.

Kant’s philosophy, with it’s noumenal and phenomenal worlds, in the very attempt to understand them – to give it place within your thoughts, took your very ability to perceive the world from out of your own mind & placed it in some 'Matrix' like space, where ‘Real Thought’ can only be created my Mega Numbers of people - according to Kant, you can't even claim responsibility for your own thoughts!

Kant’s Fancy Footwork to Save Religion Tripped It Up
Hegel, a divinity student with second thoughts, bought into the essentials of Kant’s philosophy, furthering the separation of mind from itself and reality, but swerved Kant’s goals from saving faith in religion, to putting your feelings and submission into an Historical Spirit, an over-soul civilization-spirit that all the puny people feed and serve in its unstoppable growth. This Spirit also embued History with determined cycles which fulfilled the Nation Spirit’s evolution towards the end of History when one triumphant Nation would rule over and swallow all others.

Hegel took Kant’s controlling nether world of collectively constructed thought structures, out of the hands of the people, and gave it life through the spirit of the State: “All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. The people would be nothing, living only to serve the Spirit.

"the State 'has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State... for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges.'" Hegel, quoted by William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959, page 144)


Hegel’s new contribution to the Reality Removal game which obscured thought and furthered his Historicity, was his Dialectic. In Hegel’s Logic, he describes a dialectic of existence where Being and Nothing are merged into a process of Becoming, or what he termed Dasein. Existence was put forth as Sein or pure Being; upon closer examination, this is found to be equivalent to coming from Nothing Nicht. The result is that what is coming into being is also returning to nothing (think the circle of life), both Being and Nothing are united as Becoming – Dasein. The language Hegel uses to “communicate” this is described as torturous, even by his supporters. It would be given a more marketable spin by one of his followers, Fichte, as that of the better known triad of Thesis, Antithesis & Synthesis, and which Marx then modified for his purposes into Dialectical Materialism).


Prior to Hegel, the Dialectic was associated with Socrates’s method of philosophical inquiry through conversational discussion; deductive reasoning was exemplified by Aristotle’s syllogism which took two premises already established as being true, and which resolved into a true conclusion which wasn’t known to be true prior to the deduction.

All Men are Mortal.
Socrates is a Man.
Socrates is a mortal Man.

Despite what some professors like to profess, a syllogism that said:

All Men are Green.
Socrates is a Man.
Socrates is a Green Man.


, wouldn’t pass muster for Aristotelian deductive syllogisms, since one of the premises wasn’t true in the wider context of reality, and old Socrates would have either absolutely shreded such nonsense, or more likely would have had a chuckle, wished you well, and strolled quickly away in search of someone who could speak.


Hegel avoided the embarrassing possibility of being exposed as being a fraud by doing away with the whole notion of there being a need for any correspondence to truth in order to prove anything at all. In fact he does away with reality altogether; for Hegel there is no Thing, and no moment in time when a Thing can exist, all is instead dissolving into nothingness the moment it begins to form out of it.

Florida
Philosophical Review Vol. III, Issue 2, Winter 2003

Consciousness is then nothing but a bundle of untreated and unreflected sense perceptions. But as naive as consciousness is, as unaware of itself and of time as it is, it soon realizes that the “now” is never what it seems to be. For instance, even if “now” is the evening, shortly “now” will be night. “To say anything more about what confronts us in Sense-awareness is at once to pass beyond it, to dissolve it into a series of concepts or universals”… Following the animals’ lead, consciousness learns that senses give us no access to the real–sensed objects have no “intrinsic being,” and they are many things and nothing at the same time.18As Jean Hyppolite puts it, each of these objects “vanishes in the other, and this movement of vanishing is the only reality of forces that has sensuous objectivity.” Put in Hegelian jargon, an object is nothing “in-itself”; it possesses no reality. It is only at the disposal of consciousness, which alone exists “for-itself,” meaning that it alone is aware of itself.

You don’t follow the logic? Congratulations! You’ve got it! There isn’t any! The only thing you need to do to make it official and up to academic standards is to through in pages and pages of convoluted non-sequiters & equivocations (Just like his teacher Kant) to paralyze the readers thought, and use language such as “So obviously…” to humble the readers into pretending to get it.

Do you recognize the resemblence to the technique of Zeno's paradox we discussed earlier? Where Achilles would be forever halving the distance between he and a turtle, and so would never be able to pass him? You almost have to pick the bark from your teeth, so thoroughly does Hegel shove a single tree into your face in order to remove the forest from your sight.


What Hegel proposed was that all you needed was two opposing premises, which would “resolve” themselves into a new third premise synthesized from the first two. Not only could you resolve such premises as “Men should be Free”, “The People of Gov X aren’t free” into “Gov X free’s it’s people”, but more usefully you could also synthesize it into “Gov X will enslave the people of Country Y and Country Z to pacify the slaves of Gov X with more goodies”.


Hegel’s dialectical reasoning bases itself on pitting opposites against themselves, Athens vs Sparta into Alexander the Greats expanded Hellenic empire, Rome vs Carthage into the even greater Roman Empire, etc. The key is to have opposing ideas, which rub up against each other to create a more refined and truer result. What it doesn’t require is any adherence to truth or justice, just opposing forces. Through an inward discovery of being versus nothingness, his dialectical method changed the format for deductive reasoning into one in which a new “Truth” is obtained by pitting “sort of truth a” against “sort of truth b” to get a more potent “New Truth”, which can itself be used in another triad of thesis/antithesis/synthis. Hegel also added an added touch of genius by inserted mathematical-like symbology, so the act could be reduced into a “IF A, and B, then ipso facto C”.


And like Kant, Hegel provided the perfect method for allowing people to pretend to understand what it is you’re spinning – Feeling. Since reality isn’t really knowable to reason, and only accessible through a deeper understanding expressed through Feelings, all you need to do is nod and say “I can’t say exactly why, but I FEEL it is true” and you’re home free! You also get the added bonus of not having to conform to the Phenomenal world, but to a Spirit, the Spirit of your State! What you say doesn’t have to correspond to mere fact, in fact if it is True, it rises above Fact and resonates with the Truer realities, far above this mortal plane. And through your inspired feeling of the Spirits Truth, you become one with the Spirit as it overcomes opposing forces to evolve into a more perfect State! Don’t laugh, it’s worked wonders for Hitler, Marx, Lenin & company.


The Stream Divides, and Reunites
This fine thrashing of thought soon split into two parallel streams. Hegel is the certainly the most influential philosopher of the Leftist, it is from his branch of the stream of Kantianism that Karl Marx drank the deepest from, and the American “Progressives” as well. The center court of philosophy of the early 1800’s had been moved to the German lands, particularly noticeable in the fields of Philosophy, Psychology and Educational theory. How influential was the new German ideas and practices? Guess where the concept of a “Phd.”, and the legendarily difficult process of earning one came from? It originated with educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt who founded, what was originally the University of Berlin, where Hegel also lectured. Interestingly, his linguistic theories are often cited by our old buddy Noam Chomsky, as one of the foundations of his theory of language structure.


Through Kantian/Hegelian school of thought flowed into the psychology with Wilhelm Max Wundt, a Hegelian psychologist (who first advanced the theory that man is “not accountable for his conduct, which was said to be caused entirely by forces beyond his control. According to Wundt's thinking, in a human being there is nothing there to begin with but a body, a brain, and a nervous system. Therefore, teachers must try to educate a person by inducing sensations in that nervous system” ) who through establishing the very first laboratory for experimental psychology at the university of Leipszig, formulated the essentials of Educationism which we have to thank for the university socialists of our day.


Wundt was a strong advocate of Gottlieb Fichte, the uber-hegelian popularizer of Hegel. Fichte was the head of psychology at the University of Berlin in 1810, and he felt strongly that "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable ... of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished."


Other German psychologists with similar "ideas" such as Wilhelm Meumann, professor of Philosophy and education at Leipzig University expressed the theory in his book Mental Hygiene in the Schools (required reading for generations of education students in Germany), that "oppression of the children's natural inclinations", and that schools should be made to inculcate "preventative mental health functions".


Sadly, this German thought became the Meca (apt comparison) for students of Philosophy and Education theory throughout the West, especially for American students. Some of those who received and transmitted these theories were James Ear Russell, James Cattell, William James, Edward Lee Thorndike and John Dewey.


Cattell was president of the American Psychological Association, and was the true father of modern illiteracy by virtue of his pushing for the elimination of Phonics in learning to read, in favor of the "Whole Word" method - which sought to save students from the mental stress of learning the sounds of the alphabets 26 letters and key combinations in order to enable the reader to decode any word from there on - in favor of forcing children to memorize words by their shape and look, meaning that any word not memorized at the feet of an instructor would be "Greek" to him.


Thorndike in his "Elementary Principles of Education" (1929), called for a reduction in educational basics. He is the one who said "Artificial exercises, like drills of phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value". Why did he recommend that?


He was strongly influenced by Wundtian experimental animal psychology (who you’ll remember supported the theory that Man is merely an animal, more suitable for training than educating), he didn't think (which presumably implies that he thought HE wasn't an animal, only everyone else) that students should be mistaken for creatures of free will capable of learning and understanding, when in fact they were only creatures capable of stimulus-response behavior.

ANIMALS.


SERIOUSLY!


In this view, teachers aren't there to guide students to understanding, but only to prod them into desirable responses. Just very clever animals.

Interviewer:”How does a Man learn to get himself into the frame of mind where he's willing to go into a situation where he is likely to die, in order to try to save the life of another?”
911 survivor/rescuer: “How does he learn not to?”

Where does he learn such a thing? Where do you suppose that people might pick up the notion that the lives of their fellow men might be less than inspiring in and of themselves, even questionable as to whether or not they were worth risking your life over?


I’ll follow these two streams of Progressivism and Marxism, and their efforts to smother Individualism, Freedom, Individual Rights and Western Civilization through their development in America and back to Europe with Mussolini, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and the rest of the Leftist homies in the next two posts.