Serving Obama or How to Achieve Greater Civility

The President's Tucson call for greater civility in political debate is reverberating across the globe and is being regurgitated by the Left and the MSM ad nauseum. Here's our analysis of the jaw-dropping hypocisy and the vicious spiral of hatred. Yet there has been little said on how this self censorship is to be accomplished.

In fact the basic assumptions of the political elite makes this almost impossible. Political discourse which is not adversarial will require a paradigm shift in the philosophy of the political elite. Most lawyers, politicians, professors, and pundits think in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, in which some assertible proposition is necessarily opposed by an equally assertible and mutual contradicting proposition.

Most people are unaware of how postmodern thought, and the adversarial approach, now shape our perceptions, influence our decisions and control our behaviors. Yet they are the outcomes of Hegel's philosophy and his Utopian vision. For years progressives have been nudging us toward endless self-perpetuating conflict and centralization--the "whole" of which Hegel speaks.

If you want to learn about an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic, which can provide the civility most people seek, read Dr Sam Holliday's doctrine of "Stability through Equilibrium (StE)", which results in checks and balances, conflict/cooperation--both interacting as parts of a whole--decentralization of power to the lowest level possible, and freedom for individuals to use their Free Will (which is referred to as the inner compass of the individual).

This difference is not just in words. It is at the core of the current decline of Western Culture as a result of "progressism"--a decline which could be reversed to result in true progress in keeping with the principles and ideals of those who established America and with it, the philosophy of Liberty.

That said, it must be stressed that postmodernists (progressives) want to achieve civility to prevent opposing views from being heard. That is what all of those who favor a collective want to do. In fact, it's a form of political correctness at work. This is not civility, it is servitude.

This call for civility is control of behavior through the Secular Authority of an elite. Free persons (with Free Will based on Sacred Authority) welcome differing views, so they can use judgment to adopt the best behaviors and policies based on their merit. This is civility according to StE.

But this piece of political correctness is even more insidious than meets the eye. It's one step closer to the criminalization of the opposition, something which has already been attempted on several occasions since the presidential campaign of 2008.

More articles and essays by Dr Sam Holliday and his work with the Armiger Cromwell Center is on file here.

Update

Glenn Beck: "The assassination attempt you've never heard of"

With all this heated rhetoric causing right wing Tea Partiers to translate words like 'crosshairs' into 'I must go shoot people' - you'd think an assassination attempt on the Democratic Governor of Missouri would have garnered national attention. Why didn't it? You guessed it - because this would-be assassin was a leftist! Glenn has more on the blatant hypocrisy and blind agenda driven 'news' on radio today. Read and watch a FREE CLIP at GlennBeck.com.

Related

- "Stability through Equilibrium, an alternative to the Dialectics" (addendum)
- "Not Progress, Cycles!"
- "Secular and Sacred Authority: why we need it!"
- "The Spiral of Hatred"
- "The Jaw Dropping Hypocrisy of the Left"

Related dossiers

- "The Dialectics"
- "The Pomo Presidency"
- "Pomo Lingo"
- "Postmodern Ravages"
- "Smoke and Mirrors"
- "Political Correctness"
- "Ruled by the Mob"

Ideological Archeology: Heckling Hegel (IV)

Continued from Part III: "Countering Kant"

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), was like Immanuel Kant (Part III), a great admirer of Jean Jacques Rousseau (part II). Like today's cosmologists are warping reason for their Holy Grail, the 'theory of everything', these anti philosophers of the Counter Enlightenment did the same in their efforts to unify faith and reason.

Hegel feverishly sought to square Christianity with reason. In his efforts he made an irrational decision: he allowed Kant's dialectics to reflect the contradiction.

Hegel's follower, Karl Marx thought this was all wrong and devised his own version of the dialectics, which is with us until this day as a divisive mechanism for progress through class struggle.

Hegel's philosophy is a secular fantasy based on Judeo-Christian cosmology: God's projection, a spirit called the Absolute, represents creation which is seeking reunification with God. Its development through struggle and conflict by means of which it gets to know itself, is the story of the history of the world. The story ends when the Absolute - reunited with God - achieves full self-consciousness.

Hegel's theme was the state. As Rousseau is the father of the totalitarian state, Hegel is the founder of the collective state. The Orwellian term, 'freedom through the state' describes well where Hegel is coming from.

According to Hegel freedom is not a God-given right, inherent in man and therefore inalienable as the Enlighteners held it, but is temporary and conditional, granted and taken by the state as it sees fit.

Under the principle 'as above, so below' the state is acting as the instrument of God. It is the 'ethical whole', the 'actualization of freedom', and the self-consciousness of the Absolute.

As a mere aspect of the state it is the individual's duty to submit to its needs, and worship it as a 'terrestrial divinity'. Consider the following quote as illustrative of the idea:

''Otto Braun, age 19, a volunteer who died in World War I, wrote in a letter to his parents: "My inmost yearning, my purest, though most secret flame, my deepest faith and my highest hope - they are still the same as ever, and they all bear one name: the State. 

One day to build the State like a temple, rising up pure and strong, resting in its own weight, severe and sublime, but also serene like the gods and with bright halls glistening in the dancing brilliance of the sun - this, at bottom, is the end and goal of my aspirations.''

Hegel's views are a fine example how volition, human free will, the essence of morality, is shifted from man to God, thus dodging human responsibility and lumbering God with the dire results of human free will.

'World historical figures' as operatives of God's Plan, might be exacting high cost in terms of human lives, but collective historical development is of a higher order than mere morality. This hierarchy of ethics sounds familiar.

The suspicion may be justified that the rift between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, the American-Continental fault-line, Locke versus Rousseau, is still visible today in the geopolitical differences between the United States and the European Union (Part I, The Counter Enlightenment).

Americans have taken up ownership of their politeia, safeguarded by the guarantees of the Second Amendment, ensuring the rule of law will be defended with something more impressive than corroded pitchforks and burning barricades.

Europeans on the other hand are still stuck in the mind-set of subjects. They have not given up being the pawns of Hegel's 'world historical figures', the new operatives of 'God's work' who happen to be carving out a heroic role for themselves as unelected road-builders to Kantian world government by the new world order.

Admittedly EU citizens were misled by their political leaders, but how else can one account for the civic tolerance of the collectivist, centralist super behemoth, the post-democratic techno-rule that is now controlling most of the continent and the United Kingdom? Is Hegel's hierarchy of ethics, the flow of 'world historic events' before individual rights - empire building before Enlightenment values - alive and kicking in the third millennium?

The EU recently betrayed its Hegelian credentials in the matter of the wave of Islamic fundamentalism that is encroaching on the Turkish secular democracy founded by Kemal Ataturk. The latter - knowing his Youngturks from his Liberals - made the military the custodians of the secular Turkish government.

In a recent crisis the EU made a perhaps not surprising, but very revealing choice. The military were to stay in barracks, Sharia come what may. This choice should not be interpreted as a mark of respect for the fundamentalists' freedom of conscience, because this liberty has already been officially subordinated to postmodern moral legislation.

This was a choice to sacrifice democracy, rather than save it by a military intervention, for putting the flow of 'world political events' before the values of liberal democracy. Statist habits die exceedingly hard, it seems.

Expert on anti modern Counter Enlightenment thought, Stephen Hicks, lists four of Hegel's contributions to postmodernity:

1. Reality is an entirely subjective creation (or, thought creates reality) (or, reality  for its existence is dependent upon the subjective mind); (a reversal of reason made possible by Kant, who enclosed the mind inside the skull, rendering knowledge of the external world impossible);

2. Ignoring Aristotle's law, contradictions were built into reality which made them a natural part of reason (from here onwards anything goes);

3. As reality evolves contradictorily, truth is not absolute, but relative to time, place and subject (the immediate victim of this logic is morality, the knowledge of good and evil);

4. The collective, not the individual, is the operative unit.

All this unfixed relativism and subjectivism may be surprising, but compared to the Counter-Enlightenment movement's later religious as well as atheist philosophers who have become known as the Irrationalists, Kant and Hegel sound like the sheer essence of reason.

NASA psychiatrist and blogger Dr Sanity has written extensively about the Counter Enlightenment and Hegel in relation to schooling and education, early victims of the 'new logic'. Here's a self-explanatory example:

- Left and Right Hegelians battling it out! -

"Ayers and his Cohorts are what's Wrong with Education Today"

Hegel, building on Kant, Rousseau and Fichte (next part), would go on to write, "It must be further understood that all the worth which the human being possesses--all the spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." Hegel's heirs went on to divide into left- and right-wing camps. The charge of the left was led by leftists like Karl Marx, who transformed Hegel's "dialectic of Spirit" into an economic and social system that depended on godless dialectic of "oppressors versus oppressed." The right-wing Hegelians tended to stress the omnipotence of the state and were less willing to abandon a deity. For more than a 100 years, the two camps have been battling it out, each trying to impose their utopian vision onto the human species.

Both Hegelian offshoots summarily dispensed with free will and human freedom; and between them, they brought forth the philosophical abomination that we now call "postmodernism". The 20th century was the battleground where the two totalitarian branches of the collectivist philosophers vied for spiritual and physical control over humanity. The amount of death, destruction and misery they ushered in is perhaps unprecedented in human history.

By the mid-20th century, the right-wing, or nationalist, Hegelians, or National Socialists (Nazis) had been defeated by an alliance of the left-wing Hegelians and those who stood for human freedom and democracy. By the end of the century, the social systems favored by the Hegelians of the left had been exposed to the world for the lie and deception it was.

But, in this new century, both utopian systems have been given new life by recruiting a potent new ally in their attempts to control the minds of men. That ally is postmodern philosophy and rhetoric, which I have written about multiple times. This 18th century philosophical rise of collectivism is still playing itself out several hundred years later in the competing ideologies of our own time.

The most important battlefield in this war in our time is the educational system, from kindergarden through college, where strenuous efforts are being made by the remnants of both types of collectivists to claim the minds of the next generation. (...) >>>

Coming up next: "Flunking Fichte": "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished."


Related dossiers

- "The Dystopia of Paradise"

- "Hegel's Legacy"

- "Postmodern Ravages"

- "The Dialectics"

- "Pomo Lingo"

- "The Unholy Alliance"

- "Science as a Narrative"

- "Justice, Pomo Style"

Ideological Archeology: Rousseau's Ravages (II)

Continued from part I: "The Counter-Enlightenment"

Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) personal life is marked by traits sounding awkwardly contemporary. Self-pity and paranoia play see-saw with wrong choices and deflecting blame. Man is by nature good, it is society that is the cause of corruption and vice. Iconic for Rousseauian thought is the image of the noble savage, man in his natural state before his fall from Paradise.

There is nothing ambiguous about his ethics however: he believed his 'doctrine of two substances' to be the key to the absolute quality of good and evil [Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 2001, p., 2001, p. 719]. In an example in a classical setting he saw in Athenian decadence the degrading influence of reason. He preferred the cruder, militaristic Spartans, an unspoiled and nobler tribe. Their callous practice of exposing babies to nature - now in dispute - may well have inspired Rousseau to expose his own five illegitimate children to the hardships of the Paris orphanage.

Although Rousseau died in 1778, before the French Revolution, his justification of violence to power was the source of inspiration of the Reign of Terror that the Jacobins unleashed during the latter part of the rebellion. In 1792 the French 'citizen army' faced the Prussian forces at Valmy. In a psychological victory they prevented them from marching on to Paris to restore the monarchy. Earlier in the capital a mob had stormed the Tuilleries Palace. In the massacres over a thousand political prisoners were brutally hacked to death. Fabre d'Eglantine declared: "In the towns, let the blood of traitors be the first Holocaust to Liberty, so that in advancing to meet the common enemy, we leave nothing behind to disquiet us!" [Wildmonk]

After "the first Holocaust to Liberty" many more would follow. It is a specific feature, typical of Rousseau's constellation of ideas. The chief ingredients as expressed in "Profession de Foi" are a sweeping rejection of tradition, Revelation, and all institutionalized authority. [Radical Enlightenment, p. 718]

In Roussea's ideas we find the source of every anti-Liberal, violent revolution ever since the French Revolution went off the Lockean track. Rousseau is ultimately the father of many noxious and lethal, collectivist traditions besides: Romanticism, redistributive Socialism, philosophical agrarianism, conservative Communitarianism, Nazism, and more to the point, the Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism (including anti-human ecofascism). Cultures, adopting Rousseauian ideas found in them a mirror of some aspect of their own identity. [Wildmonk]

Many have descended into the abyss of collectivist hell. In France his radical egalitarianism led to The Reign of Terror, in Germany to Left and Right Socialism with known result, in Russia and the Far East to communism, starvation and slaughter on grandiose scales. In China Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward resulted in the greatest mass murder in human history and in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge's extermination campaign to establish Rousseauian agrarianism resulted in the deaths of well over twenty percent of the population. [Wildmonk] If this is not evil, frankly I don't know what is.

Why Rousseau is different
Rousseau stands apart in many respects. He marks the fault-line in Western tradition between Anglo-American and Continental lines of thought, and forms the point of departure from the Enlightenment because he is essentially anti-modern [Wildmonk]. While loosely following the traditional path of Enlightenment thought, his radical stance differs notably on the crucial issues of anti-individualism [Isaiah Berlin, "Against the Current", 2001], anti-capitalism and against private property ("Radical Enlightenment", p. 273), anti science and technology, his radical egalitarianism, and the inherent mindset in which the means are justified by the perceived noble end.

Rousseau is often quoted as the iconic philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it is quite clear he fiercely rejected all its tenets and values. No doubt, here we have the ground zero of the Counter-Enlightenment.

He was certainly no believer in mutually beneficial interaction, or the beneficial effects on society of self-interest (Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), "The Fable of the Bees"), asserting that "society hardly needs to feed man's love for himself and his desire to be first among men." ["Radical Enlightenment", p. 273].

His radical egalitianism is echoed in the notion that rational and industrious man with dehumanizing machines would replace royalty as an enslaver of the common man, being better and more ruthless on the aggregation of material goods. He argued that the separation of the progress and dissemination of science and art from political and religious control are hazardous for society and for the virtue of the people [Bloom, 1990]. But it gets worse."

Common will" instead of freedom
In Rousseau we see the first social contract at the price of freedom and the birth of a notion called the "common will". The latter is a concept that in Rousseau's approach requires state intervention. This should not be confused with the 'common good'. It is a far more developed conception which, and unlike the former, can only be realized in the context of civil society under the state ["Radical Enlightenment", p. 720).

For the creation of a society of common will, "freedom of all the people", they need only accept the dictates of the state. This was Rousseau's essence of "true civilization." The struggle between rich and poor would then rise to a moral experience of self-restraint. [Wildmonk] With the faculty of moral choice thus abdicated and forfeited to the state, people would be free from lowly - earthly desires and reach full - ideal potential. Man is thus divorced from the social and economic context in which he lives and interacts with others. The ideal state of heaven, separated from earthly considerations.

This totalitarian approach to freedom, an abomination in every sense, was later further developed by Marx, who wrote that "capitalist, individual liberty is the most complete suppression of all individual liberty and total subjugation of individuality to social conditions" [Wildmonk: Marx, "Grundnisse", pp. 131]. "Freedom can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of their human nature." [Wildmonk: Marx, "Selected Writings", pp. 496].

In this way man's separation from his nature and morality began. Never in human history were their worse judges of human character than Rousseau and his followers: all seek some degree of formal control over individual freedom for the purpose of creating material conditions deemed necessary for "true freedom", moralectomy in precise equal measure. Rousseau's concept of "common will" became the most savage, bloody instrument of social engineering in the history of mankind.

The Atlantic Ridge
In the United States Thomas Jefferson was the most prominent supporter of the French revolutionary achievements. Nevertheless, property rights and Enlightenment liberties were set in stone in the spirit of Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith. The present Democratic Party is being diverted further and further from that tradition as the sway of the postmoderns intensifies. Rhetorical style and attitude betray their influence.

While National Socialist and Communist ideas have swept America to some extent in their haydays - notwithstanding the counter culture, a product of the latter - these Rousseauian inspired ideologies remained by and large a marginal affair. Rousseau entering Locke's territory by the back- door may come as a surprise to some Americans - the wrong brand of revolution is encroaching on its most basic principles.

In Europe the situation was markedly different, as we shall see. Locke's influence remained on the whole limited to the British Isles. France and Germany have both Rousseau traditions, not Lockean. Today of great long-term concern is a possible return to some form of Rousseau inspired extreme ideology. It is chilling to see the rise of an unelected governing body on the European continent. The post-democratic elitism, combined with postmodern ideological chaos understood in the philosophical context, is an even more disquieting prospect.

Counter-Enlightenment projection* is on the order of the day and may even be consciously used as a tactic. Rousseau's brand of radical and revolutionary ideas, combined with the notion that civilization is so corrupt that it must be considered beyond salvation, makes him the father of all violent struggle in the last two and a half centuries.

Americans, tending to confuse Locke's revolution with Rousseau's, occasionally fall into the trap of supporting the wrong causes: initially the Russian Red Terror, and more recently, the covertly Islam inspired call for independence in the middle of Europe's powder keg, the Serbian province of Kosovo in the heart of the Balkans, thus providing a foothold in Europe for similarly based and equally pernicious radicalism.

The zero-sum game approach to economics also originates with Rousseau, which is giving rise to the annual media talking point that "a new report is suggesting that today's rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer". This is incorrect propaganda, some reason requiring regular public re-affirmation, perhaps for that reason alone.

Rousseau and Religion
The great minds of the Enlightenment proper - Spinozists excluded - never saw Christianity as their mortal enemy. To them Church and the Enlightenment were natural allies. Rousseau was no exception, but he had only a passing acquaintance with the Christian political tradition. Therefore he dismissed the role of Christianity as a moderating force in society. He saw the faith as entirely a spiritual undertaking, occupying itself only with "heavenly things."

Rousseau's Christians are so detached from reality that they can hardly be recognized: a people so spiritualized that they display a profound disinterest if their earthly pursuits are successful or not. Rousseau's call for transcendent values to harness the energies of men towards the 'common will', coupled with the rejection of Christianity as a engine of these values, made it a central tenet of all the Rousseauian ideologies [Wildmonk].

To Rousseau religion was an imperative. "... the state cannot ... pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject dangerous notions of toleration and the separation of church and state." and "so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers ..." [Stephen R.C. Hicks, "Explaining Postmodernism", Scholargy Press, 2004, p. 98].

Despite being so enamored with force-feeding religion, after the publication of his work "Emile" he was driven into temporary exile in Bern after a warrant for his arrest was issued. "Emile" was widely denounced as irreligious and seditious.

The Legacy
The loather of civilization, Rousseau was nevertheless greatly admired by the early Counter-Enlighteners, as he is by today's postmodernists. His followers mostly selected from his work what they could use to prop up their ideologies. Marx accepted Rousseau's critique of Locke's economic man but stood solidly by the Enlightenment in his appreciation for science and technology. Marx even went so far as to describe his ideology as Scientific Marxism, basically a pseudo scientific rationalization of his aggregate of ideas.

Hegel as well as Rousseau inspired Marx' theory of dialectic materialism, in which the theme is the dichotomy of the Oppressor versus the Oppressed. Now clearly a tactic of this dialectic, Rousseau's vista of a noble, primordial world destroyed by man's egoism, might well also have sired the epidemic of Western self-loathing.

Irony
Ironically, while Rousseau was convinced that civilization was the cause of moral degradation, little did he know that his followers, by rejecting objective reality, would drop morality along with it. Despite two and a half centuries of genocidal legacy in pursuit of Rousseauian ideal society, it enjoys considerable support among the Western intelligentsia, specifically in the humanities departments of academia, the media, all levels of education, contemporary arts, the political elite, advisory boards, government ministries and departments and what is loosely described as 'the corridors of power.'

The postmodern heirs remain committed to undermining free-market democracy, casting misty eyes upon the Rousseauean atrocities. 110 million dead are not vile enough to discredit 'the Party of Humanity' in the views of some of the most stubborn apologists. Considering that totalitarian societies are today's version of the tribal community he so admired, the Rousseau ideal society could well be described as an agrarian totalitarian state.

Another point of irony is that Rousseau's conviction, that reason engenders egocentrism has been falsified by every non-government sponsored humanitarian organization on the face of the planet, while Rousseau's faithful follower Hegel is responsible for the subjectivism that saw the birth of egocentrism gone mad, the 'Master of the Universe' syndrome (each individual creates his own personal version of reality: If I die overnight, will the sun still rise tomorrow?).

In France, Rousseau's ideal of small, intimate villages and a peaceful, agricultural society built on the consent of the common will has resulted in France becoming a by-word for centralized statism. Rousseau's tenet that reason caused man's fall from paradise may well be the basis of the later Counter-Enlightenment's political ideals, modelled on the re-creation of 'paradise on earth', Utopias which usually turn out to be dystopias instead.

Postmodernism or Rousseauism?
Rousseau can certainly be traced back as the source of all members of the postmodern coalition: environmentalists, third-worldists (Baran-Wallerstein), feminists, anarchists, 'gender, identity and sexual orientation' theorists, traditional socialists of various plumage, and 'classical' postmodernists. It is a true gathering of Rousseauians that has largely remained uninvestigated, underreported and certainly undeclared.

In the chaos of the total postmodern bankruptcy in the wake of mayhem, moralectomy and grandiose failure, there is but one purpose left. A resolve that brings these ideologies together with a tradition with which it has so much in common. We are witnessing a spontaneous feast of recognition with radical Islam.

It is truly remarkable that every prior held conviction and allegiance has by now been jilted in favour of furthering the causes of the intolerant: it's back to the Rousseau basics. The grant plan: a strategy to deconstruct Western, democratic, liberal capitalism by critical theory, and 'irrational means of the will.'

Up next: Emmanuel Kant: "I found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."

* If you think of yourself as a peaceful, loving person, while actually you are full of wrath and hatred, the psychological coping device of projection - as if by magic - transforms the object of that wratch into someone who is hateful, devisive, full of vitriol and bile, bigoted, intolerant and hatemongering.

Related dossiers

- "Postmodern Ravages"

- "The Dialectics"

- "Pomo Lingo"

- "The Unholy Alliance"

- "Science as a Narrative"

- "Justice, Pomo Style"

Epics for a Postmodern Era

A major part of this blog's hypothesis is the claim that Christian cosmology has stood model for the conceptual framework of almost all modern ideologies.

As God was the center of the Universe, with Pope, King or Emperor as spiritual and secular substitutes in feudal times - during modernity in Nationalism - the Nation quite literally usurped God's place, as did the State in all incarnations of Statism. That includes liberal democracy, which is presently collapsing under the weight of Postmodernism collectivism.

In Europe, philosophers as well as anti philosophers went wholesale for the substitution model, particularly after the French Revolution, when it was institutionalized in the French version of the separation of Church and State (laïcité).

A philosopher of the Enlightenment proper who has been a major influence on the founding of America - John Locke (1632-1704) - seems to have been well aware of the danger. It was also understood by America's Founding Fathers, who crafted the Republic not on the banning of religion from the state, but the state banned from the area of religion. The statist effort to institute an American form of laïcité therefore goes to the heart of the Republic.

Many writers at the time of America's childhood years - for example Alexis de Tocqueville - have commented on the fundamental role of religion in America's philosophy of liberty.

The problem becomes more clear if we look at the teleological narratives of Counter Enlightenment thinkers, like Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831): a dialectic, constituted of "improvement through strife". Both had a tremendous influence on two of Europe's main political strands: what is termed today, Social Democracy (and all forms of Progressivism) and Christian Democracy (so much so that the British Tories felt the need to leave the Christian Democratic faction in the European Parliament). It is where the Progressives' notion of social engineering (or 'makeability') is rooted.

From "Countering Kant": Kant foresees in a teleological progress towards an end-game by means of strife, war and discord. This brings man as a species to a more ethically evolved order. The process will ultimately culminate in a world government, an international and cosmopolitan federation of states, awaiting the coming of the Day of Judgment. This is the Hidden Plan of Nature according to Kant."

From "Heckling Hegel": Hegel's philosophy is a secular fantasy based on Judeo-Christian cosmology: God's projection, a spirit called the Absolute, represents creation which is seeking reunification with God. Its development through struggle and conflict by means of which it gets to know itself, is the story of the history of the world. The story ends when the Absolute - reunited with God - achieves full self-consciousness.

Hegel's theme was the state. Freedom is not God-given as the Enlighteners held, but granted by the state. Under the principle 'as above, so below' the state acts as the instrument of God. It is the 'ethical whole', the 'actualization of freedom', and the self-consciousness of the Absolute. As a mere aspect of the state it is the individual's duty to submit to its needs, and worship it as a 'terrestrial divinity'."

Since Marx was a student of Hegel's you may be justified in assuming that this is the ground zero of Socialism. But we must go even beyond that. Both Kant and Hegel were great admirers of Rousseau (1712-1778), the inventor of a foul notion he called "Common Will".

From "Radical Rousseau's Ravages": The latter is a concept that in Rousseau's approach requires state intervention. This should not be confused with the 'common good'. It is a far more developed conception which, and unlike the former, can only be realized in the context of civil society under the state ["Radical Enlightenment", p. 720). For the creation of a society of common will, "freedom of all the people", they need only accept the dictates of the state. This was Rousseau's essence of "true civilization." The struggle between rich and poor would then rise to a moral experience of self-restraint. [Wildmonk]

Imagine the world as a dome. Is it an empty space? Is it God's gift to humanity and a theater in which to pursue man's eternal rights to life, liberty and happiness (or property)? Or is the dome filled with Rousseau's nebulous collective ether, made up of humanity's Common Will under the State from which temporal rights are derived? We know Obama told us he likes the latter, in passing also equivocating the redistribution of wealth (or "social justice") with "economic freedom" (Orwell is his master).

This is the difference between freedom and bondage; liberty or statism; the Anglo-Saxon model or the Rhineland system; God given, inherent, eternal, individual rights - or temporal, collective rights derived from the State. The choice is yours.

We live in epic times. Global warming hysteria is the perfect narrative for enslavement to a global tyranny: a common enemy within and without demanding all encompassing collective measures, the Common Will to which we must all submit for the sake of the common good. We are sleepwalking into the trap. Consider these two examples, produced within a day of "Hopenhagen":

AP: "Climate reality: Voluntary efforts not enough" [go ahead, sue me!]


(...) analysis by the United Nations and outside management systems experts show that those voluntary reductions will not keep temperatures from increasing by more than 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with now. That's the level that scientists, the United Nations, the European Union and the Obama administration have said the world cannot afford. Good intentions aren't enough.  (...) More negotiations are planned for next year. "It just underlines the heroic effort here that the science says needs to be done; it's not easy," said Alden Meyer, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "If it were easy, it would have been done. This is a daunting effort." (...) >>>

I give you last night's entry on the Articles dossier of Climategate:

The ominous postmodern rhetoric of John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK is worthy of any pocket potentate:

"The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. There are no targets for carbon cuts and no agreement on a legally binding treaty. It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen".

Expect the last remnants of Leftist liberalism to die along with their eco illusions. Aim justifying the means, don't be surprised if the fascistic tendencies from here onwards go full throttle.

Lord Monckton was manhandled in Hopenhagen. Briefly earlier he'd asked Czech President Vaclav Klaus "whether the draft Copenhagen Treaty’s proposal for what amounted to a communistic world government reminded him of the Communism under which he and his country had suffered for so long." "He thought for a moment – as statesmen always do before answering an unusual question – and said, “Maybe it is not brutal. But in all other respects, what it proposes is far too close to Communism for comfort."

Today, as I lay in the snow with a cut knee, a bruised back, a banged head, a ruined suit, and a written-off coat, I wondered whether the brutality of the New World Order was moving closer than President Klaus – or any of us – had realized. >>>

Wretchard on PJs peeks into the future and ventures a guess what the progressivist One World tyranny might look like (do read it all!). Cheer up: "Others have given us the Christmases past and present. But Christmases future are up to us. (...) We are the last best hope of man on earth. >>>

Hacking a Way Through the Hottest Hoax

Ever since Emmanuel Kant took up duplicitous sophistry - called by its Orwellian name "Pure Reason" - using false logic to lay the axe at the root of reason, we've seen this parlour trick used against the forces of Enlightenment, again and again. It is in fact a intricate equivocation wrapped in a dense layer of philosophical yada yada to cover up the intellectual shell game.

Kant's dialectic was followed by Hegel's, followed by Marx', followed by Nietzsche's and Heidegger's, followed by the Frankfurt School for cultural Marxism, followed by the contemporary postmodernists of the counter cultural revolution.

- Caption: Thomas Hart Benton's postmodern vision of “Hollywood” in 1937 -

If Marx' version of the dialectic consisted in pitting social classes against each other in which an intellection elite took power in bloody revolutions - ostensibly on behalf of the underdog - today's postmodernists build on a foundation laid by the Frankfurt School, which sought to subvert the free world from within. It was successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Today it's no longer just two social classes with rival interests facing each other, but a global plethora of minorities based on race, gender, religion, culture, geographical origins and national identity, opposing the first world's power made up traditionally of "white, dead males" based on cold reason, egoistic individual rights and selfish, economical development - or so the narrative goes.

The ultimate theater in which this global dialectic is played out is the transnational progressivist heist called the first world's "climate debt" to the third world. It's rooted in a postmodern version of Kant's "Pure Reason", now dubbed "True Science".

The "logic" underlying that narrative is that the West has been industrially revolutionizing itself for some two hundred years, foisting on the world evil devizes it has not asked for: steam engines, ocean vessels, aeroplanes, space rockets, motorcars, refrigerators, washing machines and all those other nefarious consumer implements from hell.

Needless to say that - in analogy of Marx' dialectic - all this revolutionizing went over the backs of peoples located in remote areas on the other side of the globe.

The phenominal world of the dialectics is not just an equivocation, it's rather blunt, dumb and unsophisticated to boot: everything is a zero sum game. Hence the Western world is now handicapped with a "climate debt" to the tune of one hundred billion dollars. Fuzzy math by tranzie officials has calculated that the US percentage of the debt stands at 30%, while the EU's is limited to some 25% (China's by comparison stands at just 5%). Most undeveloped or underdeveloped countries are net receivers.

Quite conveniently the blessings of all these discoveries and inventions are ignored by the Luddites (a better term would be Rousseauians). The sophistry of the dialectic has once again turned reality on its head: development is evil, stagnation is good. And thanks to habit of Western member countries of depositing their worst Socialist political surplus at transnational institutions and world bodies, there's no one in NGO'ism or at the UN available to point out the fact.

COP15, a tranzie code word for the Treaty of Copenhagen, the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, is looming large in a few weeks time. Barack Obama is perceived to be holding the keys to the agreement, having been bribed ... eh, encouraged for the purpose with a preemptive Nobel Prize for eco justice.

- Caption: the exploitation of children is not beyond the means that justify the aim, otherwise covered by the Kantian ethics of good intention: a natural phenomenon as old as the world is now a "man-made" disaster (mea maxima culpa); the good news is that guild can be bought off -

This is why the hacking last week of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, home institution of one of the world’s centers of research into anthropogenic global warming (AGW), comes as a gift from heaven, hopefully just in the nick of time to prevent the egalitarian nightmare of World Socialism from becoming reality. The event - "ClimateGate"- is already shaking the world of "denialists" to the core.

That the lamestream media has managed to ignore the story so far, is indicative of the measure of evasion they are capable of in this hottest hoax and everything else that doesn't fit their construed version of reality. Update: something's being spun right now! James Delingpole of the UK's Telegraph who scooped the story, has a round up (Delingpole's site).

Pajamas Media: "Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean?", by Charlie Martin

Late on the night of of November 19, news broke on PJM and elsewhere that a large amount of data had been stolen from one of the major climate research institutions by an unknown hacker and made available on the Internet. (...) The hackers released about 172 megabytes of data, and we can be sure examining it closely will take some time. But after a few days, certain things are beginning to become clear.

The data appears to be largely, perhaps entirely, authentic. The emails are incendiary. The implications shake the scientific basis for AGW (anthropogenic (man-made) global warming), and the scientific reputations of some of AGW’s major proponents, to their roots. Let’s look at the files and emails first. (For a running list of the interesting emails, see Bishop Hill’s list.) (...) >>>

Wiki Leaks

Read at all! >>>

Related dossiers:

- "Greenism" (contains more links to this subject)
- "Transnational Progressivism"
- "The Dialectics"

- "Socialist Causes Explained"

Related posts:

- "Red-Green Radicalism Has Sprouted Wings"
- "The 'Brother Species' Just Hate Us"
- "Cosmology and Aim of the Progressive Narrative" (series)
- "Global Warming: A Problem Not Supposed to be Solved"

Updates will be posted on the "Greenism" file. Just this: Terence Corcoran brings up another problem: the unscientific, through and through politicized way in which the facts have been bent to fit the theory, may cause outcry in the same anti modernist camp that this spells the end of science. The irony will come full circle: after Kant destroyed rationality through his fallacy of Pure Reason, it will be the True Science of the climatists that will mark the end of the epoch of Enlightenment. Beware!!!

National Post: "After Copenhagen, the end of the science"

Transnationalism: Manmade Disaster or 'Evolution'

In the present discussion with Carl Rove and John Bolton at Glenn Beck's we see the ongoing disaster known as transnationalism clearly presented as a manmade process: it is pushed by people and politicians with an agenda.

According to others a world government is the logical outcome as man progresses on his way through history and evolution.

This meme is the result of a two centuries old phantasy, a theory set out by the reactionary philosophers Kant and Hegel who saw it as the outcome of man passing through history, bringing himself on higher levels of morality through strife and struggle.

This dualism has come to us in the form of the Marxist dialectic, which was based on Hegel's dialectic. On that basis one might say, Transnationalism is world Socialism by the backdoor.

At least Kant had the foresight to accompany his prediction with the caution that this world government might well be the "greatest tyranny ever seen". This is the state of affairs in the Third Millennium.

- Filed on Articles on "Hegel's Legacy" and "Transnational Progressivism" -

The Savage Logic of Nihilism

This title is a fallacy. Nihilism is an assault on reason and as a consequence, doesn't follow logic. It is however not uncommon - indeed tradition - to present violations against logic as just another form of reason. Much like Hegel's anti-philosophy - which considers contradictions a sign that 'something interesting is going on' - was presented as the New Reason. We've been mentally impaired ever since.

Anti-modern' thought' is filled to the brim with Orwellian oxymora: 'true freedom' through the state, society as manifestation of 'real self' and the source of 'pure ethics'? Whatever next? A secular, Muslim broadcasting association? (in Dutch)

The politically correct thought police is enforcing the rules of Pragmatism, a branch of relativist philosophy that should not to be confused with 'the practical'. Key here is the expedient. Everything else is subordinate: the end justifies the means - pick and choose among all possible causality whatever fits your agenda and apply it unilaterally (no need to be consistent, ever).

So when a Finnish knucklehead starts slaughtering his classmates one by one in cold blood, it's not the perpetrator who is at fault, but the morally neutral means he used to commit the crime: handguns (morally neutral, because weapons don't have brains or Free Will).

The narrative (or 'logic') of the Hegel dialectic in Europe runs something like this: the American Republican Party - the gun-toting, Bible-thumbing arch reactionaries, support the Second Amendment; this party belongs to the political Right. Therefore - since we proudly declared for progressivism - our subjective position must be that we are against guns, irrespective of the merits (sub current ... and that goes for hunting (the 'murder of animals') as well ...!).

Enter the British Left's in-house news rag Al Guardian, home to unrepentant Marxists and Al Qaeda apologists: "Finland school massacre brings day of mourning and review of gun laws", subtitled "Prime minister says he is 'very critical' of easy access to handguns after gunman kills 10 at vocational college." It's the gun that did it, not the hand that moved it, goes the new 'logic.'

The Left's approach to crime does the rest: criminal behavior is not the result of Free Will made a bad moral call, but on the contrary, follows from a person's inability to conform to society's arbitrary conventions. Therefore society is at fault, not its 'victim' who is unable - through no fault of his own - to conform to arbitrary social norms (hence the frantic pursuit of genetics which - with gland activity - opens up a whole new field to attribute blame).

Very integrated piece of 'philosophy', is Leftist ideology!

Returning to the Finnish school shoot-out, we suppose this has nothing to so with the nihilist thought processes that lurk at the bottom of the subjectivist pond? Surely third millennium adolescent mass murders are unrelated to anti-modernist champion Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who gave us the organic collective's Common Will; or to Kant's ethics of sacrifice to the collective as man's highest moral achievement?

Nationalism (not to be confused with expressions of patriotism!), Communism, as well as Fascism and National Socialism can all be traced back to these notions: that individual man is Nothing, and pursues non-values in an unknowable universe, that makes a mockery of his being and capacity to reason; the existential trauma that - as the grandfather of postmodernism, Heidegger, put it: life is an absurdity.

After the subversion of Liberalism, we currently witness the deconstruction of Humanism as it is hijacked by the Scions of Nothing. Both have been perverted to the point of becoming their own antithesis. Humanism got divorced from the center principle, human life as an absolute value. For the last couple of decades or so Humanism advocates 'the option of death'. And subjected to the slippery slope that is the fate of all demoralized ideology, the message is now morphing into 'the duty to die'.

Must we be surprised that this is staring us in the face? Go ahead, blame the tools! Embrace environmentalism, the pseudo religion of anti-humanism.


- Filed on Articles in "Life Ethics" -

Of Mass Mind Control and Psychopathy

A Google Alert subscription to key words which have our specific interest recently shot to attention a post on The Daily Cultist about cognitive dissonance. It is a cross-posting of a Newsletter issued by conspiracy theorist David Icke.

We need not here indulge in the finer points related to the Illuminati, the Troof about 911, the "Hidden Hands" behind the death of the Princess of Wales and the "manufactured wars in the Middle East."

What concerns us is the coinciding of mass psychology with the cabal of Common Purpose (CP). On both counts he is correct and factual, but regrettably half-way shoots out into the thin space of classical paranoia. Ironically he is oblivious to his own cognitive dissonance, and copes with it by transforming his outlandish beliefs into baseless facts.

But Icke's findings regarding the CP cabal pans out with our own investigations. His references to "The Plan" is the subject of Icke's personal paranoia which need not concern us here, nor his thinly veiled anti-semitism (he probably thinks the Protocols and the Da Vinci Code are true history too). He explains that ...

(...) ‘cognitive dissonance’ appears to have its origins with a Jewish American social psychologist called Leon Festinger, who (...) studied closely with Kurt Lewin, a German-born Jewish psychologist, who is known as the ‘founder of social psychology’ (...) ’social engineering’ or mass mind control would be a better way of putting it. Lewin was Festinger’s ‘mentor’.

Lewin was a major influence on the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in London, one of the premier individual and mass mind-control research and development operations on the planet, which based much of its ‘philosophy’ on the work of the Austrian Jew, Sigmund Freud.

The Tavistock Institute was officially founded in 1947 (though its work goes back much further under other guises) and it was funded into existence by the Rockefeller Foundation. Among its key founders was John Rawlings-Reese, commander of the British Army Bureau of Psychological Warfare. (...)

(...) an organisation called Common Purpose (...) develops the ‘leaders’ for the institutions of government, commerce, ‘education’, law enforcement and so on. Its methods are classic Tavistock.

Tavistock is a mass mind control operation and at the heart of global ’social engineering’. (...) The plan, now well advanced, is to create a massive network of ‘training and diversity’ organisations to brainwash the useful idiots to run society on behalf of the Elite. These include, as with Common Purpose, those involved with the institutions of government, commerce, ‘education’, law enforcement etc. (...)

Icke's paranoid theory that cognitive dissonance is being used as a tool by 'the Illuminati" or whatever, does not diminish the reality and its workings in any way. It sounds disturbingly familiar when transposed on the subject matter of recent posts, "The Twin Blessings of Denial and Projection", "The Perception Campaign" and "Thought for the Relative of Mind".

Indeed we are being manipulated into directions that are not of our own choosing, but as far as the sources are concerned our thoughts just do not wander with Icke into the avenues of Rovian cabals behind The Troof of 911. Indeed, the pointers go in the other direction - the ones with proud collectivist ethics of Common Will, rather than those who see the dissemination of individual freedom as the best antidote to violent and coercive collectivism. Icke stresses the importance of social and group pressure:

(...) The individual believer must have social support. (...) If (...) the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade non-members that the belief is correct.’

That is how the herd mentality works and how individuals are pressured to conform to the beliefs of the group - what is termed ‘creating the consensus’. It is also why individuals changing or questioning the consensus view are targeted, marginalised or removed (a Tavistock speciality). Such people are ‘dangerous’ because they have the potential to prick the collective reality bubble and instigate cognitive dissonance by making the others see contradictions.

It is this constant mental and emotional readjustment in the wake of cognitive dissonance that ensures the survival of all religious, political and social beliefs. When something comes along to demolish the original belief, people just find a way of explaining the contradictions so their belief remains intact (...) ...

... indeed one of Icke's own specialties. But here we connect with another worrisome aspect of the O campaign and the 'creed' in which he wants us all to 'believe': meet MyBO ...



Hat Tip: the Founding Bloggers

At first we couldn't figure out what exactly is so creepy in this video commercial. But it is the mob/hive thing, the creation of a vested interest in the O personality cult, the 'belief in O as the savior'. Combined with the other 'voodoo' features (the campaign is filled to the brim with psychological triggers, archetypal symbolism, and memes), the O Public Service proposal, the details of which yet need scrutinizing, may well be the most disturbing aspect of the developing personality cult.

A little further, Icke goes into what we very often discuss in these pages, the psychological mechanism of projection: "(...) people who have a self-identity of being kind, loving and caring for others (...) is always a fake identity because no-one lives up to that all the time, and I mean no-one. (...) ‘It was you who made me react like that’ or ‘they deserved it’ are among the [regular methods of dealing with dissonance] (...) This filters reality to fit the self-identity and (...) why it was not their fault and not their responsibility. In short, they will protect the self-identity at all costs. (...)

To overcome the negative effects of cognitive dissonance I would offer just one sentence: it's okay not to be 'perfect' and it's okay to be wrong (...) ... hear, hear!

This is the last sensible word we get from Icke et al. At this point his own paranoid beliefs take over reality. Aristotelian philosophy could gave saved him, but the subjectivist triad Rousseau, Kant and Hegel got the better of him.

He sighs: "How about those who believe that our freedoms must be taken away to protect our liberties?? That’s classic Doublethink and vast, vast numbers of people believe that blatant contradiction to be true" ... which would - had it not been a false statement- be classic Hegel dialectic, echos of "Freedom through the state."

To clear up the point he is alluding to, in all honesty he would have to concede that he, David Icke, hasn't forfeited a single liberty, and were he ground to pulp by an Al Qaeda tool, his liberties would be quite irrelevant anyway.

- Chart: mature defenses (click to enlarge) -

We also see the destructive Rousseau idealism at work, the basis of his fallacy that morphs 'is' into 'ought': "(...) millions die of hunger in a world of plenty and millions more die in manufactured wars? (...)" - surely that cannot be reality/the natural state/the will of God; there MUST be a conspiracy, a cabal of humans who 'manufacture wars' and who out of callous egoism see to it that wealth accumulates unevenly.

Reality has become part of the conspiracy theory - classic paranoia. But at least it seems to earn him a living.

Interesting article, nonetheless.

- Filed on Articles in "Dossier Common Purpose" and "The Political Pathology Pile" -