Means of Survival

One of Ayn Rand’s more important ideas is the role of philosophy in inflencing the course of history:

“The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.” Source.

For a brief example of the above, Ayn Rand describes how Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas are at the root of a movement towards science, technology, the Industrial Revolution, and individual rights, whereas the more mystical and theological philosophers of antiquity and late antiquity gave rise to monasticism, other-worldliness, feudalism, and what is commonly called the Dark Ages.

This has led me on a quest of "philosophical detection,” which led me to three philosophers who I believe have had a great influence on the present state of the world, which includes, among many other catastrophes:

The ascendency of the Islamic Caliphate (ISIL, ISIS, Daesh, etc.) sweeping across the Middle East; murdering, pillaging, raping, and wiping out whole villages of Christian civilians, and rival Muslim fanatic groups

The ascendency of left-wing “Progressive” politicians in the USA, obliterating the Constitution and the objective rule of law

Brainwashing the youth of America and Europe, having seized the educational establishments and the mass communications media

A full-scale attack on traditional Christianity, with the intent of obliterating it (in the Mid-East, by the mass murder of Christians, in the West by ridicule and smearing) or hijacking it (as exemplified by His Holiness, Pope Francis, champion of Global Warming)

A direct and indirect assault on the Founding Fathers of the USA, whose religious beliefs were based on the Renaissance-era division between Reason and Faith, with a preference for the former on almost all things, except for the origin of individual rights, believed to come from God.

So, which three philosophers did I choose as the most influential on bringing us to the state of affairs described above? Answer:

Plato

Hegel

Leo Strauss

The title of this essay is Platonic Republicans, which is actually a pun. The word Republican refers to the Republican Party in the USA, and also to the fact that the USA is a constitutional republic: in the words of Benjamin Franklin: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Source [It looks, unfortunately, that we may not be keeping it.]

However, the Platonic reference is where the pun comes in, because Plato wrote a landmark philosophical work called the Republic, in which he detailed what appears to be a blueprint for justice in politics for all time.

Ayn Rand Institute Scholar Robert Mayhew has researched a criticism of Plato’s Republic by none other than Aristotle, a former philosophy student of Plato. Ayn Rand and many others (including, more recently the modern philosopher Karl Popper) conclude that

The city portrayed in the Republic struck some critics as harsh, rigid, and unfree; indeed, as totalitarian. Source

It is in this sense the pun “Platonic Republican” refers to a society which is totally the opposite of what the USA Founding Fathers intended; instead of a society upholding individual rights, it implies a society where the individual is rigidly controlled from the top down, a society towards which the USA is moving very fast under the influence of the “Progressives.”

So much for Plato. Now, the other two philosophers:

Hegel was an overt advocate for the supremacy of the State over the individual, and was foremost advocate for what George Orwell later called doublethink, a form of thought where everything turns into its opposite, and thereafter into some kind of synthesis between the two. ("War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, etc.)

In Catholicism and other religious traditions, seven vices are said to be “deadly sins:” anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, and sloth.

After Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a new Kantian-Hegelian-Marxist-Postmodernist religion has evolved, and the new religion has become the undeclared Established Church of the ruling elite in the United States. The acolytes of the new religion, who love to call themselves “Progressives,” have replaced the old Seven Deadly Sins with a new list:

Racism

Sexism

Homophobia

Islamophobia

Pollution

Discrimination

Offensiveness

How do we know that these ideas and behaviors are considered sinful according to the Progressives (they of course don’t use the word “sin”)? Any public figure demonstrating any tendency towards any of the New Seven Deadly Sins will be roundly condemned in the mass media, held up to ridicule; and often there will be demands for job loss or legal penalties.

The first six of the New Seven Deadly Sins are obvious, but it should be noted that offensiveness is only a sin if directed against certain people who are considered oppressed and protected groups according to Marxist class struggle ideology and Postmodern “critical theory.” Thus, attacking Big Business and Christians is not considered offensive, while attacking Muslims and transgender “queers” is considered highly offensive.

The “Progressive” re-designation of the Seven Deadly Sins is especially remarkable, because the old set of sins have become reclassified, unconditionally or conditionally, as virtues:

Anger: a virtue, encouraged and praised when directed against the Marx-defined capitalist oppressors: the banks, insurance companies, doctors, white people in general, Christian clergymen, Israel, the US armed forces, and, of course, the local police.

Envy: a virtue, because it motivates political action on behalf of class struggle. The rich are bad guys and it is good, according to “Progressives,” to envy their wealth and luxuries, unless, of course the wealth was obtained by government looting and mooching.

Gluttony: an old-fashioned sin, often ignored since capitalist productivity has fed much of the world, so there is less need to compete for food and delicacies, but none-the-less the “Progressive” message is that feeding one’s face is virtuous as long as the food is wholesome according to Michelle Obama.

Greed: Have the “Progressives” turned avarice into a virtue? Yes, for the politicians, any and all government agencies and departments, and the UN. They can never have enough. (For Big Business, and the self-employed, greed is still a vice, and must be punished with ever-increasing taxes and regulation.)

Lust: A virtue, if you’re lesbian, transgendered, or gay. If you’re a heterosexual family man, many “Progressives” might be concerned that you are objectifying or exploiting women, so in that case, it might still be on the negative side of the moral ledger.

Pride: A virtue if you’re Black or gay. A vice if you’re American.

Sloth: In an era when government intervention in the economy has destroyed employment prospects for a vast swath of the population, not working, collecting unemployment and welfare benefits, and keeping your mouth shut is part of the “Progressive” solution, not part of the problem.

Finally, based on Ayn Rand’s writing and lectures, how would one address both the old and the new “sins”?

Ayn Rand defined three cardinal values: Reason, Purpose, and Self-Esteem; and three cardinal virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, and Pride. None of these are on the old sin lists, except for pride, which Ayn Rand believed to be virtuous. By pride, she meant pride in one’s ability to use reason throughout life, to be productive, to have a purpose in life, and derive self-esteem rationally from the value of purpose.

The problem with philosophy is…

it’s intellectually demanding

most of it (since Kant, anyhow) is bullshit

it’s boring

nobody gives a damn about it

Why bother, then?

The alternatives to an understanding of philosophy are…

Religion (Feh!)

Moral Chaos

Political Tyranny

Or, as Ayn Rand put it:

Faith and Force (The Destroyers of the Modern World.)

Socrates and Plato implied that philosophy is kind of a hobby, and that most people are either incapable of understanding it, or don’t want to.

Ayn Rand, on the other hand, implied that everyone, to some extent, is capable of understanding philosophy, and should.

The West has lost its mind. It has gone insane. I will not attempt to provide evidence; you, the reader can do that; and if you can’t there are many more interesting things to look at here on Tumblr.

Why has the West lost its mind? Ayn Rand gave us an explanation: after philosophers, beginning with the German Immanuel Kant, attacked the validity of reason in order to make a revival of religion possible, the West, led largely by Marx, found new ways to promote mysticism, collectivism, and the principle of self-sacrifice, philosophical altruism.

As an Ayn Rand fan, I agree with her explanation for the West’s psychotic break, which was spelled out in detail by Leonard Peikoff in his book, The Ominous Parallels, written with Rand’s advice and support.

But there’s more… It’s long been my concern that the madness of the West is very specific, more specific that Kantianism and Marxism would imply. Neither would predict the Western obsession with “saving” Islam from “Islamophobia,” the legal (or semi-legal) hijacking of the White House by Barack Hussein Obama, and the mass abandonment of Israel by America’s Jews.

After all, America has not become anything like the Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, or any other Marxist regime… and its New Left President, Obama, is vague and elusive in his Marxism, and by conviction; not merely to get elected.

No, America has not gone Marxist; it has merely gone mad.

After a fair amount of investigation I believe I have found the key to the West’s madness: Marx’ philosophical predecessor, Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831.) When it comes the assault on reason, I could write (and will now do so) that Hegel was Kant’s hatchet-man.

Karl Marx adapted Hegel for his own theory, accepted by the Communist world, but it is my impression that the West has now rejected Marx and moved back to Hegel.

James Doull, a recent Canadian philosopher and Hegel fan wrote:

Hegel had been successful in his attempt to articulate in the form of self-developing concepts the inner content of the Christian revelation…

In other words, my words, the West has adopted Hegelianism as a new form of Christianity, where the Church is replaced by the State.

In my opinion, this is too important to ignore. As Ayn Rand pointed out in her book Philosophy, Who Needs It, philosophy can’t be ignored. In my view, sometimes bad philosophy can’t be ignored either, especially if it is bad philosophy that has driven a whole culture insane.

In the USA, Marxists prefer not to call themselves Marxists. Their current favorite name for themselves is Progressives.

I’m fine with that, as I will explain. However I want to state right now that there is nothing progressive about a Progressive. What they advocate is in no way any kind of progress; it is a return to the Dark Ages.

So, why am I fine with the name? There are historical reasons.

Look up Progressivism in Wikipedia and the truth will unfold. Ignore the introductory text (which makes the preposterous claim that Progressivism has something to do with progress) and go directly to the history heading. FDR and Teddy, Woodrow Wilson, LBJ… the whole rogue’s gallery will be disclosed. Yup. The authors make it clear that Progressivism is left-wing.

Once upon a time, left-wing referred to opponents of the King of France during that nation’s 1789 revolution. After a purge of rational opponents of the King (the Gironde) what was left was your standard nihilist scorched-earth leftists, the Jacobins, intellectual ancestors of the Marxists, who were, in turn, the intellectual ancestors of the Progressives.

Now, in the Wikipedia article on Progressivism, go to the Philosophy heading. There it is: the granddaddy of the movement is Immanuel Kant, the academic philosophy professor whom Ayn Rand called, “the most evil man who ever lived.”

Kant’s influence boiled down to attacking reason as unreliable, among other very ugly things. This opened the door to Hegel, a later philosopher who gave us what US political commentators call Big Government, and Hegel’s follower, Marx, who gave us Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Un, and indirectly, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

Therefore, in my view, Progressive is shorthand for a follower of Immanuel Kant and all the destruction resulting from his attack on reason.

This, I believe, is historically accurate. “Progressives” (I use the scare quotes too) implicitly or explicitly view reason as their enemy, and therefore a rational person must view Progressivism as the enemy of reason.

The southern border of the United States of America has become a major political controversy. The Obama White House appears to be pursuing a policy, not merely of opening the border, but of encouraging mass immigration. The conservative political movement advocates closure of the border with strict border controls. Ayn Rand fans appear split on the subject: in a free society, say many, the free flow of labor should be encouraged, but citizenship severly restricted. Other Ayn Rand fans fear that open borders will result in a permanent electoral majority of left-wing collectivists.

This blogpost is not about the open border issue per se, however, but about the fact that open borders are a metaphor for the Pragmatist philosophical movement which has hijacked the minds of the vast majority of Americans, especially businessmen; and what is the Pragmatist philosophical movement? In essence, it is open borders of the mind.

This blog is all about man's means of survival, which is reason. In order for reason to function, man needs to be able to distinguish between true and false, right and wrong, success and failure, and other conceptual dichotomies. Each one implies a border, a boundary, a bright line between one pole and the other.

Is cold-blooded, premeditated murder right or wrong? Juries must decide that in capital cases. If they cannot, the result is a hung jury and the accused is not convicted.

Pragmatism preaches that there is no such border. There is no right or wrong, true or false, good or evil. There is only an after-the-fact vague mulling over the question about whether something worked or not.

In my own mind, I have closed the border to Pragmatism. For me, the Pragmatist method of dealing with reality is not merely an "undocumented" immigrant looking for honest work; it is a terrorist intent on destroying my rational faculty.

There are plenty of sources from which to learn about Pragmatism. A good starting point is this link to the Ayn Rand lexicon website.

In Ayn Rand's writings, the essay The Cult of Moral Grayness is, by now, a classic critique of Pragmatism. It is a chapter in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, and is also narrated (not by her) on YouTube here. In that essay, Ayn Rand does not identify Pragmatism per se, but its consequences.

The Obama Administration, solidly backed by the two political parties that put him and keep him in power, appears to have successfully destroyed the capacity of the United States of America to control their southern border.

As both a consequence and a cause of the destruction of the border is the destruction of the electoral system, upon which the US "democracy," a tyranny of the majority, is based. Because the above-mentioned two political parties keep the balance of electoral power close, all it takes is electoral fraud in a few key counties in a few key states to sink the US electoral system, at least as far as major national (presidential and congressional) elections go, just as a relatively small hole below the waterline of an otherwise intact battleship will take the ship down to the bottom of the sea.

The solution to the border/electoral crisis is not to patch a few holes (of both the border and of honest elections), or even a lot of holes, or even (at the present time) most of the holes; the electoral system if far too broken to allow anything but minor patching to take place.

The solution exists, however, and it is potentially a powerful one: the power of ideas. The youth of the next generation, and the few generations after that, will have to learn to choose between reason and irrationality, between individual rights and collectivism. If they learn to think at all (that's a big if) as time goes by and the economy deteriorates, they have a chance of becoming disenchanted with the propaganda of the Left, the Machiavellian Right, and the Religious Right, they might rediscover capitalism,and they might deem capitalism worth working for and fighting for.

How do I know this will happen? I don't. What I do know, however, is the American sense of life, which I believe is alive and well among America's very confused young people. I encounter it daily on the Internet, and I also see it slowly being endorsed on Twitter from youth in other parts of the world.

Another important point: the American youth to which I refer above may have been born in a Guatemalan hut, a Brooklyn hospital, or near their parents' Texas ranch,but at birth, all ultimately have equal chances, in my opinion, of accepting capitalism or falling for altruist, collectivist, mystic hokum. They all have minds, and minds are their means of survival.

Yes, it would be nice to impeach Obama, regain control of the border, and take back the schools, but it ain't gonna happen. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was Athens or the US Constitution.

In September, 2012, Dr. Leonard Peikoff, a long-term associate of Ayn Rand from his teens until her death, published a philosophy book, The DIM Hypothesis, subtitled "Why the Lights of the West are Going Out." In that book, Dr. Peikoff describes three modes of thought, abbreviated D (disintegration), I (integration), and M (misintegration.)

Is the rapidly disentegrating nation of Iraq a perfect demonstration of the DIM Hypothesis? I say yes. Saddam, ISIS, and Iran are M2 totalitarians. (Solid subscribers to the "misintegrated" mode of thought, typified by religious fanatics and North Korea-style Stalinist dictatorships.)

Obama is a D2 skeptic nihilist. (D2 means a solid subscriber to the "disintegrated" mode, in which nothing is certain, and true reality cannot be known.) Bush, in my opinion, was a D1 skeptic; he was not tied sufficiently to any truly objective view of rights and freedom to understand Iraq, even in the wrong way. On the other hand, the D1 mode of thought allows a mixture of a belief that reality exists, and in many cases, it can be known, acted upon, and evaluated, and it was such objective knowledge of military strength that made it possible for US and other forces to invade Iraq, oust Saddam (not the "cakewalk" it was claimed to be), and set up an Iraqi army after a sufficient military "surge."

In a previous blogpost, I pointed out how US President George W. Bush supported a nation which had "Allahu Akbar" on its flag, and to which Americans politicians turned a blind eye when Christians were persecuted. It seems that the guys who shouted "Allahu Akbar" the loudest, the "terrorist" jihad network known as ISIS, has the real cakewalk when they invaded Iraq: the US-trained Iraqi army fled in terror.

According to The DIM Hypothesis, who understood what about Iraq?

Saddam: understood the Shia threat, the Western need for oil, and the use of violence to suppress those he ruled. He was, in essence, a fellow traveler of the Old Left, a remnant of the so-called "unaligned" nations of the Cold War.

ISIS: Its leader, whose name, by the way, is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, understands the principles laid down by Muhammad the warrior, reflecting Plato's vision of a philosopher-king, but substituting the earthly Dar al-Islam for Plato's idealistic World of Forms. His motto might well be: "Give me that old-time religion: it's good enough for me."

Obama: totally buys into the advanced skepticism of Postmodernism, which replaces Leninism with nihilism, a mindless but bogus utopian egalitarianism, and "identity politics." He abandoned Iraq because, well, why not?

Bush: in the mode of "Progressive" Republicans, whose ranks include Teddy Roosevelt and Nixon, Bush paid lip service to supporting American power, advocating some form of republic loosely based on a Western "democracy," but falling short of protecting individual rights. The army set up by the USA according to Bush's policy did not know what they were fighting for, and therefore they did not fight.