Answering 'Somehow': The Problem of the Ideological Observatory

As seen in the previous post, seeking after obvious facts and answers can 'somehow' put you at odds with understanding what is real and true. But how? As with most of our problems today, they have less to do with what we do, than with what we no longer do, and since the West has been 'educated' out of its stories and history, we've lost sight of what Aristotle understood to be a critical aspect of understanding what you know, which you can catch a glimpse of in his Poetics, Section 1, Part IX:

"...It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular...."

Proverbs 29-19:
"Where there is no vision, the people perish..."
Note: It's worth reading the other translations of that passage here.

, and together with our modern attitude of treating stories as 'just stories', we've trained ourselves into the habit of seeking obvious facts as being sufficient answers for particular problems, and we become too easily satisfied with that lack of depth in short range answers, and in so doing, give no thought to those universals which principled thoughts such as "...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..." depend upon being understood, by We The People.

This tendency to accept a shallow understanding of matters, makes an ideal stage for the 'somehow' that philosophical Houdini's - 'experts' - cultivate for performing their sleight of mind 'magic' of conceptual distractions, in synch with the artful stage management of narratives, which leaves us unable to see the monsters that our world is filled with today, let alone how to battle them. Worse, the forms which those monsters have been taking, like that of the many-headed Hydra, instinctively grasp that we don't understand them well enough to do them any real harm, and so they gleefully provoke us into reacting with those shallow attacks that we think we're hurting them with (hello "education reform!"), but which actually helps their beast to grow still more heads to overwhelm us with.

That deliberately shallowed vision is the means that pro-regressives from Descartes to Kant, to Fichte, to Dewey and Gramsci, have used in their efforts to hamper people's ability to grasp what is real and true, and that is critical to their plans for ending the West's 'Cultural Hegemony'.

How does that 'somehow' work?

You've heard of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, right? In which there are prisoners chained to the wall in a cave, as unseen others fix their attention upon the shadows being cast upon the other wall before them. The prisoners, who seeing nothing else, accept those shadowy images before them as being real, and there's something in that act of accepting surface level answers, which leads them to cling to them, and to resent, and even to attack, those who try to show them the depths of what is actually real and true.

While keeping that spirit of Plato's Allegory intact, I'd like to make a suggestion for modernizing its form, by utilizing the popular meme of an object that is shaped in such a way that when light is shone on it from the front, side, or above, onlookers see it casting images of a square upon one wall, a circle upon the other, and a triangle upon the center of the floor, within the walls of an Ideological Observatory that has been established to teach what are said to be the most valuable answers (ideologies) to students who're studying to become Those Who Know Best (TWKB) in their society.

Inside the Ideological Observatory, its interior has been curtained off and divided up in such a way that a spotlight can be shone onto the ideological object hanging from the ceiling, so that only one shape is seen in any individual area within it. And instead of images being viewed by prisoners chained to a wall of a cave, the students of the Ideological Observatory are divided up into particular groups, in which each group knows nothing of the shapes that other groups are being shown in their areas, and seeing only that one image which is obviously being cast upon its surface by the light being shone on it from above, they are instructed throughout their studies there, how to argue that the image they're being shown contains the answer that is the key to resolving the world's troubles, and to getting all that they most desire in that world.

Of course, once these students have graduated and are sent out into the world, they are soon confronted by others who've passed through the Ideological Observatory, but who speak of having seen differently shaped answers than those shapes that they had learned to recognize within all that they saw. Each of these groups will predictably experience "WTF?!" moments and a sense of outrage, whenever meeting the liars and idiots of those other groups who dare to deny the obvious fact that the shape of the answer is "and should be!" that [triangle, circle, or square] which they earned their degrees in studying.

More importantly, the fact is, of course, that each group has viewed what is obviously the image of a [triangle, circle, or square]. But along with that 'obvious fact' comes the false impression that the object that they viewed that image of, was cast from a [triangle, circle, or square], which couldn't be further from the truth - which those who focus the spotlight on the ideological object hanging above all of these areas know full well - and without a grasp of the wider and deeper contexts involved in what they are considering, such 'obvious facts', can be exceedingly misleading, and quite possibly entirely untrue.

For real life examples of this, see 'Social Justice!', 'Free Speech Movement!', 'Free Trade!', etc., etc., etc.

Now you might be assuming that it's obvious that the Ideological Observatory is able to instill those assumptions which spread division & discord, because its inner rooms are curtained off to show different 'answers' to different groups, but that's not the case.

In fact, those differences are but useful distractions that help each group to provoke reactions from those of other groups, to act out against them, which keeps the ideological dialectic churning away, and helps ensure that the Ideological Observatories will continue to be filled with a steady stream of eager students in search of answers.

The real key to the Ideological Observatory isn't so much that each group has been given different answers, as the fact that 'answers' are all that each group is given; 'answers' are what each group is taught to seek out in all of their materials; 'answers' define the problems which their group desires to solve; 'answers' are what each group is thoroughly instructed in how to give systematic arguments for justifying those systems, and which produce only those 'answers' which they recognize as being the acceptable 'answers'.

The particular 'shape' (ideology, system, etc.,) which one group does, or doesn't accept as being the 'answer', isn't what matters to the Ideological Observatory. What does matter to it, is its ability to shape every group to conform to the pattern of seeking answers from ideologically approved sources & authorities, with very little risk that the 'educated' will ever learn how to ask those questions that would lead to understanding the essentials of what they have been observing.

That pattern of accepting, memorizing, and regurgitating obvious 'answers' and seeing systems as if they were reality, is the central lesson and is the key to the successful spread of ideology, and that pattern of thinking is what The Ideological Observatory instills into all of the members of all of the groups that it processes through its hallowed halls, and is passed on to those who've learned by example from them.

The only counter arguments that are taken seriously by any of the groups themselves, are those of 'Epistemological arguments' which compare and contrast the utility of 'answers' from competing systems, while conspicuously refusing to venture into examining what the hanging object actually is, or how the spotlight is focused upon it, and who it is that handles doing that, or why, which amount to wacademic fanfare over making distinctions without a difference.

What this ultimately means, is, that what the Ideological Observatory's graduates think, isn't the issue, or their litmus test for entry: How they think, is, which illustrates that far from being a benign saying, that idiom attributed to John Dewey:

"Teach them how to think, not what to think"

, is less a noble sounding statement about the methods of good teaching, than how modernity has used our educational system to pour a big goblet of hemlock down reason's throat, for more than a century.

That system for transmitting the ideological pattern of thinking is what ensures that the interests of the Ideological Observatory are served, and that is served, no matter what shape any group's ideological system identifies as being the 'answer' - be it triangle, circle, or square.

As a consequence, what's common to every ideological shape-seer amongst TWKB in our society, is that the same habitual pattern of thinking which all groups are instructed in, expects to find satisfaction in obvious facts and in all-encompassing systematic answers for them (ideology). Each of these shape-seers will habitually argue with those who 'somehow' fail to see that the shape which they see in those facts which 'everyone' can clearly see, must be the 'answer' that they're seeking. And having been miseducated into an unfamiliarity with, or misunderstanding of Universals, they lack the 'metaphysical firewall' of what is, and what cannot be real and true, which leaves them more easily led to see particular answers in any given flurry of facts. Even in the case of those who convert into believing a different ideological group's 'answer' - now seeing a square instead of a circle or a triangle - they're not valued for the new 'answer' they believe, but for how that adds to the competition between the ideological systems that are peddling circles, triangles, or squares, and that 'conversion' raises the heat of contention over what all have observed. That heated competition is valued not because it helps to promote one shape over another, but because it helps to better hide what is real and true beneath the churning of discord & division that their ideological competition ensures, and that is what ensures that Ideology is what will continue to reign over all.

Those who don't order their understanding by surface appearances, but by their underlying concepts and principles, integrated with facts, are better able to resist accepting those 'answers' put out by the Intellectual Observatory, because they will routinely question what other people fail to. By doing so, these questioners are better able to see how an ideology leads its listeners into accepting its disembodied 'answers', and how it is that the ideolog's purposes depend upon human nature being rendered rootless, so that it will run its course more favorably for the particular narratives they are being fed. But when these outliers try to ask their questions of TWKB, they will almost certainly find them unwilling to listen, or to do the work of understanding: 'people don't talk that way or use words like that!' is a reply that's often heard from those who want the fruit of answers, but who want nothing to do with tending the tree and roots which such fruit is grown from.

What is necessarily not observed in the Ideological Observatory
The pattern that those who pass through the Ideological Observatory do not learn, is that of inspecting what the actual issue is (Metaphysics), understanding what leads to and follows from that (Causality & Logic), and methodically reasoning from that to understand what, if anything, should or should not be done about that (Ethics).

The person who learns to look up and around in order to observe the object that ideological images are generated from, and inspects the source of the light being shown upon it, as well as the shadows being cast from them, becomes someone who develops the habit of thinking first about what is, and then diligently reasons from there, in accordance with that. Those are the people who are able to develop the deep roots that a sound & sturdy tree of knowledge can grow from, and so becomes able to comprehend at least some of what the whole truth actually is.

The nature of that pattern of reasoning, which has been passed on down from Aristotle through Aquinas, and from Thomas Reid to our Founders' generation, is understood as:

“the conformity of thing and intellect” (adaequatio intellectus et rei)

, and that is recognized (though not understood) by the operators of the Ideological Observatory, as being a direct threat to the observatory itself, for it understands that if its adherents regularly examined both the light source and the object which its vaunted images were being cast from, they'd soon understand how its shapes were contrived to appear to be what 'everyone knows!' as triangles, squares, and circles, and whether or not those shapes actually followed from the nature of the object of their thought, or not.

The depth of understanding and breadth of applicability that particular 'answers' can never contain:
"...A single line of choral text can emerge from memory and aid recognition of what is occurring in the present, perhaps even more clearly than pages of intellectual academic argument..."
~ "Axioms in Accord"

Anything that might impart that pattern of thinking - such as the once treasured stories and music of The West in concert with the realist philosophy they are rooted in - cannot be permitted to be given any respect in the Ideological Observatory. Instead, they are sold the sop of 'Epistemology' justifying what you know, by comparing one system with other systems, each of which systematically avoids identifying what it is that those systems are systems of...'somehow' (ala Hegel's 'Science!' of systematic mysticism).

Recall that stories don't provide their readers with easy answers. The person who opens up the biblical books of Genesis or Judges, or myths such as Hercules, or even histories such as are found in Thucydides or Plutarch's Lives, expecting to be presented with answers they can 'score an A+!' with, are in possession of minds that've already been captured by the pro-regressive pattern of thinking, and they will have to actively and intentionally struggle to free themselves from those habits of mind that they've been taught to confine their thinking within.

Logic as a Liberal Art: An Introduction to Rhetoric and Reasoning by Rollen Edward Houser

If you doubt the value of the literature of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West (The Bible, the stories from Homer to Dante, their histories), you need only look at the state of the world today to see what its absence over the last century has cost us. It's not coincidence that its stories were the first to be ejected from our schools, its philosophy was then pragmatically subverted & corrupted without their support, and its religions stands alone, turned against each other, and under siege. And if you ask 'What can be done to restore it?', the answer should be obvious: Read what has been set aside. Do that, and you begin restoring the glory of The West within yourself, and that is no little thing.

Familiarize yourself with the 'language' used - and realize that because we are talking about a 'common culture' that extends over umpteen languages, we are not talking about the 'arbitrary rules of punctuation' (the English rules of which, though I'm better than I once was, I've no doubt my grammar still gives grammarians the willies), but of a grammar centered on the reality based logical integration of thought across theme, plot, and character development. Focusing your attention upon that grammar of reasoning within the stories and materials being read, is what encourages the reader to draw inferences, identify principles, and so better understand how and why people - yourself included - take those actions that they do.

But as you're reading, it is important to understand that just reading the lost literature of The West, is not enough: how you read through it makes a critical difference.

The Real Difference that makes all the Difference!
As you're reading through what is truly worth reading, you must realize that reading to understand what is (Metaphysics), what it leads to and what follows from that (Causality & Logic), and what, if anything, should or should not be done about that (Ethics), is a very different method and purpose for reading, than that of reading those same 'texts' through 'the lens of' modernist ideologies (whether Utilitarian, Marxist, or other Critical Theories), to see what the Ideological Observatory expects you to see. The tragic fact is that much of The West's literature is still technically being taught in our schools and colleges today (as professed by creatures like my troll), but they are being taught in such a way that doesn't seek understanding and wisdom, but utility and power. That difference between seeking to understand what you're reading, in order to better understand what is real and true, and that of seeking answers that are 'true enough' to achieve an aim, is the difference between day and night, and while you may be reading the same words, what you are able to understand from them, will be worlds apart.

Those rootless would-be heroes 'on our side' who've ignored or were steered away from rooting their understanding in what is real and true, will fail to foresee the long-range consequences of their short-term answers, which is exactly what makes them the target audience that the hydra counts upon provoking. Remember: The Hydra wants you to attack it, because your reaction is the point of its action - and the impetuously heroic efforts of those full of answers without understanding (hello "School Choice!"), will do little more than to help the hydra to grow more heads to attack us all with. That is what Saul Alinsky understood about the vast monster he helped to create out of decades of college students: The Hydra knows that you won't have been taught enough to be able to kill it, and that because your ill-considered reaction is likely to be cutting off one of its regenerable heads without knowing how (or understanding why) to cauterize it and prevent it from growing two more back in its place, your heroic efforts will only help it to grow still more heads to eventually overwhelm us all with.

Most of all, what the would-be heroes of our populace have been 'educated' to not understand, is how much damage can be accomplished by just shifting our attention and understanding aside... just enough... for an important universal to be only partially recognized and an inference of principle to be missed (like the shift from inalienable rights, to what rights you've contracted for, which is a very different thing). We no longer recognize how much our ability to recognize universals clearly (or realize why we need to) and to assiduously make principled distinctions, is largely developed from what we learned (or should have learned) in childhood all those years before, and so we've forgotten how much we rely upon being able to lay ahold of those in the face of all of the buzzing particulars that adult life might array against us.

The most meaningful lessons for us to learn are not learned through the STEM's of 2+2=4, but by working through fables like 'The boy who cried wolf', and parables like 'The Sower' and the return of 'The Prodigal Son', and epic stories from The Iliad to Ivanhoe, as well as the many meaningful poems, and speeches of the great orators, which were key to developing the deep and penetrating reasoning that put the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West on the world stage. The person whose thinking was developed through lessons such as those, is likely to be better prepared to utilize the understanding of 2+2=4 with far greater effect, than that of a person who has learned only the deracinated facts of 2+2=4. Which approach a person's learning was guided by, is a clue to how likely it is that they themselves habitually engage in 'Critical Thinking'.

Those who truly want to 'fight!, fight!, fight!', must learn to look further than the obvious 'answers' floating upon the surfaces of popular narratives, and to realize that doing so requires more than those 'answers' which targeted 'research' and the engineering of LLM prompts can provide, and that requires reading, considering, and pondering, those lessons and histories found in the books - not textbooks - of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, which most of us were either never taught, or were taught in a way that neutered or subverted their meaning and value.

We'll dig further into the nature of that, and into revealing the hidden nature of the dastardly 'somehow', in the next post.

'Somehow' - The Critical Insurrection being waged in the minds of our 'Critical Thinkers'

Rene Descartes led The West into its first Critical Turn in thinking: "masked I advance":

I began this series of posts on 'The Critical Insurrection' five years ago (here, and here), by noting that despite the heated talk of insurrection at the time, the real and ongoing insurrection against America has had very little to do with what happened in our capital on the day of Jan 6th (a bitterly laughable claim). Much more to that point, are the innumerable insurrectional ideologies that have beset America with a century and more of attacks, whose most significant aspect is not those attacks we see still to this day, but the acceptance of that behavior by so many amongst us. That indicates where the critical damage is being done, not in open rioting, but within the ideas being thought within our minds, and so masked, the insurrection advances.

The various forms that 'Progressive Education' has taken over the last two centuries, have enabled the insurrection to advance unseen, by progressively purging the Western Mind of its history & literature. Too often lost in the distractions of rising illiteracy rates, falling test scores, and calls for more 'education reform!', is the reality that without the natural defenses that those lessons of history & literature had provided, we've become less able to identify, let alone confront, the ongoing insurrection that the enemies of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, have been executing against us.

What lessons?

The Anchorage School District puts a warning label on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

The most obvious ones we lack today, are those that were once commonly learned from those now mostly forgotten stories, such as the one I referenced in the 2nd of these posts, where Hercules fought the Hydra, the many-headed monster that grew two new heads for each one that was cut off. In that adventure, Hercules & his companion Iolaus realized that they couldn't defeat the hydra just by cutting off its heads, because for each one they severed, it grew back two more to attack them with. What they soon realized was that if after Hercules cut off a head with his sword, Iolaus quickly cauterized its stump with his torch, it could grow no more heads from that neck, and so as they severed & cauterized one neck after another, they soon rendered the many headed Hydra, headless, and were able to bury what was left of the beast under a massive stone.

Sure, I realize that many (not you, of course) might be saying:

"Swell story Van, but we're not facing many headed monsters, and we have no swords or torches to cut and cauterize them with if we did! What we need are STEM skills, not stories!"

, and my reply to that, is:

Stop being so naive.

For those with eyes to see, the plain fact is that we are fighting a many headed monster, and it is devouring both our children and our society, and it is our willful ignorance of that, that has made it so easy for the beast to lay us low.

So yes, shallow perceptions aside, the fact is that:

• we most definitely do have a monster confronting us in the guise of a govt whose power has broken free of its proper limitations, working in league with an 'educational system' designed to make you unwise enough to accept it
• its many heads stem from fraudulent rights and perverted virtues that're supported by a long neck of unjust laws & new 'norms' that've grown out of the boldest of its lies
• we do have a sword: Truth, and we do have a flaming torch to cauterize the necks we sever: Principled arguments rooted in metaphysics, causality/logic, and ethics, which provide the high degree of truth needed for unseen errors to be found & corrected and for lies to be exposed, which is what it takes to ignite & burn sophistry with the heat of a thousand suns

The sheer quantity of meaningless facts being waved about in front of our faces, distracts most of us from being able to see the principles that underly them, and that is at least partly due to what we've been 'educated' to look for importance in, and what we habitually dismiss as irrelevant. Those valuable lessons which go unseen within everything from the fables of Aesop, to the mythic adventures of heroes like Hercules (the painting "The Choice of Hercules between virtue and pleasure", went 'viral' in our Founders' era), and the biblical tales such as Samson who "slayed a thousand with the jawbone of an ass", are what our modern 'thinking skills' oriented education, effectively blind us to.

One would have to be a fool, or one so dis-educated as to be indistinguishable from one, to dismiss such gems as little more than 'Talking snake stories', but achieving that level of cognitive blindness is and has been the point of our pro-regressive dis-education, and having achieved that state of mind by the early 20th Century, is what made it child's play for our experts in 'Progressive Education' to then discard Greek & Latin, and Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas, and even Shakespeare, from the minds of the last several generations that their beast has been busily 'educating'.

“In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.” ~Joseph Sobran

The West was able to achieve what it had, through how it learned lessons from its foundational stories, and recovering both those stories and how to read them, could do that for us once again, if we would just stop doing everything else but that. It's worth considering, that one uncomfortable lesson that those stories are ready to teach us, is that a STEM Skill centric people - having skills without understanding - is the intended result of cutting all the tall poppies down to size.

Some of you (not you, of course) might be saying:

"Oh come on... give me even one example of a 'lesson' like that applying today!"

Ok, tell ya what, here are three relevant lessons worth learning from Hercules & the Hydra for the price of one:

1. By imagining yourself in the position of the monster that grows two new heads for every one that's lost, you might learn that the monster wants to provoke its opponents to rush in and cut off one of its heads, because that's how it gets enough heads to overwhelm them with.
2. Knowing that the Hydra wants to be attacked by bold & impetuous heroes whose tempers can easily be inflamed, teaches you that it's wise to consider a situation carefully before rushing in to attack what you're being provoked with.
3. From stories such as these you learn that those who're ignorant of such lessons, are more prone to following their natural (ignorant) reactions to rush in where angels fear to tread, and so assist the monster they're battling against, to defeat them.
   • Bonus Lesson: No Hydra wants you to learn lessons such as these, from stories such as those!

Provoking you to rash actions is how such monsters go about killing and eating you, or as Saul Alinsky put it when radicalizing students into Leftist activism:

"Their reaction is your action!"

Is this just theory? No, and a quick check of recent history abounds with the consequences of allowing the hydra to provoke the rash behavior of popular opinion, again & again... here are three off the top:

• Ten years ago when trans-gender bathrooms and drag-queen story hour emerged, the public was outraged and demanded change!... which was then exploited through policies ensuring gender affirming care, porn in public school libraries, and further diluted and reduced the presence and position of women in society through the zealotry of 'trans women are women!', men beating women in women's sports, and men being named as 'woman of the year'
• Twenty years ago when parents were angered by convoluted math problems and the vapidness of assigned 'texts', they rushed into their school boards and loudly demanded change! (to what? for what?) and more rigorous testing (testing of what? for what?), and 'struck down Common Core!' (or so they thought); which on the one hand helped usher in the ideological intensification of SEL, CRT, and DEI, and 'School Choice' on the other (the 'choice' isn't what you think it is), both of which add additional bureaucratic facts, policies, reduced understanding, and ever worsening results
• A hundred years ago sensational stories about political corruption led to a big push for more 'democracy!' and the first wave of campaign finance reform being waved in We The People's faces, which resulted in passing the 17th Amendment... which reduced meaningful representation for every person, incentivized corruption, and transformed the federal govt into the untouchable hydra that We The People are still battling against today

And as you begin to notice that provocations and insults are routinely deployed to get us to attack the obvious issues being waved in front of our faces, it's worth remembering Alinsky's other favorite training phrase:

"The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution!"

C.S. Lewis: "The Screwtape Letters"

, and remember that their tactics are all about provoking you to react to the latest outrage in as shallow a manner as possible (anger & miseducation being the preferred one-two punch of monsters everywhere & everywhen), so that it can intensify our reactions and advance its divisiveness forward over our positions, positions which, lacking the perspectives which those lessons could have provided a solid foundation for, become more easily overrun, and prone to collapse before the critical insurrection.

The treasury of the West, from Homer to The Bible, from Virgil to Dante, and Shakespeare, abounds with meaningful lessons and truths which reveal its foundations in the rock of what is real and true, and those can still be as readily communicated to us today, as they were to our Founders in their era, and so provide the metaphysical stability needed to fill the mind, body, and soul, with far more than 'just stories', and the Hydra gnos that.

I've noted before, how at the outset of the pro-regressive transformation of what we had known education to be, into the malicious creature it is today, an astonished essayist commented in the late 1800s that:

"...The notion that literature can be taken up as a branch of education, and learned at the proper time and when studies permit, is one of the most farcical in our scheme of education..."

The Palmerworm is adept at showing how seemingly useful answers are used to suppress and violate vital principles, such as: The Anthropological Line

, and he said so because to think that what literature transmits to our understanding can be thought of as being only a secondary branch of a 'STEM' education, rather than the soil, root and trunk of what an education is developed through, was still recognized by most people in his day to be completely absurd. Since then, however, that has become the norm, as anyone trained in 'Critical Thinking Skills' today would tell you (like my college professor troll), and they'll find ready support from those on 'The Right' who will jump at any opportunity for still more 'education reform' (which mainly enlarges the schools' bureaucracy and further diminishes the education they provide) to boost those test scores, provide 'accountability' and ensure improved 'thinking skills'. But take note:

• What do stories provide?: grammar, context, theme, plot, characterization, through which readers develop a basic understanding of logic, causality, ethics, and the ability to infer principles through, and learn lessons from, what they've read.
• What do stories not provide: Answers.
• What does modern schooling train you to seek and accept?: Answers.

Being trained to seek surface answers leads a person to neglect their awareness of underlying structures of principled understanding which are revealed through attention to theme, plot, and character development (you did learn about theme, plot, and character development in school, right? ...and that it was one of the most important lessons to learn...?), and not just those found in stories & literature, but in other narratives as well. That habit of mind is vital for developing a solid depth of understanding about what you've read or heard, and without that, the habit weakens, you become comfortable with its absence, and ever more willing to accept whatever 'answers' you're given, as substitutes for having given the serious consideration to a matter that's required to come to a conclusion about it that's worthwhile - actual, not artificial intelligence. 

Excellent demonstrations from Courtenay Turner, on how to see the larger story being lost behind the 'answers' that're given, in:
"The Simulation State" and "The Factory Reset"

Don't forget:

striking off the monster's head is the easy part...

...as the monster intends it to be

, and that requires it to do nothing more than wave the easy answers of divisive facts in our faces, to get an ill-considered reaction from us. And unless you actually understand the issue which it inflamed your reaction to, then even if you manage to cut the head off the neck you're being faced with, you'll lack the depth of understanding that's needed to generate enough heat to cauterize its bloodied stump, and so you enable the hydra to sprout still more heads for tearing us all apart with.

A Grimoire of philosophical spells: "Hegel and the hermetic tradition", by Glenn Alexander Magee

That lack of depth in our understanding (Note: this isn't a matter of intelligence, but of what is left unconsidered by even the most able thinkers), is what inclines us to lash out at every provocation, which is what has been on full display in the usual responses to issues like students being led (by their teachers and administrators) out of school to protest for 'Black Lives Matter!' or 'Ice Out!', as the Woke Left & Woke Right (or just Pro-Regressive, for short), shout that "It's about white supremacy!' or 'It's about hating white people!", both of which advance a common narrative of racial division. What's then able to go unnoticed in those (deliberate) appearances, is that the actual issue is not about race, race is just what they know they can rely upon to provoke a rash response from both you and their friends on the 'other side'.

The issue is never about the apparent issues of education, or race, or illegal aliens, or about what 'gender' you identify as, but the churning that happens on every ideological front, as with the 2nd Amendment where the dialectical churning from each side ('Left' or 'Right') making it all about guns - for or against - diverts everyone from thinking about the individual rights that the 2nd Amendment secures to us by preventing the government from infringing upon our right to keep and bear arms (Note: it says 'arms' in general, not 'firearms' in particular) - that churning is the insurrection in action.

The pattern to be noticed emerging from that, that of a provocative distraction, reaction, action, is the footprint (and mating call) of the monster that we're actually facing (which is not the guise of govt that it wears, but the monster beneath that mask), and 'somehow' that pattern mirrors how we've all been taught to think about and approach the issues of the day.

The initial provocative distractions and the public reactions to them - 'transgender bathrooms', 'low test scores', 'teachers unions' - seize upon surface facts and easy answers, and then - 'somehow' - with an action of philosophical sleight of mind (have you noticed how activism around hot-button issues like 'freedom of speech!' and 'Don't cancel me!', typically intensify the problems they purport to be concerned with?) the underlying issue slips by and progressively metastasizes (reproduces?) and sprouts two new heads as matters steadily worsen.

Whichever head of the hydra is being battled, as we react to the distracting movements that the hydra churns up around an issue, the doors to the halls of power are swung wide open by our impetuous heroes calling for 'Change!' from all sides, and the only thing that can be counted upon, is that it will result in still more policies, media denunciations, and more, as the spiritual and political corruption of the Hydra's venom seeps in deeper and spreads still further... which is the 'Left, Right, Left, Right, Forward... March!' of the revolution.

Eric Voegelin:"Science, Politics, and Gnosticism"

How has that 'somehow' been accomplished? Well, in a word - and this word might be a bit provocative itself: Magic

I know, many (not you, of course) are probably saying:

"Really Van? Magic?!"

Yes, but, because the word 'Magic' has multiple meanings, it's important to clarify that what I mean by that has less to do with the hocus-pocus sense of a Merlin the Magician, and more to do with the skilled stagecraft of a philosophical Houdini. Much of what has been attributed to complex issues (1st cousin to 'hocus-pocus') like 'rising illiteracy', 'trade wars', 'the decline of the family', are in fact the natural consequences of simple perceptions, decisions & actions we're routinely led into, whose import is effectively obscured and hidden from us by the artful misdirection & subterfuge (much of which is done unconsciously) of those who put on the airs of an expert (magician).

"Can you define a woman?"
, "No...I'm not a biologist"

No doubt most of you (you too?) are pushing back on even that 'stage magician' identification of the term, but I'll ask you: What is it that you have in mind to explain what has enabled bearded men to publicly identify as woman, and to do so with the assurance that thousands if not tens of thousands of highly educated people will accuse you of 'transphobia' and 'hate speech', for objecting to their ludicrous claims? If the sum of your assessment of that is something to the effect of

'Oh...hell-If-I-Know...somehow!'

, then I submit to you, that your exasperation and acceptance of it, is that same sense which both the stage magician and the philosophical sorcerer cultivate, because to be successful they both need their audience to have that level of misunderstanding about the tricks they're performing upon them "Wow... somehow he pulled a rabbit out of a hat!". Just as the stage magician uses sleight of hand to appear to pull a rabbit out of a hat, the philosophical sorcerer uses a conceptual sleight of mind to slip impossible ideas into what 'everyone knows', in order to do what every sane person would otherwise say is insane to even consider. And they do this with the assurance and expectation that they will be applauded for doing so on the national and international stage, just as the stage magicians are applauded for tricking their audiences in Las Vegas.

We'll put legs under this as we go through this series of posts, but I submit to you that if the audience 'knows' only those apparent 'answers' that the magician gives them ("you can see there's nothing in this hat") and doesn't understand the nature and causes of what they are seeing happen before them (such as how to conceal a rabbit), then those 'answers' they think they know about the trick, coupled with their misdirected attention and absence of interest in understanding what has happened, means that their audience's understanding of events differ very little from either sense of those observing a magician perform 'Magic'. I contend that nothing less than the widespread shallowness of understanding that is compatible with either sense of 'Magic', could have enabled someone to confidently identify as 'trans', and to feel assured that you would be penalized by the rest of the audience for heckling their performance.

This sort of 'Magic' should not be dismissed as mere trickery, as that same power it has to amuse, can be used to dismantle and destroy friendships, families, and entire societies & civilizations, by presenting poisonous ideas as desirable cure-alls. I submit to you that the artful stage management of philosophical 'Magic' is not only real, but exceedingly effective in its misdirections ("I think therefore I am") and wand-waving ("Teach how to think, not what to think"), and other such techniques of conceptual sleight of mind, that induce the mindset of seeking 'just the facts!' , along with a willingness to accept the appearance of obvious 'logical answers', which serious students of literary myths & monsters would balk at, even as it dismisses those studies as only so much unserious jibber-jabber (and with a sly eye cast towards religion). That soph-satisfying sense of superiority, is a 'tell' of how easily such spells of apparent 'understanding' can and have been performed upon us, without our noticing.

Deceptions such as these have not only enabled the Pro-Regressives to bury us under layers and layers of the hydra's provocations, but they also whisper to us why it is that they operate in this way. Antonio Gramsci (who, BTW, was decades late to the pragmatic propaganda party) infamously identified the West's 'Cultural Hegemony' - that western culture being the result of the philosophy, religion, history, stories and myths of the Greco/Roman - Judeo/Christian civilization, has dominated all others - as the greatest defense against, and threat to, his Marxist's ideals, because he saw that our regard for our stories and religion and the understanding of them, was far more central to and foundational for that 'Cultural Hegemony', than any scientific and technical aspect of 'progress' in the modern world (none of which could have occurred without them).

What it is that Gramsci & others before him intended by attacking the West's 'Cultural Hegemony' and why, and how that was meant to be wielded against The West, by 'defenders' of The West using its technological powers against itself, is what we need to identify, sever, and cauterize into lifeless stumps, in order to bury the headless beast beneath an unmovable stone. Only then, will we be able to re-secure a sound understanding of America, within the minds of Americans today, and tomorrow.

Using 'Critical Thinking' to identify the nature of that 'somehow', progressively clarifying its footprint, profile, and purpose, and the familiar and trusted appearances it operates through and hides behind, is what this series of posts will be digging into.