St. Louis Tea Party Coalition http://www.stlouisteaparty.com Restoring liberty since 2009 Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:02:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 30769244 ‘Critical Thinking’ Fails its Socratic Paternity Test https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/08/critical-thinking-fails-its-socratic.html Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:02:55 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=2bd4eb740d9797915fc20db6d2cb33ec If, as I contend, 'Critical Thinking' is and always has been a critical threat to sound reasoning (it has) - why did (do) otherwise intelligent people adopt and promote it? That's partly due to what we saw in the previous post, where its deceptive claims about what CT is and will 'do' for students, are furthered by the claim that 'Critical Thinking' is directly descended from what Socrates practiced at the dawn of Western philosophy. As has already been pointed out, these claims are clearly bogus, even on the basis of the title itself, as 'Critical Thinking' stretches no further back in time than to John Dewey in the 1890's (not actually using those words until 1910), and that the first book on 'Critical Thinking' wasn't published until 1941. But what needs to be better understood, which is the purpose of this post, is that worse than simply being technically incorrect about historic details (AKA: Lying), the substance and spirit of the claim is, at best, patently absurd.

Ironically (Socrates cheers), as their Socratic paternity claim is made to lull people into not thinking about what 'Critical Thinking' really is, if we subject 'Critical Thinking' itself to just the initial questions that Socrates might have begun with, it not only reveals itself to be a mismatch on the basis of its philosophical DNA, but it reveals how fundamentally incompatible that CT is to what Socrates was doing, and to why he was doing it, and so flat-out fails the Socratic paternity test.

At the dawn of moral philosophy some 2,500 years ago (can you feel Moses waving 'hi!' from across the sea?), Socrates had begun practicing his unique form of asking questions in a manner he called the Dialectic, to clarify the meaning of the words we use, and how to use them to better understand ourselves and the world around us. As Plato recounts it, his dialectical process began with asking someone a seemingly simple question about what had been claimed or repeated by them, and whether or not an obvious implication of that was something that they thought to be true. He'd continue questioning the answers given to his questions to reveal the extent and integrated nature of that knowledge (or lack of it), in the hopes that both the questioner and the person being questioned (and those of us participating in the dialog at home) would gain a better depth of understanding of what they did and did not know about what they had presumed to be so.

One thing that practicing his dialectical reasoning upon his fellow Athenians brought out into the open, was that those terms which Socrates' fellows' lives revolved around, in everything from the seemingly mundane, to the loftiest of sentiments, were so poorly understood by them, that their own words were leading themselves astray from what they expected they could secure by using them. Worse still, their lack of understanding was being used by those amongst them, the Sophists, who understood how to cultivate their confusion in order to disorder their minds into whichever state of passionate intensity or apathetic disregard, seemed to best serve the interests of a well-positioned few.

NOTE: You shouldn't read Plato to find 'answers' (that's a bad habit from 'Critical Thinking'), but to identify the questions, and how best to pursue understanding. 
One such dialog, the Euthyphro, is set where Socrates is waiting to be arraigned on the charges of impiety that he'd soon be executed for, and it recounts the conversation that followed from Socrates asking another fellow in 'the waiting room', about what he was there for. Euthyphro answered that he was there waiting to charge his father with 1st degree murder over the accidental death of a misbehaving fieldhand, because Euthyphro thought that would be the pious thing to do.

Socrates, a bit taken back by that, asked him what he meant by Piety? To which Euthyphro, as do most of Socrates' 'victims', replied with a surface level answer:
"Piety is giving an offering to the gods, or being respectful"
, and in typical fashion, Socrates began by clarifying what he'd asked, before launching into the dialog of further questioning the answers being given:
"You misunderstand me, you've given me examples of pious behavior, but I'm interested in what it is that Piety means..."
, and the dialogs get underway with Socrates attempting - oftentimes without succeeding - to clarify what the speaker actually meant by the words and terms they'd been carelessly using to think with.

Consider, for instance, Euthyphro charging his father with murder. His father had taken an action, and his slave died following it - that was an obvious and readily apparent fact. But whose action was it that caused the death, the father's or the slave's? And what was meant by 'Caused'? And was the action Just?

Without having questioned his way past the surface level of appearances, Euthyphro could not have the knowledge that only follows from examining the depths of context surrounding an issue, and acting 'as if' you already know what you haven't bothered to examine, causes consequences that cannot be good. Can justice be served by taking action against someone 'as if' you know what you haven't bothered to understand? Can such an action be pious? By disregarding the context of what happened, Euthyphro's pious action amounted to virtue signaling the pretense of it at his father's expense - how likely was it that (Zeus? Athena? The Furies?) would look kindly upon that?

By ignoring context, we butcher our grasp of causation into a materialistic "Cause & Effect" response, which is not adequate for gaining a sound understanding of an issue. Unfortunately for Euthyphro, Aristotle's study of Causation and the four causes which that revealed (final cause, efficient cause, formal cause, and material cause), was still several decades in the future, and Aquinas's 5th 'Exemplary cause', was still a thousand years beyond that. We, however, can benefit from what Euthyphro lacked... but how many of us do? As 'Critical Thinking' gives no consideration to such concerns, it helps to ensure that those numbers are few.

What the Socratic dialogs that Plato left us also demonstrate, is not only how little people often understand of what they're saying, but how angry they can become when made to face their own errors & ignorance - so much so that Socrates' was ultimately executed for refusing to stop practicing his dialectic of questioning upon the people of Athens.

What is critically important for us to understand still to this day, and perhaps especially today, is that it is as easy as it is unwise to behave as if we understand something, when the underlying meaning of the words we're using amounts to what 'everyone knows!', and without the context being clear to us, we truly cannot know what we are talking about.

The painful fact is that the real drama of history often ensues from those critical misunderstandings which result from the right questions having not been asked, or having been asked, were left unheeded. In fact, tragedians, comedians, and historians have long made their living by providing their audiences with an awareness of the context which the people 'on stage' lack, and without which they lead themselves into taking those unwise positions and actions that can only lead to disaster, while 'the audience' is left to experience the agony of knowing what could have been prevented if someone, anyone, would have simply asked one or two key questions that would have unraveled the entire awful turn of events.

But unlike an audience, we here in the present cannot know what might hinge upon what it is that we do not consider, or say, and we should learn from those dramatists that real knowledge is never isolated, and only (seemingly) ethically neutral in certain contexts. And we should also realize that the sophists of every age view those who ask and pursue questions as Socrates did, as threats to those whose interests are served by such matters not being common knowledge, and they view those who teach such lessons, as Socrates did, as being... unwelcome.

But being ignorant of important facts isn't nearly the problem that being ignorant of the need to ask relevant questions, is. The inclination to assume that we cannot know what is true, or that 'knowledge' is just a matter of recalling isolated facts, combine together with our willingness to accept 'obvious' facts and 'answers' that 'everyone knows!', to leave you forever 'just asking questions!' while never gaining an understanding of what an answer to them should be, which mainly benefits those who'd prefer they remain concealed by what 'everyone knows!'.

A Critical Difference between philosophical reasoning and 'Critical Thinking'
We saw in the previous post, that when asked what 'Critical Thinking' is, CT'rs standard reply to parents and the public, was very much like that of Euthyphro's reply about what Piety is, with:
"Critical thinking is a kind of thinking in which you question, analyze, interpret, evaluate and make a judgement about what you read, hear, say, or write...."
, and with Socrates's response as an example, we can see that we should reply to those CT'rs:
"You misunderstand me, you've given me examples of 'Critical Thinking's behavior, but I'm interested in what it is that 'Critical Thinking' means..."
, but to be fair, as that is clearly not the kind of thinking that 'Critical Think'rs are familiar with, we, like Socrates, should clarify a little further about just what kind of reply it is that we're looking for, and why. When we feel ourselves being either stirred up into anger or lulled to sleep by another's words, as you feel their words taking ahold of you, you should do as he did and question the nature of the context that they're leading you into. Ask:
  • What ends will the good or ill passions you're being led to feel, serve to excuse, distract you from, or accomplish?
  • Is what is meant by the words being used to urge you on, going to have the same meaning when they're being applied?
  • Who benefits most from the actions you're being led to take?
, and despite his famously protesting that he knew nothing, Socrates clearly understood the importance of knowing the meaning of the words you're thinking with. He knew how the overall context that those words are used in, could shift what is assumed to be meant by them, and he knew that it's only by asking and pursuing questions into that as yet shadowy context, that we can hope to understand whether the positions and actions that people are being led into taking, are of value or not, are true or false, or right or wrong, which are matters that shouldn't remain concealed through our ignorance of it.

Socrates referred to the practice of his dialectic, as Philosophy, 'the love of wisdom', and it was clear that he considered Philosophy to be - in a way that has been made nearly alien to our ears today - a deeply moral matter of consciously using our language to integrate our understanding of reality, so as to develop our knowledge of what is real & true and right & wrong to do, and without which we cannot know what it is that we're talking about.

Having a systematic approach to understanding what it was that Socrates's dialectical practice of philosophical reasoning meant and entailed, would have to wait for his philosophical son & grandson, Plato and Aristotle, to begin developing. But it was his persistent engagement of his fellows in those habits of inquiry (which (no surprise to him) would eventually cost him his life), that started the Grecco/Roman half of The West upon the path towards seeking an objective understanding of what is real & true, and right & wrong, and which, IMHO, was and is central to what enabled its Judeo/Christian counterpart to join together with it, in the forming of Western civilization.

Socrates starts opening a can of worms with a leading sophist, in The Gorgias: ...
SOCRATES: Very good, Callicles; but will he answer our questions? for I want to hear from him what is the nature of his art, and what it is which he professes and teaches; he may, as you (Chaerephon) suggest, defer the exhibition to some other time.
CALLICLES: There is nothing like asking him, Socrates; and indeed to answer questions is a part of his exhibition, for he was saying only just now, that any one in my house might put any question to him, and that he would answer.
SOCRATES: How fortunate! will you ask him, Chaerephon—?
CHAEREPHON: What shall I ask him?
SOCRATES: Ask him who he is...."
Socrates' opponents at the time, the Sophists, OTOH, were already well aware of the misunderstandings that the misuse of language could create, and rather than attempt to clarify what our words mean and how best to use them, they thrived upon that darker form of dialectical reasoning which cultivates the ignorance & errors that result from an absence of good questions being asked, and in fact depends upon utilizing ignorance and the ambiguities of language to conceal meaning. Their skill in the manipulation of that, was what the Sophists were sought out and rewarded for.

Sophistry requires the ability to get away with treating words and terms 'as if' their meaning is disintegrated from the rest of what you know, and that depends upon a widespread view of knowledge being seen as little more than the ability to recall what's useful in one moment, and to consider that completely irrelevant to the concerns of the next moment. That Pragmatic view of knowledge as essentially having 'meaning' in name only (another variant of Nominalism), is what enables the sort of language that we accept today in phrases such as 'Truth is an illusion' and 'Truth is what works', which is critical for spurring people into taking those positions and actions that serve a given narrative which they likely know less than nothing about (hello 'stay 6' apart for social distancing'!), for a 'common good' that primarily serves the interests of those that the sophists of the Ideological Observatories serve.

And so with that contrast between Socrates' Philosophical Reasoning, and that of Rhetorical Sophistry in mind, I hope you're recalling two of the primary contentions of the Critical Thinking crowd from the previous post, which are that:
1)“...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong"
, and that that assertion is dependent upon the view of 'knowledge' that Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives has been teaching to those who've been teaching our teachers since the 1950s, that 'knowledge' is only a matter of recalling "...previously learned material...", and as such, it:
2)"...represents the lowest level of learning outcomes in the cognitive domain."
, and if so, you should now recognize - if you are thinking reasonably rather than 'critically' - that both of these beliefs that are at the heart of 'Critical Thinking', are in full opposition to the deeply integrated knowledge and moral clarity of thought that Socrates was pursuing through his Dialectic.

And seeing now why the CT'rs reply to the question of what 'Critical Thinking' is, is so much like Euthyphro's, we can compare and contrast what Socrates' purpose of using his Dialectic to pursue Philosophy was, to the nature of the 'Critical Thinking' that our modern day sophists teach in our schools, and notice just how unlike that is to Socrates' method, which sought to understand and integrate our thinking, and to expand our knowledge in order to better do what Aristotle said in the opening of the Nichomachean Ethics:
"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim ..."
In complete contrast to that, what the sophistry of 'Critical Thinking' aims at, is what is momentarily useful to ends that can only be unworthy, because they are achieved by diminishing the nature of our knowledge to a recalling of random facts as suitable 'answers', and with which CT'rs seek to bring about an attitude within a student's mind, that:
“...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong"
On that basis alone, any reasonable consideration of the evidence before us, shows that 'Critical Thinking' not only fully and completely fails the Socratic paternity test, but reveals that the claim could only have been made, in order to put you and your children under its power. You needn't fear that this failed paternity test will leave our 'Critical Thinkers' as philosophical orphans though, for since it was also the Sophists' primary interest to get people to act without considering whether such actions were 'right or wrong', and instead to just do 'what works', we have identified that our 'Critical Thinkers' philosophical pedigree truly lies with the Sophists.

The authentic intelligence that leads people out of the darkness of confusion and into seeking to see and do what is right, comes from turning your own attention towards actively identifying what is (Metaphysics), how you know it (through an epistemology of Causality and Logic), and what should be done in response to that (Ethics), and will reveal to you a depth of context in every aspect of your life, that can only be revealed by the light of what is real and true.

Because the Sophist's power - then and now - depends upon those manipulations of language that are only possible within a climate of subtle misunderstandings and meaningless 'knowledge', their 'Critical Thinking', like Euthyphro, blinds themselves into believing that they can see what they do not, and if we are not aware of their doing so, we put ourselves in peril.

To prevent the same old sophistry from becoming as fatal to us today, as it was to Socrates in his day, it is critical for us to stop mistaking the Artificial Intelligence of 'Critical Thinking', for the real thing, and we'll dig further into that, in the next post. ]]> 13922 Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/08/thinking-critically-about-critical.html Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:16:16 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=083b8107958b7ad3a90e77ad40715c89 big success.
Richard Mitchell's "The Leaning Tower of Babel"
So, let's start with trying to get a grip on what most people think is meant by 'Critical Thinking', by considering how parents and academics might respond to the question:
    • What is Critical Thinking, and what is it expected to do for students?
    It's safe to say that if you ask most people what their expectations of 'Critical Thinking' is, and what they expect that it will do to help their, and their kids lives, they'll answer something like:
    a - Learning 'Critical Thinking' will help my kid to think more clearly and logically about what they read and hear.
    b - Being a 'Critical Thinker' will help my kid to see and do what is right, and better understand how to succeed in life.
    Not surprisingly, most schools will reply similarly, though in academic language, that they expect 'the same':
    a -"Critical thinking is a kind of thinking in which you question, analyze, interpret, evaluate and make a judgement about what you read, hear, say, or write...."
    and b - it's "... about making reliable judgements based on reliable information."
    What's interesting to note though, is that when the theorists of 'Critical Thinking' talk with each other about what 'Critical Thinking' is and does, the one thing they agree upon most, is that they don't agree upon what it is or does for students. Furthermore, the fact is that doubts about whether or not learning to be better able to "... question, analyze, interpret, evaluate and make a judgement... is something that is being taught effectively by CT, have been raised almost from its inception.

    So there's at least one discrepancy between what 'Critical Think'rs say to each other, and what they say to parents and the general public about what they think CT is and does.

    That's interesting.

    Something else that shouldn't be missed, is that there's a bit of ambiguity involved in their citing those 'features' of how to "...question, analyze, interpret..." to identify what 'Critical Thinking' is and does, as those are also what the Western understanding of the art of Reasoning has been identified with for thousands of years. And while those habits of mind which most people typically expect kids to learn from practicing 'Critical Thinking' - to "...question, analyze, interpret...", think logically, etc. - are the habits of mind that any decent education has sought to lead students to develop throughout those thousands of years - why speak 'as if' that would identify 'Critical Thinking' in particular?

    it is confounding...
    Are any of you Critical Thinkers out there now wondering how 'Critical Thinking' differs from Reasoning? And if not, does that mean that you think that 'Critical Thinking' and Reasoning are 'the same'? But... if they describe 'the same thing'... then why does 'Critical Thinking' even exist? Those of you who recall the previous post's warnings about the perils of reasoning with false premises and ambiguous terms, should be getting curiouser and curiouser. As Christine at The Palmerworm points out, when you are intentionally led "to mistake for another, to identify falsely", it's possible that you are being confounded... and those of you who're familiar with the activist uses of a 'Floating Signifier', should be slipping out of curiosity, and into alarm.

    But sure, while the discrepancies we can see so far between these two sets of answers, don't seem to amount to being a deal breaker, they do at least indicate the need for us to ask a few more questions. We can come at this from a different angle by asking three more questions, beginning with one question about what you might be thinking that I'm thinking:
    1. Are you suggesting that 'Critical Thinking' isn't equivalent to, or as old and valued as, a traditional approach to Reasoning is?
      2. , followed by:
    2. When did we first discover the wonders of 'Critical Thinking', and what are its innovations?
    3. When and why did we begin calling for more of 'Critical Thinking'?
    To answer question #1, Yes, I am. One reason why I speak of 'Critical Thinking' in such a critical manner, is because it is typically spoken of 'as if' it were something it is not, which leads people into a number of false assumptions about it, ranging from it having its origins coming from Socrates (which is untrue), to it coming from the Frankfort School of 'Critical Theory' (which is also untrue... but as we'll see, in many ways the reverse of that is more true).

    When I criticize 'Critical Thinking', I'm not questioning the value of what most people believe CT means, I am questioning what it actually is and does. I'm pointing out that despite what CT promises, it not only has not lived up to those promises, but that there are good reasons to believe that CT is itself central to what has degraded our student's ability to develop those habits of mind that "...question, analyze, interpret..." which thoughtful judgement is dependent upon.

    Do you think I go too far in that? Then answer me this, given that we can probably all agree that 'Critical Thinking' has been one of, if not the most popular products of the Education Industry since it first began to surface in the academic language of the 1950s, quickly rose into public awareness across the 1960s & 1970s, and then exploded into demand by schools across the nation over the 1980s,1990s and into the 2000s, has this thought ever occurred to you?:
    • I marvel at how much more clear and consistent and sensible the general thinking and behavior of the American people has become, since we began teaching more and more of 'Critical Thinking', don't you?
    I think that most people would hesitate to reply 'yes!' to that... and that the rest of us would burst out in bitter laughter at the suggestion.

    And yet experience shows that people's reaction to that will amount to little more than a headshake & a grumble.

    That's interesting too, isn't it?

    And if you haven't asked such a question before, or having asked it, didn't get an adequate answer to it... is that a failure of 'Critical Thinking', or a result of it? What I am encouraging people to do here, is to consider these questions and to stop assuming that 'everyone knows!' what 'Critical Thinking' is 'all about', and also to consider instead how well it's lived up to delivering on any of the promises made in its name, and to wonder why that might be.

    I'm asking these questions because the concerns that I have with 'Critical Thinking', are that what those academic theorists intend 'Critical Thinking' to do, has less to do with what most parents and others would see as improving their student's thinking, than with fundamentally changing their student's way of thinking, and that it does so in ways that most parents and others would neither expect nor approve of.

    So yes, I am more than just suggesting that how the rising popularity of 'Critical Thinking' has tracked with a 'surprising' inability to think through such issues, and I'm cautioning that it has a lot more to do with causation, than correlation.

    Intellectual Stolen Valor - Is 'Critical Thinking' what you've been led to think it is?
    The answer to question #2 (2-When did we first discover the wonders of 'Critical Thinking', and what are its innovations?), isn't the easy answer that we're usually given, as the promoters of 'Critical Thinking' often speak of it 'as if' it were either a very modern 'discovery' which our poor 'critical thinking' deprived Founding Fathers had to make do without while framing, debating, and ratifying, our Constitution, or 'as if' our Founder's era knew about, engaged in, and may have even been masters of, but whose skills we've somehow lost the knack of since their time. If you assumed something like the latter, you might be forgiven for that error, as it is one that CT'rs are very keen on everyone thinking 'as if' it were so. For instance, the popular and 'authoritative' CT site, CT.org, opens its post on: "A Brief History of the Idea of Critical Thinking", with this glowing line:
    "The intellectual roots of critical thinking are as ancient as its etymology, traceable, ultimately, to the teaching practice and vision of Socrates 2,500 years ago who discovered by a method of probing questioning that people could not rationally justify their confident claims to knowledge."
    Sounds swell, doesn't it? Except for one teensy-weensy problem: in both fact and spirit, it is untrue. It's a Semantic Deception that's even more blatant than what was performed with 'epistemology' (if you're unaware, read that link). This entire narrative of theirs is one they've essentially plagiarized from, and misattributed to, intellectual history, and it amounts to the equivalent of a case of philosophical stolen valor.

    How can I say that? Because "...its etymology..." is very traceable to a few scattered mentions by John Dewey and other supporters of 'Progressive Education' in the late 1890s to early 1900's, where Dewey described the need for a *new* method of thinking, as in 1910's "How We Think", which at the time he usually referred to as 'Reflective Thinking', and envisioned that what:
    "...was needed, as
    "...active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends." (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)
    and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind..."
    , keep your eye on that 'scientific attitude of mind' (and 'supposed form of knowledge'), we'll come back to these shortly. And although the motive theories behind CT had been gaining traction in 'Progressive Education' circles, the first serious treatment of 'Critical Thinking', didn't come until decades later when one of Dewey's followers, an obscure academic & management consultant from Teachers College, Columbia University, Edward M. Glaser, delivered his book 'Critical Thinking' to a preoccupied world in that somewhat less than ancient year of: 1941.

    It's not as if the fine folks at CT.org don't already know this, they even mention it elsewhere on their site, but because they'd rather not openly say so and draw attention to the fact, they 'bury the lead' (AKA: Lie by omission and commission). One reason for that, might be the fact that the actual history of 'Critical Thinking', is rather brief, uninspiring, exceedingly boring, and riven by such failures that they feel the need to resort to the intellectual stolen valor of their claims, in order to 'get important things done'.

    For a deep dive into the depths of the "that is this" tactic, you should cautiously read Derrida's 'Structure, Sign, and play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', which lays out the strategy of deconstructionism (equivocate, mis-identify, and brazenly uphold the new error as being a valid point). It is pure toxic garbage, but it is revealing all the same.
    BTW parents, does the inclination to pretentiously misrepresent another's history & achievements as being your own, sound like the traits you'd look for in someone being hired to clarify and improve the thinking of your child? The fact that CT'rs are resorting to an old Sophist's trick of equating this with that, and then pretending that is the 'same as' this (see Derrida's essay in sidebar), is not only pathetic, but is a level of 'creative thinking' (AKA: Lying) that most parents would also be unlikely to want to have experts instilling in their kids' minds (especially so if they are mindful that it was the Sophists who instigated the trial & death of Socrates).

    So now, seeing that 'Critical Thinking' is a recent construct, are you curious about what innovations it has introduced into our habits of thinking? After all, as our schools advertise their ability to improve their students' 'Critical Thinking Skills', what are these new innovations that CT has added to our known knowledge of Thinkology? And how do they differ from the old and supposedly outmoded methods that 'mere reasoning' once advised on how to '...question, analyze, interpret...'? And why is it that CT still advertises itself by those same old traits of how to '...question, analyze, interpret...', instead of using its own marvelous new innovations to that?

    That isn't just interesting, it's odd, isn't it? I mean, when you want to distinguish one thing from another, do you highlight what both have in common, or do you point out how they differ? IOW, if you had a sports car to sell, you wouldn't say:
    "This sports car is worth so much more than that sedan because it has the same engine and four wheels that sedan has but now I'm referring to those as being sporty!"
    , would you? No, if you'd devised something that's better and more effective than something else, you'd focus on what sets your new thing apart from that old thing, and highlight what makes this, better than that, right?

    OTOH, if for some reason, you'd rather avoid scrutiny, then the way you're going to sell that product is by acting 'as if' it was 'the same as' your competition's, but... that's it's less expensive, or easier to come by, or some such, right?

    But if you're being told that it delivers those old tried and true steps, methods and expectations 'borrowed' from earlier philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Thomas Reid, etc., and you then noticed that it requires far more time, money, and resources to do the same thing that had always been done before, but now with worse results, and you found that your questions about that are met with "...nothing to see here, no need to concern yourself , just more expert thinkery in action, move along. All's well...", you could be forgiven for suspecting that what you're being sold 'as if' it were 'the same' thing, might be hiding something very, very, different, behind the appearances of sameness that you've been advised to just trust to the 'experts'.

    If these were used car salesmen selling you a car with another car's Carfax history, you'd be concerned... but it's somehow ok behavior in those teaching your child how to think?

    If 'Critical Think'rs did not come up with these 'features' of '...question, analyze, interpret...' - and they did not - or add new steps to them - and they have not - then why do they behave as if they had? What is this pretense intended (yes, intended) to conceal?

    Having read through many a book and whitepaper on the subject, I can tell you that the poorly hidden secret of 'Critical Thinking's secret sauce is that it most definitely does differ from what came before, and they do not like to advertise the nature of what that difference is, because what it actually is, is an absence - a subtraction from rather than an addition to - our knowledge and understanding, and how to think with and about them.

    If you are someone who sees themself as being open-minded and capable of 'questioning, analyzing, interpreting', then I'd think this would be something that you'd consider to be worth pursuing to an answer. Right?

    The answer to #3 (3-When and why did we begin calling for more of 'Critical Thinking'?), requires a bit of a two-step reply, which begins with Glaser's book on 'Critical Thinking', as he and his fellow theorists of education realized that 'Critical Thinking' could be made out 'as if' it were a critical necessity for 'education' in the modern world. And with that claim being made by TWKB (Those Who Know Best), it became possible for them to achieve less than nothing right out in the open, by peddling their jargon terms of 'Critical Thinking Skills' and 'Higher-Order Thinking' as the innovations needed for gaining a 'scientific understanding' of any issue at all.

    John Dewey & Co. and their 'labs' at Columbia's Teachers College had been building up to this for years, and Glaser's own efforts made extensive use of various studies to bolster those skills, and to warn of what hinders them, such as referenced on pg 47 of Maller and Lundeen's study on "Sources of Superstitious Beliefs", which describes how:
    "...the researchers sought to determine the extent to which the home, books/media, school, church, friends, and personal experiences influence belief and disbelief in superstitions..."
    , and in noting that superstitions are often described as 'false religions', they noted that:
    "... it is not altogether surprising that what is considered religion by one may be considered superstition by another..."
    Do you find yourself a bit suspicious as to how they went about clarifying that difference, or the reason for pointing it out? If not, how about after noting how Glaser repeatedly advocates that:
    "...a scientific attitude is developed by a knowledge of scientific facts and varies directly with such knowledge...."
    , even as he repeatedly has to admit that:
    "...general science work seemed to have no effect in reducing superstitious beliefs..."
    That's interesting.

    Even more interesting, Glaser himself notes in the conclusion to his study, that 'Critical Thinking' didn't actually help students in their general thinking. As he puts it:
    "...There is no reason to believe, for instance, that the students who gained significantly in critical thinking as measured by the tests are now appreciably more competent to make critical judgments of pieces of art, music, or literature...."[emphasis mine]
    Yes, you read that right. Thomas Reid's quip comes to mind, that "Theories are the creatures of men, which nature seldom mimics". And while it's hard to imagine how any of this helps in selling the sizzle of the 'CT Sports Car', the fact is, that it has sold, and sold well. How?

    The Great Chain of Epistemology;
    Hierarchical Order of Knowledge
    Glaser and his fellow 'Social Scientists' certainly didn't add anything new beyond their jargon in place of the old terms 'as if' they meant the same things as syllogisms, rhetoric, and the like. It's worth noting, however, that their new 'social science' terms have served to verbally divide the thousands of years of existing commentary on the subject of teaching and reasoning well, from what they've been advertising as this new method called 'Critical Thinking'. And yet they'd added nothing of substance to the practice or explanation and effectiveness of reasoning, or to logical thinking, or rhetoric, or even to the practice of science itself.

    Nothing.

    But in being sold the spiel of improving students' ability to "...question, analyze, interpret, evaluate and make a judgement...", what is being concealed is that their 'thinking skills' are not intended to improve the student's ability to reason well, but more narrowly to instruct the student in finding what is expected to be the correct answer, and the way that 'Critical Thinking' does that, is hidden in plain sight behind what it boasts to parents that it will provide their kids: Critical Thinking Skills. The operational use of 'skills' is first being applied to two very different approaches to thinking - one being the kind of reasoning in which a juror would deliberate over evidence for an accused person being found guilty or innocent, and the other with which a scientist might examine some materials and measure others to find and select what fits a given formula - and collapsing both under the narrower term of 'skills', which is more suited to the latter, results in the former being neglected, at best.

    The students, in being instructed to treat all knowledge 'as if' it were a demonstrable fact or calculation of external references so as to find 'the right answer' (which, BTW, was Fichte's goal for Prussian 'education', to produce students who would accept the answers they were given without question), are being nudged away from developing the inner qualities of honesty, ethics and moral behavior, that are necessary for developing sound reasoning and practical wisdom.

    That's where the second step in CT's success story comes in, with 'Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives', which helped enormously in making the very new and obviously flawed field of 'Critical Thinking', able to spread throughout our schools.

    The sciency-ish set of booklets that comprise Bloom's Taxonomy, formed what's been lauded as the authoritative list of definitions and objectives for what every teacher has been directly or indirectly taught to teach from, since the 1950's, and was critical to the selling of 'Critical Thinking' to the world. One of those critical points defined Knowledge as:
    "Knowledge is defined as the remembering of previously learned material... represents the lowest level of learning outcomes in the cognitive domain."
    , and according to Bloom et all, knowledge doesn't imply understanding or deep meaning (as you'll see below, it definitely doesn't imply knowledge as being right or wrong), it's just facts conveniently strung together so as to be recalled when & where useful. In the new 'cognitive domain' of Bloom's Taxonomy, the sense of knowledge as once understood as being a depth of understanding that's valuable in the pursuit of wisdom, has been replaced with 'knowledge' as the 'lowest level' of 'learning outcomes' in 'the cognitive domain', where students will prove their 'knowledge' by scanning for and collecting as many of the useful facts that the social science experiment of 'education' calls for, which is what enabled the recall of facts to become what is measured in our 'testing'.

    Bloom's views on these matters are very much drawn from the likes of John Dewey's ideas of 'Pragmatism', and operate under the modern presumption that metaphysics - what is - is either unknowable or does not exist (ahem), and that what matters is the 'epistemological' processing of 'facts' to find 'what works', readily fit so well with what our Teachers Colleges already taught in their practice of teaching teachers how to teach, that it quickly caught fire with modern notions of 'education' and 'went viral' worldwide. Even today, a quick search online will return thousands of references over the last seven decades, such as this one from The London School of Management Education (2019), saying that effectively developing:”
    “...critical thinking skills is always a challenge to teach and deliver effectively to learners, and the best approach is to adopt the Bloom’s taxonomy as the basis of learning...”
    , which all supports their efforts to teach, and teach, and teach, your kids the skills of 'higher-order thinking' that they insist is soOooo necessary to the success of 'Critical Thinking'.

    Delivering less than zero, by means of the Thinking Skills of Semantic Deception
    Dr. Benjamin Bloom should be remembered for writing books such as "Outcome-Based Education", and "Mastery Learning", each of which prompted a great deal of parental outrage, and many more rounds of productive 'Education Reform!'.
    What reading through the booklets of Bloom's Taxonomy reveals, is not just that 'Critical Thinking' promises to deliver the 'higher-order thinking' skills - or 'HOTS', as they like to refer to them - (they do love their cutesy acronyms), or that they are difficult for them to deliver on. And what we should note here, is that parents and most other people's expectations of what these 'Critical Thinking Skills' are, is very likely not what these Educrats mean by them.

    For instance, it seems unlikely that most people think that their suburban school district would teach their teachers that 'Critical Thinking' and 'HOTS' should be taught to mean, what I found was being emphasized in around 2020 by the "Santa Clara County Office of Education" (it's since been taken down or put behind its membership wall), which was (and likely still is) instructing their new teachers to teach their students 'Thinking Skills', according to this view from 'Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives'. Note: As you can see in the screenshot, the bold emphasis is mine, but the ellipsis are in the original, I have not edited its content:

    How can lesson design move learners from knowledge acquisition that is concrete to one that is more abstract and creative?

    “Benjamin Bloom said, “...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong". In creating his taxonomy, Bloom highlighted a student’s ability to think more abstractly and demonstrate learning in ways that were sparked by creative thinking. Learning is more than recalling the right answer. It is applying learned content to new and different situations in ways that can “reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.” This course will review Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy and will expose the learner to different technology tools that can move students to higher orders of thinking."
    Is "... no longer believes in right or wrong..." and "...reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings..." what you were thinking of when I originally asked what you expected 'Critical Thinking' to do for a child's thinking?

    And now, as you use your 'Critical Thinking Skills' to read this with an open and analytical mind, to compare what I've shown you so far, to your original expectations, are some doubts beginning to arise in your mind? If you were to '...question, analyze, interpret, evaluate and make a judgement...' further upon this, it seems to me that these are just a few fairly obvious questions that you should be asking yourself (and stewing upon):
    • How do they intend to 'help' students to 'no longer believe' in Right & Wrong (spoiler alert: they mean that in both senses of the words, BTW, true/false & good/bad)?
    • What is meant by 'reorganize their student's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings', and how do they go about doing that?
    • What is meant by 'knowledge acquisition', and how does that differ from learning what is being studied?
    Prior to our modern reforming of schooling (which, BTW, is in no way limited to public schooling), people sought an education to lead them out of the shadows of ignorance and confused misunderstanding, by learning what's rooted in an integrated understanding of what is real and true and right and wrong, and by aiming at identifying the good that all sound thinking aims at, the student was expected to be able to become a moral and self-governing individual capable of living a life worth living, in liberty with others.

    Teaching students 'Critical Thinking Skills', OTOH, utilizes the student's mind 'as if' the purpose of an 'education' was to stock the shelves of the nation's human resources tool sheds, with a variety of tools and skills which TWKB have determined to be needed, at varying skill levels, for various tasks, as needed. Such 'Thinking Skills' do not reflect who a student is, but what actions they've been trained to perform for 'today's economy'. A sad 'side effect' of instilling 'thinking skills' in this way, is that in between having tasks to work on, the student's 'education' is of little or no use to them outside of the tasks which they've been made useful for, and so they're left to fill their 'off hours' with whatever distracting entertainments might keep their 'power tool' brain buzzing with between tasks.

    Unlike traditional education which carefully revealed timeless truths to its students which they would find to be of value throughout their lives, to be 'educated' in modern times is to be suited only to the present moment, which necessarily means becoming useless in the next one ... which will then require your re-education ("Learn to code!"). Perhaps what it is that 'Critical Thinking Skills' are intended to move us 'beyond', is best summed up with the opening line of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics:
    "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim ..."
    , which was the view that was prevalent in our Founders era, and was very much rooted in a concern for understanding what is real and true, and is unquestionably concerned with what is right and wrong, and that is entirely opposed by what Bloom's Taxonomy has been teaching our teachers to teach our kids to 'rise above' for decades.

    'Critical Thinking' in action: “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
    — Katherine Maher (NPR CEO)
    Because these differences between what had traditionally been considered to be sound reasoning, and 'Critical Thinking', are distinctions that make a critical difference, they go unmentioned when CT'rs are selling CT's skills to parents and the general public to confound their understanding with "Critical thinking is a kind of thinking in which you question, analyze, interpret, evaluate and make a judgement about what you read, hear, say, or write...."

    Under the guise of teaching kids 'thinking skills' to "...question, analyze, interpret..." the world 'as if' 'Critical Thinking' were the 'same as' reasoning, students are being taught what was never intended to lead them into becoming good, moral, ethical persons, and instead focuses them on acquiring some level of 'Conflict Resolution Skills' which views 'truth' as a relative and malleable means of calculating utilitarian bargains in which the 'ends justify the means', and it does so under the implicit presumption that it would be wrong to teach the importance of developing a child's ethical judgment of what is real and true and right and wrong.

    The harsh reality is that through the power of being trained in 'Critical Thinking Skills' which view knowledge as "...the lowest level of learning outcomes in the cognitive domain...", a person's depth of understanding is easily satisfied at the surface level of ideological appearances, which severs them from having any deeper concern for what is real and true and right and wrong. By their own efforts to skillfully calculate a pragmatic answer, rather than by seeking first to understand and respond appropriately to what it is that's being contemplated, they are metaphysically decapitating themselves from within their own mind, by removing the metaphysical point and purpose of reasoning well from their conscious awareness and intent.

    That subtraction of the student's metaphysical awareness is 'Critical Thinking's primary innovation, and it has enabled the pro-regressive desire to develop demoralized human resources (just what do you think "... no longer believes in right or wrong..." means?!), who are stocked with whatever calculative tools and 'people skills' that the experts of TWKB deem to be needed most at that particular point in time.

    Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left:
    Especially if your own schooling was all about building up your 'thinking skills', this cannot be pleasant to hear, and even harder to accept, but as you're beginning to see for yourself, if you pay attention to what the purveyors of 'Critical Thinking' say when discussing what they intend 'Critical Thinking' to accomplish, they'll tell you in their own words, that these are the ideals that they intend to transform you and your kids with.

    Do yourself a favor, don't just try to 'keep an open mind', and perhaps above all don't try to 'wake up!', as if you've been asleep all along - you have not been asleep, and the contrivance of that excuse is unworthy of the mind of man (hi Marx!). What you do need to do, is to turn the light of your own attention towards actively taking notice of what is (Metaphysics), how you know it (through an epistemology of Causality and Logic), and what should be done in response to that (Ethics), and you'll soon see the darkness being rolled back by the light of what is real and true. There is a great deal that you will begin to take notice of as you continue to "...question, analyze, interpret..." from that perspective, and despite what our educators think of you (and humanity), because you are a human being, you are able to see, recognize, understand, and correct the errors of men.

    What is 'Critical' to your Thinking?
    So now as you compare what you'd assumed CT to be, to what you're now beginning to see it involves, never forget that what you assume that the Pro-Regressive Left (and Right) mean by something, as even how to '...question, analyze, interpret...' is often the sheep's clothing that's being used to smuggle in a wolf that's contrary to your expectations, and they do so because of their pragmatic belief that truth is just 'what works' for the moment, and they see themselves as TWKB (Those Who Know Best) who should have the power to determine what it 'works' for.

    That's especially the case when you see the word 'Critical' placed before the word 'Thinking', for while you might think that 'Critical' simply implies an important point to question & consider in what you are thinking about, if that were the case, there'd be no need for the 'Critical' to be prefixed to 'Thinking', as that is what 'thinking' is:
    thinking noun
    the activity of using your mind to consider something:
    do some thinking I'll have to do some thinking about how best to arrange the books.
    , but those of a Progressive, Socialist, Marxist, Hegelian, Kantian, Rousseauian, Cartesian, Hobbesian bent of mind (or just Pro-Regressive for short), do not mean for you to simply consider something from different angles, what they mean by 'Critical', is for you to engage you in the causeless doubt (hi Descartes!) that isn't intended to raise questions, but, as how the skeptic puffs himself up in his own eyes while tearing down what others behold and revere, it encourages you to presume to 'just know' that there are alternate or hidden 'answers' to be dwelt upon, without any actual cause or evidence for suspecting them - what Samuel Silva calls 'the affirmation of the No' - and that sense of 'Critical' is perhaps best expressed by Marx's exhortation to a:
    Fissiparous, in CS Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress, is a "...process of infinite fracturing, unceasingly dividing..."
    "... ruthless criticism of all that exists..."
    , so as to undermine and destroy the foundations of the West in general and of America in particular, and to bring our houses to ruin.

    It's critical to note that adding 'Critical' to your 'Thinking', is not done to better understand what is true, the 'Critical' is put there to operate upon your 'Thinking', in much the same way as 'Social' is used in 'Social Justice' to dilute & destroy the traditional western understanding of 'Justice' that's concerned with individual instances of right and wrong, in favor of using power to enforce those popular presumptions and prejudices, which TWKB calculate that they can get away with at the moment, by presenting them as being 'what works'. Both instances are intentional assaults upon the metaphysical 'Imago Dei' of man as a being created in the image of God, which they seek to replace with social constructs that give TWKB the power to reshape society in their own image.

    The first step a person takes down the road of 'Critical Thinking Skills' in seeking 'answers' to poorly understood questions, is already leading them away from attending to what is, how you know it, and what you should do about that and why (buh-bye Aristotle), and 'Critical Thinking' does so because its HOTS are not intended to, or interested in, enhancing the ethical reasoning, or the sense of morality, or even the accuracy of a person's thinking, they exist to put the purposes of power at the center of your attention, as with the NPR CEO quoted above, so as to dispense with 'truth' as a "...distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done". That is the purpose of 'Critical Thinking', and that is how 'Critical Thinking' seeks to "...reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.." and move them 'beyond' concerns for 'right or wrong', which leaves them, you, and the rest of 'We The People' wandering around as metaphysically decapitated beings, not just dazed and confused about what is real and true, but arguing with each other over the ideal way to churn society in their brave new world of Ideology (see previous post).
    The Root and the Fruit


    In the coming posts we'll dive deeper into what we've just scratched the surface of here, in what 'Critical Thinking' follows from, seeks, triggers and accomplishes, but as its 'Skills' have been spread throughout our schools, it should be no surprise to us today that generations of people drilled in 'Critical Thinking Skills', should show an ever diminishing ability to think well, behave virtuously, morally, honestly, or purposefully.

    And finally, I should add, with the reactions in mind that many of us have on first learning about the nature of 'Critical Thinking', it's best to not forget that one of the leading reasons why we find ourselves in our current circumstances today, is because of all of the bipartisan 'School Reform!' we've engaged in over the last century. To borrow a phrase from a radical activist: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house!”.

    It's best to just get your kids out of our schools, and redirect their attention and concerns towards what is real and true, so that they can have a chance to get a decent education. ]]>     13914     The Meaning of our ‘Answers’ are problems for ‘Critical Thinking’ https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-meaning-of-our-answers-are-problems.html Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:15:51 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=1c6826d367de7a59aefd37c2a789a7d7 Do you understand The Grammar of Liberty? In the previous two posts (here and here) I noted how much we've lost with those stories and histories of The West that we're no longer learning from today. And whether it's the case that we're only not reading & studying them, or worse, that we're reading them through a post-modernist 'lens' that is fundamentally opposed to what makes The West in general and America in particular so much better than the rest, either way their meaning is being lost to us, and that is what's leaving us blind to the very real monsters that we're facing in the world today.

    That means that recovering the canon of the Greco-Roman-Judeo/Christian West's stories and histories, involves more than just reading those works, it involves being mindful that those works represent an approach to reality which understands that:
    Real meaning is only found through recognizing what is real and true.
    IOW: how you go about your reading, matters as much or more than what you're reading - how else could you be expected to recognize the many errors, and even evils (hello Rousseau!), that are present in the canon, and understand how to avoid swallowing and repeating them? Recovering the Western mind, rather than simply repeating its sometimes fashionable 'answers', requires developing its essential approach to reasoning about reality (which, despite appearances, is the same reality that our Founders faced) in the pursuit of wisdom, and that involves seeking to understand what is (Metaphysics), what that leads to and what follows from it (Causality & Logic), and what, if anything, should or should not be done about what it is that you do come to understand about aspects of the real world that you live within (Ethics).

    If you're one of those who recognizes the problems surrounding what we no longer know or understand, and are wondering what to do about it, I hope you're not also one of those who complains when told what the solution to that is:
    Open those books and begin remedying your own lack of familiarity with the canon.
    And yet, because I've had experience with delivering this message over the years, I won't be surprised when those hearing this advice for the first time (first time? Really?), that many of you (not you, of course) will be thinking (or shouting):
    "But Van, it'll take time to read those books!"
    Yes, you are correct. It will take time and some effort on your part, to learn some measure of what you should have been taught to understand all along.

    And?

    Are you waiting for the Answer Fairy to leave some solutions under your pillow? Or to have A.I. 'somehow' do that for you? Do you imagine that you can 'fix' others, without 'fixing' yourself? That must be some mote you see in another's eye, if it's stopping you from seeing that this is exactly the sort of response that the Hydra's 'somehow' knows it can expect as "... an expression of the American mind..." from most people schooled in America today. Go figure.

    I do, of course, get the aggravation behind the response, though. When I began this series of posts, I naively thought that I could just expose the central issues required to cauterize the stumps and approach the 'final boss' (which I'll finally name in the course of this post, and identify and dig further into it throughout this series of posts). Nevertheless, it's taken me five years of going through the history of 'Education Reform' in America (again), the equally forgotten (discarded) nature of Metaphysics, and what Epistemology is not (but should be), and the false & subversive ideology of 'Economic Thinking' (which is not philosophy or a substitute for one).

    It turns out it takes time to get something done. Go figure. Recognize that evading this is just indulging in more of the wishful thinking we've all been filled up with since pre-school. Deal with it, and get on with the doing of it!

    If you still resist doing so, is it because you don't realize that recovering some measure of those works, along with the deliberate intention of seeking to understand what is real and true, may be able to do for you some measure of what it did for our Founders in their era? If you don't think it can... why? If you do, but would rather use your time doing something else... what and why?

    Or do you 'somehow' think that human beings in our modern world are so very different from those of our Founders' era? Do you imagine that their powdered wigs & horse drawn carriages somehow made them different from (or better than?) you? Or that having technology 'somehow' makes you different from (or better than?) them?

    What seems more likely to you, that having electric lights means that we don't need to know what they understood to be necessary for living lives worth living and in liberty with others, or that something about our having electric lights has 'somehow' blinded us to the dangers of our own ignorance?

    You should blink and take a moment. Then refocus, and think.

    The only real difference between them then, and us now, is our respective familiarity with the canon, along with approaching it with the intention of gaining a better understanding of what is real and true and right to do, and doing so with a clear awareness that there are consequences to ignoring reality. The real difference between them then, and us now, is that our electrified society eases our thinking that we can 'somehow' get away with ignoring reality, in a way that wasn't possible with the hostile wilderness they faced.

    If you want to do something to help restore The West, what is it that you imagine you could do that'd be better and more effective, than beginning to restore it within yourself first? If you doubt the value or effectiveness of doing so... do you not understand what that 'answer' means for the very issue you've admitted to recognizing?

    Becoming familiar with the stories and histories that shaped their thinking, and the habits they practiced in thinking about them, will provide you with some measure of what led Thomas Jefferson to describe the Declaration of Independence, as being: "... an expression of the American mind...". Conversely, failing to adhere to a habit of reasoning that seeks to understand what is real and true, and lacking the canon which develops that habit, leads into the muddled state of mind that the Hydra's provocations are meant to distract us into, and 'Critical Thinking' plays a significant role in which mode it is that prevails for our students, and for the rest of us today, though... perhaps not in the way you might assume.

    And again, No: getting 'answers' from your targeted research and LLM prompts will not provide you with the understanding that you should have, or save you much if any time in learning what you need to learn. What either is most likely to do, is to fill you with still more meaningless 'answers' that you'll be drawn into bandying about with the opposing groups from the Ideological Observatory, as both of you help the ideologs to spread their ideological churn further far and wide.

    Don't do that. Learn something from history, instead. Stop complaining and start reading what you've missed out on.

    And as you go about doing what you know you need to do, keep in mind that the point of engaging in this kind of learning is less about fetching items from a shopping list of The Bible, Homer, the Greek Tragedians, Herodotus, Aesops... Dante... Shakespeare, as if to acquire new possessions, merit badges, and support ribbons for displaying on social media, than to continuously learn more about what is, what follows, and how their integration enables us to better recognize the universal concepts and principles involved in better understanding what you know, and what should be done about that (and don't neglect your Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and Thomas Reid, who'll help you with getting more meaning and understanding out of those stories, and within your life).

    The good news is that you don't need to 'know it all' (and you should know that you never will), and neither do you have to memorize long lists of facts and answers.

    What really needs to be done, is what so many are avoiding: Doing the reading, and actively focusing on how to approach an issue, which is what enables a person to generate a sufficient force and heat of understanding that's needed to both sever and cauterize the hydra's many headed lies into lifeless stumps, and to understand that then, and only then, can it be safe to move on to attack the next provocation that's being waved in their face.

    The Pro-Regressive doesn't want you to develop those habits - and they need for you to think that simply reacting, is a 'good idea'.

    With that in mind, keep in mind that Pro-Regressive's (Left and Right) always utilize ambiguous terms in order to benefit from the shallow and premature conclusions which they know that you will assume they mean by their words (such as 'Left' and 'Right'), while unbeknownst to you, the inner-circle of TWKB (Those Who Know Best) have freighted them with misleading content and meaning which directly contradicts what you assume is meant by them.
    Key Tools of Semantic Deception:
    Paltering (n.) The act of using truthful statements to mislead or deceive, often by omitting key details or presenting facts so as to create a false impression.

    Polysemy (n.) The coexistence of multiple meanings for a single word or phrase, where the meanings are related but distinct, often arising from a common origin or usage over time.

    Equivocation (n.) The use of ambiguous language or expressions to mislead or avoid commitment to a clear statement, often by exploiting multiple meanings of a word or phrase to obscure the truth.


    As we'll see in this series of posts, these tactics are nothing new, they come from the age-old art of Sophistry, which concentrates upon generating an 'everybody knows!' mask of unquestioned narratives which seem to have substance, and turns your attention away from looking beneath the surface for further arguments or deeper meaning. The sophist waves the flag of 'Only fools & fascists doubt ___!' to divert the rest of their audience into fighting against a slew of superficial labels in one rhetorical dead-end alley after another, while the revolution advances on around them and acquires ever more monstrous forms.

    To be able to identify and expose the central neck of the many-headed hydra, requires our not treating what isn't real, as if it were real - that's what their illusions rest upon. That requires your being in the habit of expecting that the meaning of something, must mean that something is and can be understood to be true, something whose essentials are identifiable, and which integrate into the rest of what you know - before and after - without contradiction, and is not simply a floating 'fact' that is copy & pasted widely as the 'answer' whenever prompted.

    What I mean by that, is that what seems sensible on the surface, may not have any real meaning in it. For instance, take the original syllogism:
    Socrates is a man,
    All men are mortal,
    Socrates is a mortal man
    , which is logically correct, meaningful, and true, but the fact that on the surface it is syntactically correct (it follows Logic's rules of distributed middle, etc.,), is not what makes this syllogism either meaningful or true. Aristotle's first rule of logic is that before beginning to construct a syllogism, you must first ensure that your premises are true, and that your terms are unambiguous, and only then do you go on to constructing a syllogism to logically demonstrate that.

    It is only by understanding that the premise of what a man is ( human beings have a nature that is created to perceive reality and to use its reasoning faculty to guide its chosen actions to accord with what is real and true, and suffers the consequences of failing to do so), and that what the term mortality refers to (a living creature's life will end in death, and that every man, no matter how well they reason out their best laid plans, will someday die), and knowing who it was that the term Socrates refers to (an Athenian man, proven in battle, who thought that an unexamined life was not worth living, and who was put to death in 399 B.C. for publicly questioning his fellow Athenians and testing the meaning of their replies with his Socratic logic), is what makes it possible for the properly structured syllogism to demonstrate that it is both meaningful and true, but if either its premises are untrue or its terms are ambiguous, it doesn't matter how correctly the syllogism is structured, it's 'answer' can't be logically shown to be either or meaningful true.

    ...from Stephen Coughlin's Unconstrained Analytics
    To better see the issue, contrast the 'Socrates is a man' syllogism, with one that is syntactically correct, but whose premises and terms are invalid:
    Socrates is a tortoise,
    All tortoises fly,
    Socrates is a flying tortoise
    The premise that all tortoises fly is a false premise that does not reflect what a tortoise is or can do. And while we recognize the name 'Socrates', because it's not being used to refer to the man that we typically assume it does, the term is being used ambiguously. Because the syllogism's premises are untrue, and its terms are ambiguous, it is not logical, meaningful, or true.

    I can hear some thinking:
    "Another swell story Van, but I'm not worried about what a tortoise can or kant do!"
    Try this one on for size:
    Healthcare is a human right,
    All human rights are inalienable,
    Healthcare is an inalienable human right
    The absence of Context, often indicates the presence of Pretext
    If you're in the habit of ignoring context and accepting answers where 'That makes sense', or what 'everyone knows' is correct, and are not in the habit of checking premises & terms, your agreement with or objection to this, will likely reflect whichever way the current ideological winds are blowing you in, each of which may reflect as little of what is real and true, as the other (See obamacare, or 'replacements' for it, for reference).

    Note: you should also beware of those who'd say that something like the Tortoise & Healthcare syllogisms are 'logically correct, but technically untrue' (hi Kant!), for they too are utilizing untrue premises and ambiguous terms, to subvert your understanding of reality through the mis-structuring of logic, so as to escape the restrictions of what is real and true.

    With the habit of checking premises & terms firmly in place, then you'll find issues with such 'arguments' jumping out at you, one after the other, such as:
    • 'Healthcare' - What is meant by 'health'? Who defines and determines that, you, your doctor, or metrics on a govt regulated insurance form? Similarly for what is meant by 'care', does that mean choosing a service from those offering it, that you think are best able to provide it, or will you have to take what some other entity has determined that you're eligible to receive, according to how you are classified by it?
    • 'human right' - a 'human right' is a collectivist term for what might be secured by pressure groups who desire to use political power to force others to act as they wish, and so such inhumane 'rights' are entirely constructed and fully alienable, by majority rule, and/or authoritarian dictate
    • An 'Inalienable Right' is derived from what all human beings by nature are, and not from what some or all people yearn for - what is inalienable, cannot be alienated - separated from your nature - anymore than breathing can be made optional.
    • I say again: There are no 'human rights' that are inalienable
    • 'Individual Right' - is derived from the nature of what all human beings are, not from what some or all people desire . An individual right cannot be alienated from you except by force, such as imprisonment or execution, as penalty for violating the individual rights of others, and such individual rights can only be justly upheld and defended, within a rule of law that is dedicated to, and limited by, an objective respect for them (AKA: Liberty).
    • Liberty or a House Slave - Whether your society recognizes 'human rights' or 'individual rights', determines whether you have a choice in your 'healthcare' being provided by those who're interested and competent to offer it, or have no choice in what will be given by those who have been compelled to provide it (AKA: enslaved), and competence will have little or no role in the 'care' you receive, or the 'health' you achieve from it.
    Those who peddle 'answers' which have only the surface appearance of being correct, while urging you to accept their statements as 'obviously true!' without your grasping or examining their underlying meaning, are just as likely to 'argue' that you are a heartless fascist for even thinking of questioning what 'everyone knows!', as do both sides of the ideological "Healthcare is a human right!" battle.

    Reminder/Hint: They want you to react to their 'answer', they do not want you to take a moment to understand what it supposedly answers, or what an actual answer would actually mean.

    The scattershot banalities of 'everyone knows!' that surround phrases in everything from "Healthcare is a human right!" to "Heritage Americans are the only real Americans!", are waved about to lure you into biting on the enticing bait of isolated facts shorn of necessary context, by which they form the Semantic Deceptions needed for disguising their untrue premises and ambiguous terms. It's in that way that our own language is often used to play upon our assumptions, and if we fail to examine the premises & terms being used in the language that we habitually hear and use, then our own thoughts use of them can do grave injury to our understanding of far more than just what is being 'argued' in that moment.

    That is and always has been the signature strategy of Sophists through the ages, and in all of their ideological stripes. It is how Pro-Regress is achieved.

    Fortunately for us, these monsters, as all monsters do, have a fatal weak spot - they are untrue - which they can't help but hide in plain sight, which is why they live in a constant state of dread of an honest man with the sense and liberty to ask: "What do you mean by ___?". They are painfully aware of the real danger that they would be left facing if we don't take the bait of those distractions that they're busily thrusting into our faces.


    Their weak spot is easily spotted, if you look
    Whether it occurs on X, or Facebook, or face to face, don't engage with them on the level of their narrative and its deliberate provocations, for to do so is to implicitly accept their false premises. That is what happened during the "Healthcare is a human right!" push for obamacare, which was often advocated for with lines such as "What are you going to do about the 30% who lack health insurance?!", and the typical response from The Right was something like "First of all, it's only about 10%, and these people choose...", without ever realizing that by doing so, they'd implicitly accepted their pro-regressive premises, and effectively conceded the argument, and so could do nothing more than complain as their half of the ideological "Left! Right! Forward March!" cadence helped in marching us on towards our demise.

    Stop taking their narratives as presenting either valid or invalid facts (what is obviously wrong, is a key means of drawing you into their ideological churn. AKA: Clickbait). Ignore their provocations and poke beneath the surface by paying less attention to what they've said, and more to what the premises for what they'd said must mean, what they're based upon, and what is likely to follow from, and be built upon, their being accepted.

    Start looking at their narratives as a story that's being told to make you assume that they mean what they do not really mean (which typically involves evading a principle that's lethal to their narrative), which is how they sell what 'everyone knows', and inflict such damage by shifting our attention away from what is, to their narrative about it.

    Doing this needn't be a complicated process, and doesn't require research projects, or position papers, it only requires you to question their narrative along the conceptual paths that they're evading, "...taking every thought captive..." so as to reveal and identify their unspoken premises & terms:
    • When they say 'Black lives matter!', ignore the provocations that some lives matter and others don't, by questioning the premise it evades and denies: 'Why do any lives matter?'
    • When they say that "The sexual organs you were born with don't determine your 'gender'!", question the premise they want you to presume is unquestionable, by asking "Then how does faking the appearances of having those sexual organs through costume, makeup, or surgical alteration, determine your 'gender'?"
    • When they say 'America is only for Heritage Americans!', bring what they count upon you thinking that they mean, face to face with what they don't want you to realize that they mean, by pointing out the actual meaning of their words: "The motto of The Great Seal of the United States of America, finalized in 1782, is e Pluribus Unum (Out of many, One), and clearly proclaims the 1776 date (MDCCLXXVI) of  the Declaration of Independence and its proposition that "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." and so must be treated equally before the law, as the origin of and foundation for the United States of America. That is the meaning and heritage of being an American, so how can rejecting either of those mean anything other than opposition to our American heritage?"
    Note that they cannot reply to those questions, without also acknowledging that the false premises and ambiguous terms which they are trying to evade, are the Achilles' heel (another lost story) of their assertions. Ask such questions not to 'own them!', but to turn the discussion away from their narrative, and back towards reality.

    Some people (you too?) will say:
    "But they'll never engage in conversations like that!"
    , and of course that is the kind of conversation that the truly Pro-Regressive (Woke or otherwise) will never engage in - they'll recoil from such questions like Dracula from a mirror, and perhaps for the same reason.

    Keep in mind though that most such conversations that you may become engaged in, are not for the (immediate) benefit of the radical you're speaking with (though you never know what time will tell), but for your own understanding, and especially for those who may be silently watching from a distance.

    If we fail to demonstrate how to dig deeper into identifying what they're trying to distract us from, that can be as deadly to us, as their failing to distract us from doing so, is to them.

    Again, don't react and try to 'own them' - that helps no one but the churning of the Ideological Observatory. The most effective thing you can do is to question their point calmly and cooly, not to get to a different answer, but to bring out a deeper understanding of the issue and their premises, and by doing so, pull them along with you as you pursue identifying what is - and is not - real and true about their 'answer'.

    A Critical Language Alert
    In short, the alternative to being led around by your ears, is your giving some meaningful thought to what underlies the terms of the narrative that they're attempting to entangle you in.

    The best response to a narrative and its provocations, is to think through the meaning and implications of what they've said, and to test whether its assumptions and claims (entailing premises and terms), meaningfully reflect what you can understand to be real and true.

    Most people today will feel an almost natural reaction against that - did you feel its tug?

    It comes from a particular habit of thinking, and that is what needs to be identified, broken, and replaced with that which I've been describing here, and those who don't do that, will continue to find themselves being carried along on the surface of popular narratives, flopping about as they're skewered with one provocation after another.

    The one thing you can be sure of, is that whichever ideological path that this habit of thinking is leading us all down, leads to a very real and inescapably anti-American system being imposed upon us all.

    Remember Alinsky's lesson for training up monsters:
    The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.
    The deeper problem with banalities of 'everyone knows!', and our eagerness for easy answers, and our acceptance of shallow 'logic', is that this pattern for arriving at their conclusions, has been repeatedly presented to us as being so sensible, and so obvious, and so alluring for a hundred years, that questioning the design pattern that generates this habit of thinking, doesn't occur to us. Popular opinion recognizes problems all around us, and enthusiastically calls for actions that can only bring still more of the same, and we do so, not because we want more problems, but because we're unaware that how we've been taught to go about our thinking, is the pattern that is furthering the purposes of the Critical Insurrection being waged against us.

    What I'm getting at here, is that the thing that's defined our pattern of thinking, whose habits incline us towards seeking 'answers' from everything from narrowly targeted research, to those turning to A.I. for 'answers' as if having those answers is or could be a substitute for understanding the problem, which only then can appropriate solutions be sought for.

    The thing that I'm pointing to as being the central head of the modern Hydra...

    ...the 'Final Boss', is...

    ...wait for it:
    'Critical Thinking'.
    No, I'm not recommending more 'Critical Thinking'.

    What I am saying, is that in much the same way that 'Social Justice', 'Black Lives Matter!' and 'Heritage American', seek the opposite of what they advertise themselves as being concerned with, 'Critical Thinking' is not the cure for our problematic thinking, 'Critical Thinking' is the problem that has made our thinking so unreasonable.

    IOW: The 'Critical Thinking' that we've been putting so much time and effort and money into forcing down our kids' throats as if it were the cure, is the very poison that's been making us all so sick. 'Critical Thinking' is the bad habit we need to be cured of.

    The Munchausen Proxy folks in the Intellectual Observatory, have been careful to generate the impression that 'obviously' what 'everybody knows!' is meant by 'Critical Thinking', is that it is a scientifically valid method for thinking through the meaning and implications of what has been said, and for testing whether what you believe is or is not true. Unfortunately, as we'll see in excruciating detail in the coming posts, is that while they do intend to give you that impression, the reality is that the theorists of 'Critical Thinking' make artful use of semantic deception to formulate their materials and curriculum in such a way that they effectively undermine and subvert what every sensible person expects 'Critical Thinking' to mean, and to do for them. And this has been done deliberately, and remarkably openly (for those who bothered to look), for nearly a century.

    What I'm pointing to here is not just another Ideology, it is not CRT (Critical Race Theory), or even any of the other 'Critical Theories'; what I'm pointing to is the monstrous many-headed hydra which those writhing necks of CRT, BLM, and 'Heritage Americans', sprout from, each time we attack any of them as if they were the central problem attacking us.

    Even as I type this into the internet, I can sense the pushback from many of you against what I've just said (you too? Of course). And that's a good thing.

    But it's worth your while to keep in mind another trope of monster stories, which is that the loudest denials of the monster's existence often turn out to be coming from either the monster in disguise, or from those who have been unwittingly aiding and supporting it ("The call is coming from inside the house!"). See our long and tragic history of Education Reform, and our very bipartisan calls for "We need more 'Critical Thinking'!" today.

    And so, as we head into the coming posts, I'm not asking you to trust that I have the answers. I'm asking you to consider that you haven't been asking the right questions (such as What is education?).

    I'm not asking you to trust what I present to you as new 'answers', I'm asking you to consider what I present, and to satisfy yourself that the premises and terms involved are sound and meaningful (theirs, mine, and yours), while being especially careful about the difference between those facts that you assume to be true ('everybody knows!'), and what you actually know, within the proper context, is real and true, and that you come to understand its meaning.


    Towards that end, keep Solzhenitsyn's line from 'Live not by lies' in mind:
    ...Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me...
    , and that:
    "...The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world...."
    There are few things that are more critically important to a sound mind, than that.

    Do that, and then like Hercules & Iolaus, or even the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes, you may soon recognize what the old tales told us over and over, that few things burn the lie and its liar more hotly, than having their false pretenses publicly exposed to the truth.

    Now all we have to do, is to do that to every last one of the Hydra's heads, and soon we'll be able to bury its body under a tombstone, and consider the immortal beast to be defeated.

    For the moment.

    ]]>     13906     250 years later, America still depends upon Americans’ understanding of our Declaration of Independence https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/07/250-years-later-america-still-depends.html Sat, 04 Jul 2026 15:44:03 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=fd9c2194ba4c97af3533d3799af3b0c6 Inspiration of our Declaration of Independence", and to the Declaration of Independence itself, on its 250th Anniversary. The first point, which I went into a little bit of detail here, is that the Declaration of Independence is the vehicle through which those who care about what is real and true, are able to become one people, Americans, and that its inheritance is not one of blood, but of understanding their shared ideals. To affirm:
    '... these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...'
    , is your ticket into the American body-politic, it is your passport to recite the later phrases with the rest of us, so that 'We The People' are able to form a more perfect union because we do hold these truths to be self-evidently true. It is how we are made 'e Pluribus Unum - Out of many, One' people, and our diverse origins and differences are transformed into interesting footnotes to our lives, rather than defining - or dividing - features of them.

    The second point, is that with the Supreme Court striking a blow against the encroachments upon our liberty by the Administrative State, things are looking better for the restoration and preservation of liberty, than they have in decades.

    The third point, is that our independence wasn't begun on July 4th 1776, that was simply the end of the beginning. And in what has been more terrifyingly clear with the 2020s, is how central to America's existence, the Declaration of Independence and the ideas that animate it, is to there being an America (the geographical location of our nation) with Americans (those who understand and revere the ideas that made America possible) in it, and for either of those to be able to continue on together for long into the future.

    I'm not talking about each person having a copy of it - the document itself is meaningless and useless without a people who understand it. The Declaration of Independence only came into being in the first place, because there was a people along the eastern seaboard who understood its meaning well before it was written. Thomas Jefferson later commented that he made no attempt to be innovative or 'revolutionary' when writing it, but only that he intended it "... to be an expression of the American mind..." - is it an expression of yours?

    John Adams, in the first quotation below, recalled that in his opinion the American Revolution actually began in 1761, when James Otis spoke against the 'Writs of Assistance' to an assembled crowd, calling out a wealth of classical allusions and a sweeping summation of history and of legal gems, which roused all of his listeners through a torrent of eloquence so profound that Adams thought it had sparked the revolution 'then and there'. Otis too expressed only the common content and passions of "the American mind", and so I ask you, if a new James Otis were to speak to us like that today, how many people living here in America would recognize any of what he summarized or recognize why it was important? Would those modern listeners be more likely to be moved by his eloquence... or to shrug it away with a texted 'TLDR' ('Too Long Didn't Read')?

    How likely is it that we can long have either America or Americans in it, without the Declaration of Independence being both known and understood by at least a majority of them? And how well can it be understood by a people who've been 'educated' out of any familiarity with that history, its important ideas, and a perspective that values profound truths eloquently expressed?

    Don't bother muttering against our schools, they have dropped the ball, intentionally, and they cannot be looked to for help in picking it back up. It's you who needs to do this, beginning with yourself, and counting on no one else to fill the contents of your own mind with what it has until now lacked. The internet is open to you, and I've provide the links you need here to get started. You and no one else are responsible, for America continuing to be populated with Americans... or at least with one (who can then tell another).

    July 4th 1776, was the end of the beginning of America's Independence, and now 250 years later, it's up to you to ensure that July 4th 2026 isn't the beginning of its end. And to ensure that... you need to start back at the beginning. And where our independence began, according to a fellow that was in attendance at both events, John Adams, was when James Otis spoke against King George's 'Writs of Assistance' back in 1761, which as Adams recalled it,
    ",,,But Otis was a flame of fire! With a promptitude of Classical Allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events & dates, a profusion of Legal Authorities, a prophetic glance of his eyes into futurity, and a rapid torrent of impetuous Eloquence he hurried away all before him. American Independence was then & there born. The seeds of Patriots & Heroes to defend the Non sine Diis Animosus Infans; to defend the Vigorous Youth were then & there sown. Every Man of an immense crouded Audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take Arms against Writs of Assistants. Then and there was the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the Arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the Child Independence was born. In fifteen years i.e. in 1776. he grew up to Manhood, & declared himself free.,,,"[emphasis mine]
    I point that out, because it underlines the importance of what is perhaps most remarkable about what the Declaration of Independence's author, Thomas Jefferson, considered to be the least remarkable aspect of it - that he intended the Declaration as an expression of ideas that were familiar and commonly understood, by the majority of Americans, of that time, as Jefferson wrote to a friend in later years, about what it was meant to accomplish:
    "Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c..."
    That is why we are unique in the annals of human history, as being a nation founded upon ideas (those twits mouthing on about 'inherent American anti-intellectualism' can kiss my patriotic ass). Those common ideas, and their influence, continued to serve as strong guides for the later creation of our Constitution, and in even a cursory reading of the charges of the Declaration of Independence against King George, it is easy to see their reflection in our Constitution, and the original ten amendments to it:
    "To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World."
    "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
    "HE has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries."
    • The first three articles of our Constitution, divides Govt into three branches, which prevent any one person or wing from attaining a monopoly of power over the others.
    "HE has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance."
    • This is what our Constitution was expressly designed to forbid, which unfortunately is what the pro-regressive Administrative State, was erected upon it to encourage (as was our politically instituted educational system) - proof that Laws that do not live in the hearts and minds of the people, cannot protect them against themselves
    "HE has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures. HE has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power."
    • Congress has control of organizing and funding the military budget, and while the Executive has command of the military, he can not do much, for long, without the further consent of the people's representatives, and in all ways, the military is under civil control.
    "FOR quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us"
    "FOR protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States"
    "FOR cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World"
    "FOR imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
    "FOR depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury"
    , and if you take the time to read both, you will find many, many, more points of harmony between the two.

    But enough, onto Calvin Coolidge's speech, and a happy 250th Independence Day to you all!

    The Inspiration of the Declaration of Independence
    Given in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 5, 1926:

    President Calvin Coolidge
    We meet to celebrate the birthday of America. The coming of a new life always excites our interest. Although we know in the case of the individual that it has been an infinite repetition reaching back beyond our vision, that only makes it the more wonderful. But how our interest and wonder increase when we behold the miracle of the birth of a new nation. It is to pay our tribute of reverence and respect to those who participated in such a mighty event that we annually observe the fourth day of July. Whatever may have been the impression created by the news which went out from this city on that summer day in 1776, there can be no doubt as to the estimate which is now placed upon it. At the end of 150 years the four corners of the earth unite in coming to Philadelphia as to a holy shrine in grateful acknowledgment of a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity, that it is still the preeminent support of free government throughout the world.

    Although a century and a half measured in comparison with the length of human
    experience is but a short time, yet measured in the life of governments and nations it ranks as a very respectable period. Certainly enough time has elapsed to demonstrate with a great deal of thoroughness the value of our institutions and their dependability as rules for the regulation of human conduct and the advancement of civilization. They have been in existence long enough to become very well seasoned. They have met, and met successfully, the test of experience.

    It is not so much then for the purpose of undertaking to proclaim new theories and principles that this annual celebration is maintained, but rather to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound. Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken. Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the Nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection.

    It is little wonder that people at home and abroad consider Independence Hall as hallowed ground and revere the Liberty Bell as a sacred relic. That pile of bricks and mortar, that mass of metal, might appear to the uninstructed as only the outgrown meeting place and the shattered bell of a former time, useless now because of more modern conveniences, but to those who know they have become consecrated by the use which men have made of them. They have long been identified with a great cause. They are the framework of a spiritual event. The world looks upon them, because of their associations of one hundred and fifty years ago, as it looks upon the Holy Land because of what took place there nineteen hundred years ago. Through use for a righteous purpose they have become sanctified.

    It is not here necessary to examine in detail the causes which led to the American Revolution. In their immediate occasion they were largely economic. The colonists objected to the navigation laws which interfered with their trade, they denied the power of Parliament to impose taxes which they were obliged to pay, and they therefore resisted the royal governors and the royal forces which were sent to secure obedience to these laws. But the conviction is inescapable that a new civilization had come, a new spirit had arisen on this side of the Atlantic more advanced and more developed in its regard for the rights of the individual than that which characterized the Old World. Life in a new and open country had aspirations which could not be realized in any subordinate position. A separate establishment was ultimately inevitable. It had been decreed by the very laws of human nature. Man everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny.

    We are obliged to conclude that the Declaration of Independence represented the movement of a people. It was not, of course, a movement from the top. Revolutions do not come from that direction. It was not without the support of many of the most respectable people in the Colonies, who were entitled to all the consideration that is given to breeding, education, and possessions. It had the support of another element of great significance and importance to which I shall later refer. But the preponderance of all those who occupied a position which took on the aspect of aristocracy did not approve of the Revolution and held toward it an attitude either of neutrality or open hostility. It was in no sense a rising of the oppressed and downtrodden. It brought no scum to the surface, for the reason that colonial society had developed no scum. The great body of the people were accustomed to privations, but they were free from depravity. If they had poverty, it was not of the hopeless kind that afflicts great cities, but the inspiring kind that marks the spirit of the pioneer. The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them. The Continental Congress was not only composed of great men, but it represented a great people. While its members did not fail to exercise a remarkable leadership, they were equally observant of their representative capacity. They were industrious in encouraging their constituents to instruct them to support independence. But until such instructions were given they were inclined to withhold action.

    While North Carolina has the honor of first authorizing its delegates to concur with other Colonies in declaring independence, it was quickly followed by South Carolina and Georgia, which also gave general instructions broad enough to include such action. But the first instructions which unconditionally directed its delegates to declare for independence came from the great Commonwealth of Virginia. These were immediately followed by Rhode Island and Massachusetts, while the other Colonies, with the exception of New York, soon adopted a like course.

    This obedience of the delegates to the wishes of their constituents, which in some cases caused them to modify their previous positions, is a matter of great significance. It reveals an orderly process of government in the first place; but more than that, it demonstrates that the Declaration of Independence was the result of the seasoned and deliberate thought of the dominant portion of the people of the Colonies. Adopted after long discussion and as the result of the duly authorized expression of the preponderance of public opinion, it did not partake of dark intrigue or hidden conspiracy. It was well advised. It had about it nothing of the lawless and disordered nature of a riotous insurrection. It was maintained on a plane which rises above the ordinary conception of rebellion. It was in no sense a radical movement but took on the dignity of a resistance to illegal usurpations. It was conservative and represented the action of the colonists to maintain their constitutional rights which from time immemorial had been guaranteed to them under the law of the land.

    When we come to examine the action of the Continental Congress in adopting the Declaration of Independence in the light of what was set out in that great document and in the light of succeeding events, we can not escape the conclusion that it had a much broader and deeper significance than a mere secession of territory and the establishment of a new nation. Events of that nature have been taking place since the dawn of history. One empire after another has arisen, only to crumble away as its constituent parts separated from each other and set up independent governments of their own. Such actions long ago became commonplace. They have occurred too often to hold the attention of the world and command the admiration and reverence of humanity. There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.

    It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history. Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.

    If no one is to be accounted as born into a superior station, if there is to be no ruling class, and if all possess rights which can neither be bartered away nor taken from them by any earthly power, it follows as a matter of course that the practical authority of the Government has to rest on the consent of the governed. While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination. But remarkable as this may be, it is not the chief distinction of the Declaration of Independence. The importance of political speculation is not to be under-estimated, as I shall presently disclose. Until the idea is developed and the plan made there can be no action.

    It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world. It was not only the principles declared, but the fact that therewith a new nation was born which was to be founded upon those principles and which from that time forth in its development has actually maintained those principles, that makes this pronouncement an incomparable event in the history of government. It was an assertion that a people had arisen determined to make every necessary sacrifice for the support of these truths and by their practical application bring the War of Independence to a successful conclusion and adopt the Constitution of the United States with all that it has meant to civilization.

    The idea that the people have a right to choose their own rulers was not new in political history. It was the foundation of every popular attempt to depose an undesirable king. This right was set out with a good deal of detail by the Dutch when as early as July 26, 1581, they declared their independence of Philip of Spain. In their long struggle with the Stuarts the British people asserted the same principles, which finally culminated in the Bill of Rights deposing the last of that house and placing William and Mary on the throne. In each of these cases sovereignty through divine right was displaced by sovereignty through the consent of the people. Running through the same documents, though expressed in different terms, is the clear inference of inalienable rights. But we should search these charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality. This principle had not before appeared as an official political declaration of any nation. It was profoundly revolutionary. It is one of the corner stones of American institutions.

    But if these truths to which the declaration refers have not before been adopted in their combined entirety by national authority, it is a fact that they had been long pondered and often expressed in political speculation. It is generally assumed that French thought had some effect upon our public mind during Revolutionary days. This may have been true. But the principles of our declaration had been under discussion in the Colonies for nearly two generations before the advent of the French political philosophy that characterized the middle of the eighteenth century. In fact, they come from an earlier date. A very positive echo of what the Dutch had done in 1581, and what the English were preparing to do, appears in the assertion of the Rev. Thomas Hooker of Connecticut as early as 1638, when he said in a sermon before the General Court that:
    The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people

    The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance.

    This doctrine found wide acceptance among the nonconformist clergy who later made up the Congregational Church. The great apostle of this movement was the Rev. John Wise, of Massachusetts. He was one of the leaders of the revolt against the royal governor Andros in 1687, for which he suffered imprisonment. He was a liberal in ecclesiastical controversies. He appears to have been familiar with the writings of the political scientist, Samuel Pufendorf, who was born in Saxony in 1632. Wise published a treatise, entitled "The Church's Quarrel Espoused," in 1710 which was amplified in another publication in 1717. In it he dealt with the principles of civil government. His works were reprinted in 1772 and have been declared to have been nothing less than a textbook of liberty for our Revolutionary fathers.

    While the written word was the foundation, it is apparent that the spoken word was the vehicle for convincing the people. This came with great force and wide range from the successors of Hooker and Wise, It was carried on with a missionary spirit which did not fail to reach the Scotch Irish of North Carolina, showing its influence by significantly making that Colony the first to give instructions to its delegates looking to independence. This preaching reached the neighborhood of Thomas Jefferson, who acknowledged that his "best ideas of democracy" had been secured at church meetings.

    That these ideas were prevalent in Virginia is further revealed by the Declaration of Rights, which was prepared by George Mason and presented to the general assembly on May 27, 1776. This document asserted popular sovereignty and inherent natural rights, but confined the doctrine of equality to the assertion that "All men are created equally free and independent". It can scarcely be imagined that Jefferson was unacquainted with what had been done in his own Commonwealth of Virginia when he took up the task of drafting the Declaration of Independence. But these thoughts can very largely be traced back to what John Wise was writing in 1710. He said, "Every man must be acknowledged equal to every man". Again, "The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity and promote the happiness of all and the good of every man in all his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, and so forth . . . ." And again, "For as they have a power every man in his natural state, so upon combination they can and do bequeath this power to others and settle it according as their united discretion shall determine". And still again, "Democracy is Christ's government in church and state". Here was the doctrine of equality, popular sovereignty, and the substance of the theory of inalienable rights clearly asserted by Wise at the opening of the eighteenth century, just as we have the principle of the consent of the governed stated by Hooker as early as 1638.

    When we take all these circumstances into consideration, it is but natural that the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence should open with a reference to Nature's God and should close in the final paragraphs with an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world and an assertion of a firm reliance on Divine Providence. Coming from these sources, having as it did this background, it is no wonder that Samuel Adams could say "The people seem to recognize this resolution as though it were a decree promulgated from heaven."

    No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology, the popular preaching of George Whitefield, had aroused the thought and stirred the people of the Colonies in preparation for this great event. No doubt the speculations which had been going on in England, and especially on the Continent, lent their influence to the general sentiment of the times. Of course, the world is always influenced by all the experience and all the thought of the past. But when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.

    Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished. In order that they might have freedom to express these thoughts and opportunity to put them into action, whole congregations with their pastors had migrated to the colonies. These great truths were in the air that our people breathed. Whatever else we may say of it, the Declaration of Independence was profoundly American.

    If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

    We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

    About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

    In the development of its institutions America can fairly claim that it has remained true to the principles which were declared 150 years ago. In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people. Even in the less important matter of material possessions we have secured a wider and wider distribution of wealth. The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guaranties, which even the Government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self government; the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction. But even in that we come back to the theory of John Wise that "Democracy is Christ's government". The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty.

    On an occasion like this a great temptation exists to present evidence of the practical success of our form of democratic republic at home and the ever broadening acceptance it is securing abroad. Although these things are well known, their frequent consideration is an encouragement and an inspiration. But it is not results and effects so much as sources and causes that I believe it is even more necessary constantly to contemplate. Ours is a government of the people. It represents their will. Its officers may sometimes go astray, but that is not a reason for criticizing the principles of our institutions. The real heart of the American Government depends upon the heart of the people. It is from that source that we must look for all genuine reform. It is to that cause that we must ascribe all our results.

    It was in the contemplation of these truths that the fathers made their declaration and adopted their Constitution. It was to establish a free government, which must not be permitted to degenerate into the unrestrained authority of a mere majority or the unbridled weight of a mere influential few. They undertook the balance these interests against each other and provide the three separate independent branches, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial departments of the Government, with checks against each other in order that neither one might encroach upon the other. These are our guaranties of liberty. As a result of these methods enterprise has been duly protected from confiscation, the people have been free from oppression, and there has been an ever broadening and deepening of the humanities of life.

    Under a system of popular government there will always be those who will seek for political preferment by clamoring for reform. While there is very little of this which is not sincere, there is a large portion that is not well informed. In my opinion very little of just criticism can attach to the theories and principles of our institutions. There is far more danger of harm than there is hope of good in any radical changes. We do need a better understanding and comprehension of them and a better knowledge of the foundations of government in general. Our forefathers came to certain conclusions and decided upon certain courses of action which have been a great blessing to the world. Before we can understand their conclusions we must go back and review the course which they followed. We must think the thoughts which they thought. Their intellectual life centered around the meeting-house. They were intent upon religious worship. While there were always among them men of deep learning, and later those who had comparatively large possessions, the mind of the people was not so much engrossed in how much they knew, or how much they had, as in how they were going to live. While scantily provided with other literature, there was a wide acquaintance with the Scriptures. Over a period as great as that which measures the existence of our independence they were subject to this discipline not only in their religious life and educational training, but also in their political thought. They were a people who came under the influence of a great spiritual development and acquired a great moral power.

    No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.

    ***************
    Happy Independence Day America! **************************

    In Congress, July 4, 1776.

    The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
    He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
    He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
    He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
    He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
    He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
    He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
    He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
    He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
    He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
    He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
    He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
    He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
    He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
    For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
    For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
    For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
    For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
    For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
    For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
    For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
    For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
    For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
    He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
    He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
    He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
    He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
    He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
    In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
    Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
    We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
    Georgia
    Button Gwinnett
    Lyman Hall
    George Walton

    North Carolina
    William Hooper
    Joseph Hewes
    John Penn

    South Carolina
    Edward Rutledge
    Thomas Heyward, Jr.
    Thomas Lynch, Jr.
    Arthur Middleton

    Massachusetts
    John Hancock

    Maryland
    Samuel Chase
    William Paca
    Thomas Stone
    Charles Carroll of Carrollton

    Virginia
    George Wythe
    Richard Henry Lee
    Thomas Jefferson
    Benjamin Harrison
    Thomas Nelson, Jr.
    Francis Lightfoot Lee
    Carter Braxton

    Pennsylvania
    Robert Morris
    Benjamin Rush
    Benjamin Franklin
    John Morton
    George Clymer
    James Smith
    George Taylor
    James Wilson
    George Ross

    Delaware
    Caesar Rodney
    George Read
    Thomas McKean

    New York
    William Floyd
    Philip Livingston
    Francis Lewis
    Lewis Morris

    New Jersey
    Richard Stockton
    John Witherspoon
    Francis Hopkinson
    John Hart
    Abraham Clark

    New Hampshire
    Josiah Bartlett
    William Whipple

    Massachusetts
    Samuel Adams
    John Adams
    Robert Treat Paine
    Elbridge Gerry

    Rhode Island
    Stephen Hopkins
    William Ellery

    Connecticut
    Roger Sherman
    Samuel Huntington
    William Williams
    Oliver Wolcott

    New Hampshire
    Matthew Thornton
    ]]>     13898     Answering ‘Somehow’: The Problem of the Ideological Observatory https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/06/answering-somehow-problem-of.html Sat, 20 Jun 2026 01:40:26 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=e8aec4cd9b3184ea822ac6f4535a4481 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. ]]>     13884     ‘Somehow’ – The Critical Insurrection being waged in the minds of our ‘Critical Thinkers’ https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/06/somehow-critical-insurrection-being.html Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:50:02 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=92ac6e68daa33e66c0d22e41d1ffc5a0 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 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!"
    , 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.

    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.

    ]]>     13882     Memorial Day – A day to remember those who died for… what? https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/05/memorial-day-day-to-remember-those-who.html Mon, 25 May 2026 13:39:06 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=fd38946080a979767636dc3718334285

    After all, unlike the service members of other nations around the world who pledge their lives in defense of the nation, or the homeland, or the government or crown, the members of our armed forces do not. They did at one time, prior to 1789 members of the armed forces swore allegiance to the United States of America, but afterwards, with some short lived variations for officers, members of our military first give their oath as:
    "I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;....",
    and only in pursuance of that, do they also swear
    "and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
    Although that is most assuredly a solemn service to the nation, their lives are not sworn primarily to the nation, or to the government or to the President. They swear to support, to defend and to protect against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance, to, the Constitution of the United States of America.

    Can any decent person, with that in mind, especially on this day, dare to think of that document as being simply a piece of paper? Or that the Constitution they sacrificed their lives for, was primarily created for the ability of politicians to jockey for power, to bargain for benefits and to increase the influence of one political party or another?

    I do so hope your answer to that is No.

    The Constitution is not simply a piece of paper, and it is far more than a set of rules to define how government is to operate. Its laws were created by men in order to preserve and protect that which is by nature necessary for our being able to live our lives as human beings. Not just regulations, but laws written under the principles of Natural Law, designed to harness men's baser (and also inalienable) faults - such as ambition for power - to serve the purpose of preserving and defending the highest of political aspirations: liberty and justice for all.

    The Constitution doesn't simply define our laws, but their limits.

    The Constitution, which would not have been passed by We The People, without the promise that it would be immediately amended with what became the Bill of Rights, those first ten amendments to it, is not simply paper, but words which harness the power of We The People to protect a select few rights which were understood as being necessary to prevent a tyrant from successfully rising amongst them or their posterity.

    The Constitution was not designed to make the operations of government efficient, smooth and easy, but was instead deliberately designed so that its branches and operations would serve to slow, stall, and kill any implement of power - aka: Law - which some significant body of representatives of We The People (whether in the House, Senate, Executive or Judiciary) might see as being a threat to their liberty to live as human beings.

    Those men and women we honor on Memorial Day served and died, not in defense of a government, or a leader, or for a piece of paper, but for the rule of laws which recognize, uphold and defend the right of human beings to live their own lives in liberty, and respectful of others right to do the same.

    Can we honestly honor the dead, without honoring what they gave their lives for?

    Please keep that in mind the next time you hear someone talking about getting around the Constitution - for the Constitution is the reason why there are so very, very many, whose lives are honored and memorialized on this day, and so very, very many others, whose lives were so deeply affected by their loss for the remainder of their days. ]]>     13874     Trolling the troll’s projections: The dark shadow of a he/him’s ‘Critical Thinking’ https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/05/trolling-trolls-projections-dark-shadow.html Wed, 20 May 2026 21:26:19 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=8f96f88c4bc8cbc4a3d1c786c7c35285 state university local college, that has presented me with a useful illustration of the pro-regressive mind and the failures of the practice of 'Critical Thinking' which that series is going to explore. But before getting into the meat of that... taking the 'Comment Banner' of my blog to heart (only visible in mobile mode now, I dunno why), I'm first going to have some fun with my troll to "...be suffered and battered with glee, Trolls will be fed and booted for free..."
    My greeting for trolls


    My email & blog had been free of this troll's shadow for a year or so, but my post on the ICE insurrectionists triggered it into commenting once again, which mostly amounted to:
    • "Why are you so stupid!?"
    • "Why are you think you're so smart!?"
    • "Why are you so racist!?"
    , and as he/him slid into the usual flurry of spastic comments which add nothing of value, I reinstated comment moderation on the blog once again. But then it occurred to me on looking through the gibberish he/him has submitted, that it might be instructive to take note of how the mind of an academic he/him troll operates, and what it considers to be meaningful and meaningless, as that demonstrates the mental signature of our 'educational system's ideal 'human resource'.

    The first thing one notices about this self-unaware troll who is paid to teach far too many students about Drama, is that despite expressing a lofty self image (mostly by way of telling me just how much more he/him understands, than I can ever hope to), the language he/him utilizes to 'engage with' opposing ideas, betrays a rather low turn of mind that is intent on crudely provoking emotional responses, and distracting from what he/him doesn't want said or read, which if unchecked, disintegrates, confuses, conflates, and subverts, the target audience - you, and me.

    The shadow of a troll
    He/him's latest comment happens to be one of he/him's more coherent efforts, which I've put in the inset half-way down this post to hit the lo-lights of, but before getting to that, I'd like to pick through a few of he/him's typical trollings to give you a feel for the dramatic atmosphere cultivated by this troll:
    "...The reason I found myself back here is because I happened to remember the fun we used to have, you posting bullshit on the internet, me pointing out how it makes no sense to anyone with an unwashed brain, and you refusing to learn anything at all -- the blog isn't about learning, after all, it's about proselyting everything you "know" to be right...."
    I first crossed paths with he/him several years ago on a CRT thread on facebook, which quickly devolved into he/him calling me names, misrepresenting what I'd said, denying what he/him'd said, and then as the untruths became too difficult to navigate, he/him deleted his original comment thread with all of my replies with it, and started in again from a different angle. As he/him's comments got nastier on my personal page and spilled over onto those of my friends & family, I blocked him, and as his manic attempts to comment shifted to this blog, I turned on comment moderation for only the second time in 15 years. He/him sent me emails too, but as I had no interest in or intention of engaging with someone who'd demonstrated how willing they were to mis-state, misrepresent, and outright lie, I imagine that on receiving no further attention, he/him thankfully faded away.

    IOW, despite this troll's smiling picture, the manner he/him expresses in those comments that've made it onto my posts, such as: "For want of a... word?...", and the worse ones which himsoph is more comfortable with making that didn't make the cut ("...so conceited... stupid...EVERY FUCKING COMMENT..." ), belies a person with a very angry chip on the shoulder, and little of value in he/him's wording to compensate for that, and so comment moderation is on once again.

    And yet... some of he/him's comments do give me a chuckle, such as:
    "...how many times are you gonna lean on the pronoun "joke," Van?"
    My dear shallowAsstro shadow, I'm not repeating the he/him pronoun "joke" just because I think it's amusing how defensive you are over what you attempt to identify as, I'm repeating it because including Trans-Friendly pronouns in your bio - especially as a teacher of other people's kids - is a sign of an understanding of identity that is based upon ideological appearances, and indicates an unbalanced mind in an unreasonable person. And seriously, when someone advertises the unbalanced nature of their worldview, it should be noted and pointed out, especially as the views you regularly espouse are even more extreme than the 'manifesto' of your fellow he/him teacher that shot up the Washington Correspondents' Dinner.

    Still more amusing is how aggravating it has apparently been to he/him that naming of their Blogger account after an 'Astro' van in honor of my first name, failed to get under my skin. I didn't think it was even worth half an eyebrow raise, but my use of 'asstro' and lack of acknowledgement of its van'ness, irritated our shallow shadow of a he/him:
    "...But if you hadn't yet realized my account was a spoof on yours, you've got some catching up to do, Van ..."
    Weirdly, he/him somehow assumed that someone named Van, who was raised in Van Nuys, and drove a Van, and has heard 'Van' jokes all his life, would somehow find the use of 'astro' to be inventive & full of startling wit. If they gave out participation trophies for trolling, he/him would surely deserve one.

    That is Sad. But it gets sadder still.


    He/him has recently taken to using my profile pic, as the profile pic of the blogger account he/him created to troll me with. Yup.

    When I complimented him on his upgrade, he/him updated the accounts' profile pic with a more recent picture of me (which my daughter took of me in my office, for promotional use by those who asked me to speak at their events, podcasts, or interviews), and submitted another delightful comment:
    "...Speaking of profile pictures, you positioned yourself in front of your impressive library of all the books from which you've read one line and immediately misunderstood the entire text -- the same library you use in every single image of yourself: this blog, the poorly made advertisements to the confusing "talks" you give, now this recorded podcast...."
    , and,
    "...Re: your likeness: is this some soft admission of a body image issue? Is that why you're still using a 20-year old profile photo? Or why your house only seem to have one room?..."
    My first reaction to that is that I'm not the one using other people's pictures for my profile pic! ദ്ദി( • ᴗ - ) ✧
    And next, what sort of man does the thought of "a body image issue" occur to? Oh... right, a 'he/him'... got it. Sad.

    As to the setting of my profile pic, the fact that books are central to the nature of this blog, and as my office is filled on all four walls with those books which I enjoy reading, it seems weirder to me that you'd ask why I set my profile pic "...in front of your impressive library of all the books", instead of seeing it as the most obvious setting for it (what else in my house would you prefer, the kitchen?). You may disagree. Enjoy that, won't you?

    As to why I haven't updated it in years, I was and still am quite pleased with having caught a pic of my wife adjusting the light behind my head in my office, and I have no interest in, and can see no reason for, updating it. And again, enjoy that, won't you?

    I'll grant you, a he/him might find it weird that someone might find enjoyment in their wife, their office, and the books they've gathered over the course of a lifetime, but what I think is really weird, is that a drama professor who dislikes me, my way of thinking, and my blogging about that, would give even a second thought to me or my blog... let alone engage in sustaining a manic spate of submitting such 'thoughts' as he/him has, to me.

    Sad, sad, sad.

    As to "...misunderstood the entire text...", it's no surprise that the possibility of coming to differing judgments is an alien concept to our shallow wacademic troll, but I'm very much aware that two people can read the same book carefully and all the way through, and come away with very different interpretations of its meaning and implications - that's not (necessarily) a result of subjective relativism, but can be because of how much attention one does, or hasn't given, to connecting the concepts down to their metaphysical roots (hi he/him!).

    For my part, some of what I've learned from those books in my 'impressive library', and from life, is that what you 'know', doesn't make you smart, or wise, or able to reason well. But doing so does give you the means to check other people's statements against what has been said, and helps in forming a model for attempting to reason your way through a matter (rather than asserting, accusing, and insulting), to your best understanding of what something means in the context of what you can understand to be real and true, and what that portends.

    What I offer on this blog, is my effort to do just that. For most healthy people, if my take is not to their liking, this blog is ever so easy for them to avoid. But for he/him... not so much.

    That's both sad, and weird, but does anyone else wonder what the 'root cause' of this weirdness is? He/him expresses the same weirdness by peppering his comments to me with other such assertions, such as that I:
    "...sure seem to want to present yourself as an intellectual -- while spending all your time attacking the people who actually put in that work..."
    , and I guess my first response to that is: Is this the kind of language and behavior that a he/him thinks of as being the norm for an 'intellectual'?

    But to he/him's point, I have no interest in being seen as an 'intellectual', not because I think "the work of the mind" is in any way bad, or that I wouldn't leap at the opportunity to spend all my time doing that for a living, but because the term is typically used just as he/him-soph is doing, to insinuate that having an interest in and knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, is somehow above the heads of the 'typical' plumber (or software developer). But such interests are not and should not be thought of as being out of the reach of 'regular people' - having and pursuing such interests was considered the norm for any respectable person from our Founders' era through the mid-1800s - and I not only distrust those who use such terms to portray such interests and pursuits as something 'exceptional' and beyond the reach of 'most people', I roundly condemn them for doing 'that work'.

    And as to he/him's tired charge that:
    "...You're very good at assuming you're smarter than/more correct than everyone in the room;..." and that "...You immediately continue this self-superior vanity by saying that you were immediately more informed than ALL OF WRITTEN ACADEMIC HISTORY..."
    , the fact is that unlike some trolls that come to mind, you won't find me portraying myself on my blog, or anywhere else, as being smarter than other people nor do I make a habit of calling those people who disagree with me: 'stupid' - in fact I often caution against that, as such easy and satisfying assumptions tend to blind you to your own mis-assessments.

    What's instructive about he/him's comment though, is how often such charges come from what is expected of me to think and do, because of what he/him assumes I must be ( Hi Descartes!: "...I might take, as a general rule, the principle, that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true..."). What I have learned, and what he/him's schools should have ensured that he/him had learned before being let loose to instruct students in their thinking, is that the first person to question in any disagreement, is yourself. If I don't see an obvious issue with my take (and yes, sometimes I do... sometimes 'the moment' gets away from any of us), then I try to question the person I'm talking with, about what the basis for their position is, and see if I can square that with what I understand to be real and true, and how they think I've got that wrong. What I don't do in such disagreements, is presume that their position is a result of a lack of intelligence on their part.

    When, IMHO, someone is uninformed or otherwise seems to be failing to take note of relevant history & philosophy, I try to pose those questions that are most likely to reveal what it seems to me to have been missed. It doesn't always work, but it's always worth trying.

    I didn't always do that, I was once (!) an arrogant little know-it-all, as I've noted in posts and interviews (which, BTW, he/him really dislikes), about the time I was brought face to face with the most obnoxious of opponents - me - by a friend of mine who, realizing how full of myself I was on a subject, saw that if rather than wasting time on bandying answers back & forth with me, he asked me a few questions that required some thoughtful responses from me, he could bring me face to face with mysoph and hoist me on my own petard:
    "... when the questions a friend asked me about the statements of knowledgeable authorities that I'd been repeating & defending as if they were unquestionably true, led me to recognize that... they just weren't so. And worse for those labels that I'd taken pride in wearing, once I began following those questions that he'd raised, it didn't take long to realize that those authorities I was turning to next, for help in defending the first ones with, weren't any better..."
    It was following that encounter, that I discovered that I was not only mistaken, but that who I'd taken to be TWKB (Those Who Know Best), were themselves either mistaken or misrepresenting what was available to be known by anyone who bothered to look beyond the carefully selected quotations they'd been commenting on, and that is what sent me on my Blogodidactic quest to go back to Homer and begin reading my way forward in time through the original sources myself, rather than solely trusting to other's commentary on them. A key point there, is that I went back to see for myself - not because I thought that I was so brilliant, but because I'd realized that I'd been worse than ignorant; I'd been comfortable with being one of those "who knows so much that just isn't so", which was a realization that rattled me enough, that the memory of it keeps me on my toes to this day. Whatever conclusions I've come to, I have come to them the hard way, and when confronted with opposing views, I question both those views and my takes on them, as a means of deepening my understanding.

    Honest criticism is a great value. Trolling... not so much.

    How relevant can a troll be?
    Ok, troll whacking aside, how is this wacademic's trolling relevant to you? It's tempting to write this all off as the shallow drama of a weird teacher that's not worth giving another thought to. That drama isn't what is worth our attention here. While it is sad that our shallow shadow of a he/him seems utterly unable and/or unwilling to consider opposing views as honest judgments, or to question he/him's own assumptions (gasp!), or to entertain the possibility that things could be other than he/him presumes them to be, but what is worth taking note of, is that 'somehow' someone that our educational system has groomed into being a professor that's worthy of instructing college students in their thinking, 'somehow' thinks that it's appropriate to respond to differences of opinion, with 'thoughts' such as:
    "...your impressive library of all the books from which you've read one line and immediately misunderstood the entire text..."
    Our shallow shadow of a college professor clearly assumes that disagreeing with he/him's assessment 'is proof' that you're either a fool or that you haven't read more than one line of a book, which he - a college professor - expresses in such arbitrary and baseless assumptions and insults as shown here and worse ones not shown, and all made with the expectation - hope - that they would be publicly viewable. That he/him considers such 'criticisms' worthy of he/him's position (and, by extension, of the institutions he/him represents), adds to the already abundant evidence that behavior such as that is the strange fruit of our 'educational' system.


    Critical Thnking in action!
    No doubt some, maybe even he/him, would reply:
    "That's not fair, we teach students how to engage in critical thinking! This was just a case of responding to a perceived injustice!"
    , and I'd reply
    "Yes. You teach thinking as a skill, as a technology to be utilized where its useful in much the same way as a cordless drill is, and laid aside where not, in much the same way a slave is taught useful skills. What you don't do, is educate a person into understanding and caring about what is good and worthwhile, and how to recognize and behave in accordance with that, in every aspect of their life. IOW: Education."
    Now, fun & jabs aside, I assume that Shadow Zimmerman is probably, to his friends, family, acquaintances, students, etc., a decent, intelligent, caring kind of guy. But with such comments as these in mind, what also comes to mind is the old saw that writing your thoughts down (even in a comment box) produces more structured and coherent thought than simply speaking your mind does, and so I do wonder what sort of real-time stream-of-consciousness version of these comments to me, might follow from he/him encountering another person's 'wrongthink' in person, and in the moment? And I do wonder how aware most people are of how someone that is so chockfull of 'thinking skills' as he/him is (with little or no apparent foundation for them), might suddenly 'express himself' when encountering 'wrongthink' in the moment? And what sort of behavior might accompany that?
    Ladies & Gentlemen, I present to you: The 'Critical Thinking' of a he/him/his college professor:

    "Hi, Van!

    I think the fun back-and-forth is over for you, but I can't help but point out a fun little inconsistency in two posts two weeks apart from 2021. I wish I had done more back then to challenge the silliness of your arguments, rather than just attack the obvious false statement that no social studies textbook excludes information on Jefferson being a slave owner.

    Aaaaanyway. I noticed that in this post you offer an amuse bouche of your silly theory on diversity that you were nearly brave enough to read aloud in a room of your peers. God I wish that would've happened and I could've been there. You're very good at assuming you're smarter than/more correct than everyone in the room; but incorrectly white-mansplaining racism in the classroom to a Black teacher with a PhD in education is especially misdirected.

    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaanywayyyyyy. In this post you say that diversity is a given between "any three" Americans, but that valuing this diversity is "unAmerican" because "to value diversity as such in America, is to value what divides one person from one another, and to focus upon that will rend them apart through the failure to focus upon what there is that is present to each of us which could and should bring us all together as one." VERY interesting to see the "Classic AmErIcAn liberal" argue for such a collective emphasis here. It's sorta counter to almost everything you say. Hell, you don't even identify as a "classic liberal" anymore, because classic liberalism actually respects every individual's right to self-knowledge and self-guidance. Your new label is as liberal as the Nazis were socialist.

    Not only is emphasizing "what should bring us all together as one" counter your whole schtick, it ALSO contradicts your attack on "inclusion" from that stupid speech that never was. You say there that inclusion is bad, because it's "a collectivist term which is not urging the use of good manners in welcoming and including everyone, It explicitly means recognizing only those traits that are approved of as being representative of a group (which is itsell bigotted at best), and entails actively condemning any individual choices that vary from those Inclusive Identities."

    So, let me get this straight: inclusion is bad because it doesn't honor individual traits, only those shared by the group? Yet diversity is also bad, but ONLY WHEN it... honors individual traits instead of those shared by the group? What the fuck?


    Is that being too harsh? It's all too clear that our shallow shadow of a he/him is far from being the only 'educated' person who exercises 'Critical Thinking' like a fool skating upon thin ice (see 'critical thinker' video in inset). And if any still doubt that... perhaps we should ask those at the recent White House Correspondents' Dinner for their thoughts on what sort of behavior they'd expect to receive from an 'educated' he/him identifying teacher of the year?

    No, I'm not simply casting aspersions, I'm asking a serious question: Is he/him teaching that manner of 'thinking' to he/him's students? It seems to me to be pretty farfetched to think that that's not the case, and that, I think, is something for all of us to be concerned about, and it is what goes to the center of the issue that the coming series of posts will be diving into - what are our schools teaching, when teaching 'Critical Thinking'?

    Of the 'inconsistencies' he/him says he wants to point out (because they are objectively untrue, or because they conflict with a narrative?), he/him whines:
    "...I wish I had done more back then to challenge the silliness of your arguments..."
    , in reaction to what I'd noted had occurred at a school board meeting, which had myself and the crowd groaning outloud:
    "...a lady who claimed that she was 'raised a good conservative', and was shocked, shocked I tell you, when she left the backwoods of Missouri and went away to college and discovered that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. We were also treated to a speech by a student currently in the 12th grade, who also claimed that she never knew that Thomas Jefferson had owned slaves until someone outside of school enlightened her..."
    The lady who made the claim in 2020, was in her 20's. I was on Missouri's 2017 Curriculum Framework committee for Missouri's school curriculum - grades 6 to 12 - part of which involved examining and discussing the previous curriculum framework which was what was in place throughout the whole of her schooling, and unless she paid no attention in school (or to anything in media), that wasn't possible. On top of that, anyone who's had kids in our schools over the last 20 years, knows damn well that one of the most consistently repeated lessons in those SS books, worksheets, and 'recommended readings', is that of drilling home that "THE FOUNDING FATHERS WERE SLAVE OWNERS!!!", and their claim to have been somehow ignorant of that, was what made their comments so obviously ridiculous.

    He/him responded with:
    "... your silly theory on diversity that you were nearly brave enough to read aloud in a room of your peers. God I wish that would've happened and I could've been there..."
    Firstly, trolls we've got enough of at school board meetings.

    Secondly, I'm happy to report that I've repeated that 'silly theory' of mine in much greater detail in presentations to audiences (a slide from one of those here), to radio & podcast hosts, to legislators, and directly to state and local administration and faculty. What he/him is unwilling or unable to identify about the identity politics of 'Diversity', is what I go into in those presentations and in posts like this series, where any honest reading of the original sources reveals that 'Diversity' is intended to instill divisiveness through the manipulation of appearances that are intentionally deceiving, so as to achieve ideological and political ends. The slide notes that the harsh realities DEI delivers are a direct result of its promises:
    • What we're led to expect when Diversity is promised, is a sense of ‘Everyone is invited!’, but what we immediately experience is the population being divided up into 'protected classes' (few concepts are more un- and anti-American than that) like "... BIPOC, non-Black POC and gender fluid, non-binary, two spirit...", etc, while unprotected classes and those 'adjacent' to them are found wanting and are increasingly excluded from polite discussion.
    • We see Equity promising more fairness, but what we immediately get are quotas that require unequal treatment in order to force equal (meaning: 'equal' + penalty points) outcomes where all the tall poppies are cut down to an 'equitable solution'. 
    • We see Inclusion promised as “Welcoming”, but what we immediately get are lists of words & actions deemed to be non-inclusive and potentially offensive to some marginalized classes, and so power will be used to exclude them and fix the 'injustice' through enforced conformity of speech and action. IOW: ‘this is what *democracy* looks like!’
    • What we see is that DEI appears to be all about Race & *whiteness* - don’t let the enemy choose the battlefield for you to fight on – it's a trap! DEI is about power, and race is just the most convenient means of seizing more of it
    But being as he/him views the world through a post-modernist lens that denies our ability to understand anything to be objectively true, right, or wrong, he/him isn't making such graphic comments because he/him thinks I'm 'wrong', or only as the histrionics of a drama queen, but as a demonstration of the narrative nature of how he/him was taught to react to and denounce 'wrongthink'.

    Likewise with he/him's criticisms of my reading comprehension, is he/him's utter failure to comprehend (or abide by) the meaning of the words he/him uses & abuses in those comments against my post on E Pluribus Unum. I'd said regarding race, creed, color, etc. in America, that "...any gathering of three or more people will be filled with such diversity..." and that the reality is that those particular differences are both prevalent and irrelevant, because what really matters are those principles which the Declaration of Independence identify as the foundations of America, and it's those that are the true strength which unites us through the common human nature we all share in. It's our recognition of that which makes liberty and justice for all, possible and attainable. To which he/him replied:
    " ...VERY interesting to see the "Classic AmErIcAn liberal" argue for such a collective emphasis here. It's sorta counter to almost everything you say....."
    Firstly, seeing that key principles are Common to all, is not the same as or equal to imposing Collective policies upon all! The "Collective" concept of diversity is a quantitative one which derives its power from collecting as many quantities of adherents into as large a basket of fragmented identities as possible, to force the desired outcomes. OTOH, the principles of the Declaration are qualitative, in that they are as real and true and vitally important about the nature of being human for one person, as they are for three hundred millions of them, and they do not vary amongst them.

    Having the frame of mind that views the world through principles, rather than particularities, is what enables a person who's concerned with what is real and true and meaningful, to unite with any other essentially likeminded person, in a state of liberty established under a rule of law that's dedicated to upholding those ideals, regardless of any accidentals of birth, sex, class, color, or ethnicity. The prevalence of that understanding was what enabled Jefferson to propose those pillars of the Declaration of Independence, such as:
    "...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..."
    , as 'an expression of the American mind', and pointing that out and pointing it out often, has pretty much been the point of nearly everything I've said and done here.

    In equating those principles with collective thinking, he/him fails to understand (or deliberately misrepresents) that DEI is an ideological construct for gaining political power in a manner that is fundamentally oppossed to America's founding upon the qualitative reality of our common human nature. As DEI's supporters are both unwilling and unable to acknowledge that, he/him can only denigrate the latter by misconstruing it as a 'collective emphasis' that:
    "...contradicts your attack on "inclusion" from that stupid speech that never was..."
    DEI 's inclusion, excludes the Declaration's self-evident truths, the Imago Dei of one human nature, that enables Americans to become Out of Many, One, while retaining our unique differences as accents which everyone can engage with, appreciate, and engage in without anyone being reduced to, or ordered about on behalf of them (St. Patrick's Day, Chinatown, Cinco de Mayo, etc.).

    Having no argument against those concepts that endanger DEI's narrative, he/him resorts to ridicule, insult, and misidentifying the principle of all men are created equal regardless of accidents of birth and 'identity', as "a collective emphasis", and for arguing against that narrative, he/him labels me as being "... as liberal as the Nazis were socialist. ..." [which is truer than he/him fears, see W.E.B. DuBois pic quote].

    It is of course possible - however unlikely - that he/him simply misunderstands what I mean, but of course if understanding what is and is not real and true was important to he/him, he/him wouldn't 'identify' as a he/him, and whether or not he/him understands the matter, he/him hates the concept so much that he/him would rather see it destroyed, than risk it being communicated to others.

    Just for fun: W.E.B. DuBois comparing the variations of how both Communism & Nazism implement Socialism
    Here's the issue: he/him's quantitative view engages in a conceptual 'See and Say' level of word recognition that is blind to the underlying meaning those concepts that are integrated into, under, and through them - more like arranging Scrabble letters on a flat surface, than building a structure up and out with Lego blocks - he/him requires only the shallowest of appearances sake to 'justify' yelling 'racist!' to attract a diverse quantity of likewinded allies into collective actions, no matter how incompatible their interests might be (hello supporters of Hamas & LGBTQ), so as to negate those qualities that would enable people to achieve real unity, and he/him feels 'good' about the virtue signaling of doing so. That's Critical Theory, in practice, and what's interesting is that the substance of it was being practiced long before Adorno & the Frankfurt School came up with the moniker of 'Critical Theory' (more on that to come).

    He/him declares:
    "...You say there that inclusion is bad, because it's "a collectivist term which is not urging the use of good manners in welcoming and including everyone..."
    No, you sad shallow shadow of a he/him, I said those pretty promises of manners and the like are how DEI gets the power to do what it does, not why DEI is bad. I say why DEI is bad, is because it is destructive to that principled understanding which enabled America to adopt the motto of 'Out of many, one", and because it is opposed to the revolutionary understanding gained by uniting around principles of what are real and true, rather than chasing after meaningless & divisive particularities of race, class, sex, etc.. DEI is hostile to what makes it possible to achieve governing a nation "Of the people, by the people, for the people", and most of all I say DEI is bad, because DEI's nature is to portray what is false, as being true, in order to gain and maintain power over society (Hi SPLC!), and because what all that amounts to is evil, I say that DEI is (at best) bad.

    Knowingly or not, what he/him is implicitly affirming through he/him's pronouns and shallow thinking, is portraying what is evil, as being 'good'. And so I unreservedly say that DEI is not only bad, but that those indoctrinated into its methods are too often unable to recognize that, which is how DEI transforms the woke into a real and present danger to our (and their) happiness and prosperity.

    But he/him is not just innocently mistaken about any of this, he/him has gone to college, studied abroad, has been and is employed as a professor (now(?) at Yuma AWC college), and he/him's offensive manner, willingness to insult and deride, and feel superior in the process, are attributes of the ideal that our school systems aim at seeding into their students habits of thought. He/him promotes the narrative that blinds he/him to the racist nature of being arrested by surface attributes of skin color and 'mansplaining' (what a concept for a he/him!), and scans for particular narrative 'answers' that can be associated by appearance and added to the quantities used by likewinded people to 'justify' not only forcing their position upon those who disagree (AKA: Activism - check your school's grade-level expectations), but to then indoctrinate the children of those who don't accept the narrative, which they've determined is 'right think'.

    It's that manner of thinking that matters, because those involved in seeking after surface answers to support their resentful purposes, is a proven path to injury, death, and ruin, on a local, national, and worldwide scale, and it is dangerous to write off this shallow shadow of a he/him's positions on DEI, as just a pathetic narrative, as he/him's virtue signaling has roots that are both broadly shared and which run deep, reaching back to Mao's Cultural Revolution, the USSR's Holodomor, the Nazi Holocaust, and on back through the Terror of the French Revolution, to Rousseau's theory of the General Will, which is what enabled such differing events, purposes, and even opposing narratives, to achieve real and terrifying political power, over and over again.
    No Rousseau!


    Each variation relies upon the pragmatic 'See and Say' (abandoning metaphysical realism for the verbal putty of nominalism) mindset of seeking approved answers to bring about useful ends, instead of a principled understanding. This is the point of the end of he/him's comment above, accusing me of not seeing that what Rousseau literally said, was that:
    "...If a legislator begins using their particular will to guide the laws of the land instead of the general will of the state's subjects, they are no longer in a way Rousseau argues is good..."
    , and for he/him, the words are neatly arranged like scrabble tiles or verbal selfies to direct attention 'The words are right there! Are you blind?!', and anyone pointing out what those words actually mean, imply, and have enabled in practice (in what way does Rousseau's General Will restrain the Legislator from imposing their will upon the people?), is, in he/him's conceptual 'See and Say' mindset, an illiterate reading of what's right there on the surface of the page in black and white and red all over ( as words severed from meaning tend to be).

    And there you have the surface seekers problematic pattern in a nutshall:
    Yes - it is a fact that right there on the surface in black & white, Rousseau says the Legislator should align with the General Will of popular opinion.
    No - That does not in any way ensure 'liberty', or express concern for individual rights (it damns them with faint praise for 'human rights' (which mask the collectivist's repudiation of them)), it only ensures that those who don't bother to understand what words and concepts mean and must mean when put into practice (and restrained how?), jeopardize themselves and everyone else, by blinding them to the disaster that will follow from putting those words into practice, as its supporters excuse those failures on technicalities.
    Years ago I used to wonder how people like he/him didn't understand that if 'the people' (or those claiming to speak for them) wanted to 'round up da Joos! and gas them!', then in any system operating under the power of the General Will, the Legislator would use that power to do just that, without any pesky principles of individual rights slowing them down. But it has since become apparent to me that they do get it, and that they do want 'the state' to have that power - so long as the he/hims' control it - to force 'right think' upon all that engage in 'wrongthink'.

    No doubt he/him fans of Rousseau will yelp at that, but the fact is that Rousseau began his theories by asserting that those most basic individual rights found in property & marriage were the egregious errors and abuses at the root of society's problems (decades before Marx), and saw marriage and all responsibilities as impinging upon and corrupting the hedonistic state of the noble savage's 'free love' eden:
    "...whereas in this primitive state, as there were neither houses nor cabins, nor any kind of property, every one took up his lodging at random, and seldom continued above one night in the same place; males and females united without any premeditated design, as chance, occasion, or desire brought them together, nor had they any great occasion for language to make known their thoughts to each other. They parted with the same ease..."
    , and that civilization's invention of language, marriage, and property brought ruin, because:
    "... with love arose jealousy; discord triumphed, and human blood was sacrificed to the gentlest of all passions.."
    , for as Rousseau 'reasoned', what came of people allowing people to defend that property which they created, doomed us all::
    "... The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows..."
    , and in that origin, the collective of 'society' is pitted against, and must be made to triumph over, not only the individual, but the very nature of what a human being is. This theory of the General Will, recognizes and values an individual person only in regards to their adding to the quantity of bodies that provide 'democracy's power to direct and control behavior by imposing this or that policy upon all, for the 'Common Good'. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' in such a world as that, there's only what the power of the General Will seems to support... and who it is that decides what that is, is the Legislator, who Rousseau imagines possessing:
    "...This sublime reason, far above the range of the common herd, is that whose decisions the legislator puts into the mouth of the immortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move..."
    What, are you going to tell me that Rousseau says 'right there in black and white!' that the Legislator should live up to his fine ideals? Well, pardon me as I point out that in the mind of the Legislator and their supporters, they are, and always have been, and always will identify as having the very finest of ideals, which they must have the power to implement as idealistically (read: ruthlessly) as seems to them to be necessary, as was expressed right after Rousseau's time by the 'Incorruptible' Maximillian Robespierre, justifying and celebrating The Terror of the French Revolution:
    "...The hatred of bad faith and tyranny burns in our hearts along with the love of justice and the fatherland. Our blood flows for the cause of humanity. This is our prayer, these are our sacrifices. This is the cult we offer you...."
    "...the metaphysical firewall
    of God-given inalienable rights ..."
    , which was echoed a century later in the German Fatherland through Carl Schmidt's 'Führer Principle', and by Lenin, and then Stalin, and Mao, and Pol Pot, Che and Castro, etc., - each of whom had their disagreements with particulars of Rousseau's ideas, but fully embraced and utilized the spirit of his General Will to breach what Courtenay Turner calls the "the metaphysical firewall..." of the nature of what a human being is, and without which, their "...God-given inalienable rights" are simply denied for the 'Common Good'.

    NOTE: The 'Legislator' doesn't utilize the General Will as an opponent to 'democracy' - far from it - those who see themselves as being 'Those Who Know Best' (the he/hims of their day) utilize 'democracy' as the justification for their exercising power without restraint, and the individual who objects is seen as an obstacle to their serving the 'Common Good', and so, as Rousseau said, that:
    "...means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free;"
    That is not enlightened thinking, it is not a call for liberty, it's only how modern Pro-Regressives cover up for engaging in their ancient and barbarous quest for power over all.

    Truly revolutionary thinking!
    In the same way that a he/him will assert that "Communism will work this time...! If we just....", even though a meaningful understanding of what that means demonstrates that it will inevitably fail horrifically every time it's attempted, and it will do so because when the General Will is bound to the power of the state, through the Legislator, and is unrestrained from violating individual rights to achieve its aims, then structurally speaking that system has, does, and must, lead to tyranny & oppression. Every single time it's tried.

    And you should most definitely keep in mind that Rousseau's smiling face can be found in probably every 'soCIal sTudIEs' book in America, as a defender of 'Liberty!' (get your kids out of the schools!).

    The truly revolutionary concept of our Founding Fathers, is that the nature of what a human being is, is what individual rights are derived from (to think, speak, act, associate, defend the fruits of such actions, etc), and which must be upheld and defended in order to have a just society. That is utterly incomprehensible and offensive to such shadows of a he/him, who see only physical attributes and utilize 'our democracy' to provide the cover for those mass quantities of people supposedly in agreement with he/him, to ensure that power is what will be imposed "über alles" (the General Will donchaknow).

    But even worse than he/him's bizarre and anti-American ideology, is the fact that he/him was taught to think this way, and it is that manner of thinking that modern education has been instilling in Americans for generations, and as the existing memory of the old habits and manners fade away, it has been taking over our public conversations and interactions.

    All is very much not well with 'Critical Thinking' in America, and we'll see how and why that came to pass, in the coming series of posts. ]]>     13872     Remember: The shot heard ’round the world, drew blood – Lexington & Concord, April 19,1775 https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/04/remember-shot-heard-round-world-drew.html Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:35:00 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=ad8970c17e7a97d63955d6c5ce7b62ed The shot heard 'round the world' needs to be heard again, another reposting: 

    The shot wasn't heard around the world to protect an adolescent desire to do whatever you please, it was heard and echoed on down through the ages to give birth to Liberty, and to take up its often weighty responsibility.

    Before you blather thoughtlessly on about 'my rights!', take some time to think upon what they actually mean, and what heavy costs are attendant to them. Honor those who first made Liberty a reality, treat it as something more than a glittery trinket.

    The shot heard 'round the world, drew blood. If you've forgotten that; remember it. If you never knew it, it's your responsibility to give more than a little consideration to it, and to why it might be that you were never made aware of that self-evident truth.

    The shot heard 'round the world was fired at Lexington & Concord, April 19, 1775, may it echo ever on.

    Concord Hymn
    By Ralph Waldo Emerson
    Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837

    By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
       Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
    Here once the embattled farmers stood
       And fired the shot heard round the world.

    The foe long since in silence slept;
       Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
    And Time the ruined bridge has swept
       Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

    On this green bank, by this soft stream,
       We set today a votive stone;
    That memory may their deed redeem,
       When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

    Spirit, that made those heroes dare
       To die, and leave their children free,
    Bid Time and Nature gently spare
       The shaft we raise to them and thee.


    ]]>     13854     For want of a… word? Or of an understanding that should be named? https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2026/04/for-want-of-word-or-of-understanding.html Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:05:00 +0000 http://www.stlouisteaparty.com/?guid=18a75ac0fae05490de33186fdd761e11 For want of a... word? Or of an understanding that should be named?
    For Want of a Nail (1629)
    For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
    For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
    For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
    For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
    For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost,
    And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
    “Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give their opinions.”
    ― Nicolás Gómez Dávila
    The old poem "For want of a nail...", shows how a seemingly small issue, can lead to catastrophic consequences. One such seemingly small issue that continually arises today, is our inability to name what most threatens our interests, and so, it's argued, for want of a word, we have to make do with a confusing flurry of words like Woke, Leftist, Extremist, Hard Right, RINO, Commie, Progressive, Woke Left and Woke Right/Woke Reich/Weak Reich, and so on, and on, and on, which further confuses the issue (at best). For want of this missing word, or words, so the argument goes, we cannot agree on what we should or shouldn't do to put matters right, and so for want of that, we in The West risk losing our world to endless waves of ideological assaults.

    The question I have is, is the problem really a matter of our want of a word, or is it our habit of naming every seemingly new issue that arises without first identifying what the real problem actually is, which leads us to having an issue that's less one of our being in want of a word, than one of having an abundance of names for problems (many? One?) that we haven't yet either appropriately identified or named? Perhaps a bit of both? Maybe, but I suspect that if we handled the latter, it'd go a long way towards resolving the former.

    The underlying problem with using these terms (Left/Right, Woke, etc.,) is that the attempt to make ideological diagnoses of such problems, across whichever fields of philosophy, theology, art, science, politics, etc., is the very process of naming and inflaming that ideologies engage people in to heat their tempers up, and to draw them into their ideological solutions, while successfully evading any substantial identification of the actual problems which they all have in common (don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg!).

    It's not enough to call our pet peeves - or each other - names, when we haven't identified what it is that we're calling them names for, and why. Worse, failing to attend to first things first, enables all sides to claim to be trying to make progress, and ensures that the answers given to the question of "What is Progress?", will be "Progress is what we're doing!", and that regress is "what they're doing!", as each side accuses the 'other side' of being reactionary, hidebound, stupid, commie, capitalist, etc..

    First off, IMHO, we need to understand what it is that we're trying to name, before we can tell how and why this or that word does or doesn't apply, and what to do about them. Do that first, and I'm willing to bet that we'll soon make progress towards identifying any other word or words that we're in want of.

    Progress begins...
    Where to start? Well, IMHO, our first step should be to identify what can be recognized by us today, as having been not just a mark of Progress since the beginning of recorded history, but one that preceded progress in every other field of philosophy, theology, art, science, and politics, etc. Significantly, as we're often told that religion is man's first systematic set of beliefs about the world and our place within it, I think it's safe to say that when religion stopped demanding human sacrifice in the lands that would become The West, and started praising what was true and ethically just, that must surely rank as a, if not the, first example of meaningful progress, in the history of mankind.

    Should we ask why that was a measure of progress? Without getting into trite praises for 'Reason!' (which this turn doesn't necessarily prove or justify), it may be more worthwhile to point out what that change of direction marked a turning away from. Leaving aside the obvious issues which ceasing to practice human sacrifice meant that people no longer had to contend with, the unvarnished purpose of such sacrifice is to influence, gain, or claim to be able to, control the source of ultimate power over us, which means that Power itself is what was being sought and worshipped by means of human sacrifice. That worship of power, which is not limited to human sacrifice, entails violence, terror, uncertainty, unpredictability, and the pervasive feeling that that which you've made most central to your life, is a direct threat to it. Whether or not we've fully turned away from that manner of thinking, ceasing to practice human sacrifice, was at least a recognition that we should turn away from that as an acceptable pursuit, and that was not only a mark of real progress, but a standard which all additional progress can be measured by, even (especially?) today.

    OTOH, when the object of worship is that which commands you to engage in ethical behavior towards the world, towards your family & fellows, even towards your livestock, and holds that the creator of them all doesn't just value Truth & Justice, but is thought by them to be the essence & embodiment of what is real and true and good and just, then those who live with that belief at the center of their lives, are going to be infinitely more open to engaging in trust, friendship, family, and community, and consequently, that community is going to be far more conducive to pursuing (and towards understanding what it is that makes) lives that are worth living.

    Whatever opinion that people might have of religion today, the step of turning away from the former form of it, and towards the latter form, was a monumentally significant example of meaningful progress, and what Moses and the Jews wrote down for us in The Bible, is what most obviously put The West on the path out of circular prehistory, and onto the path of true progress.

    The Rule of Law in Progress or Regress
    * pt 1: The Lawful scares of October... and beyond
    * pt 2:Why a Govt of Laws, and not of men?
    * pt 3:Who Benefits from transforming Rules into Laws
    * pt 4:We hold these truths to be self evident
    * pt 5:Thoughtful Images - Turning to the Rule of Law without turning away
    * pt 6a:Snapping snap judgments, lest auld acquaintance be forgot
    * pt 6b:Locke's Lab for DIY Political Science Experiments
    * pt 6c:Property - The Progress of Cause and Effect into Life and Law
    * pt 7:Artificial Reason turns the Pen into the might of the sword
    * pt 8:Mutating Justice into injustice: the far reaching properties of Property
    * pt 9a:Trick or Treating like it's 1984
    * pt 9b: Perverting Progress into Poison - the Doppelganger Strikes Back
    * pt 9c: Perverting Progress into Poison - How Pro-Regressives see Regress as Progress
    Progress continues...
    On the other side of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian hyphenation, the Greek's are responsible for taking two giant steps towards progress as well. Firstly, by advancing beyond the habitual submission to the rule of brutal and arbitrary tyranny, by entrusting their society to the reasonable possibility that they and their fellows were capable of engaging in the effort of self-governance together, which began moving control over the levers of power towards those decisions that could be made through reasoned argument, and away from the arbitrary whims of a powerful tyrant. Secondly, the Greek's development of theatrical Drama, which put tangible ideas before the consideration of the people, was another step of real progress that was a value in and of itself, and which set the stage for the development of philosophy.

    Each of these steps moved early western society away from the sense of its people having no understanding of, or control over, lives that were lived in a fearful state of unpredictability, and moved them towards having lives that could be founded upon understanding and trust. That movement away from merely surviving under fearful & undefined notions imposed upon them by those in power, and towards conscious consideration of being able to understand what is meaningful, and why that is, is the essence of progress.

    Those two steps also served to move the Greeks away from the word games and mystifications of the sophists and their claims that Might makes 'Right', and towards the attempt to identify what's real and true, and towards moving the mind away from fog and darkness, and towards clarity and light. Both of these had a significant impact on both the lives of those in their community, and of those other communities that became aware of their ideas, and sought to emulate them.
    NOTE: Greek Democracy did not mean peace and safety for their society - see Thucydides' Melian Dialog - but it did introduce the expectation that reasoned argument should be involved in both the exercise and restraint of power, and that was progress.

    The Greek's development of Philosophy - the love of Wisdom (a hat-tip to Proverbs is in order) - rested upon Aristotle's first rule of thought, that:
    • a thing cannot both be and not be in the same time and context (Law of non-contradiction)
    , and what he identified as being the fundamental rules for logic, requiring:
    1. that all terms must be clear and unambiguous,
    2. that premises must be true,
    3. that conclusions must follow from those premises;
    , and these led to an orderly interest in, and respect for what is real and true, and brought clarity to the worthwhile thoughts and actions of those living within their society.

    Progress isn't all Greek to the West...
    The Romans advanced upon the Greeks understanding of politics and law, with the more orderly and effective form of republican government based upon the Rule of Law - with Law understood to be "...The law is reason unaffected by desire..." (from Aristotle), as well as the understanding that Laws must be reasonable "True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions" or else they are no law at all (from Cicero). That too stands as another indicator of real, tangible, progress, as they brought more clarity, predictability, and accountability, to the lives of those living within their communities.

    Christianity then introduced the world of the Greeks & Romans to the recognition & belief that each individual person, regardless of birth or status, as not only of equal standing & value before God, but was understood to be made in the very image of God. Prior to that revelation, it was a universal presumption that most people should be valued by their birth and status, and that they should be treated as being little more than bi-pedal tools, whose bodies were routinely used as fodder for the ambitions of those in power. Despite all the real progress that the Greeks and Romans made in philosophy, the arts, and law, they not only never recognized or entertained that thought, they routinely treated individual lives as being expendable, even extinguishable, for reasons of convenience or pique (the Roman father that found a baby to be flawed or inconvenient, had the power to toss it upon a rubbish heap to die of exposure, and an annoying child or wife could be put to death by his hand as well).

    To say that Christianity's view of the value of each individual - each an Imago Dei - led to revolutionary progress for all mankind, is a monumental understatement.

    The joining of the Greco/Roman to the Judeo/Christian marked a measure of progress that has become the defining feature of Western Civilization, and the completeness of it owes a great deal to the efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was Aquinas that made the most substantial progress in harmonizing the best of ancient Greek & Roman thought, from Aristotle to Cicero, with that of the Judeo-Christian, and his efforts unquestioningly improved the clarity of Western thought and behavior in every aspect of life, from philosophy, to law, the humanities, civil life, science, and even to religion itself.

    The effect of that unity of understanding has shown itself in everything from the early republics of the Italian City States, to Britain's Magna Carta, the formulation of a constitutional monarchy, the English Bill of Rights, and Lord Coke's ordering of Law in respect to "A man's home is his Castle". Those, and other significant milestones, not least of which was the lighting of the light of science by Christian monks, beginning with Roger Bacon devising the first scientific experiments, in an effort to methodically investigate the wonders of God's creation, all contributed significant steps forward in the real civilizational progress of The West.

    We can recognize these as self-evidently being real progress, because they brought ever more clarity to our ability to identify and communicate about what was and is real and true, which is of real value to human life, and to our understanding of it, and all of which served to place reasonable constraints upon the exercise of power over others, and contributed to improving people's ability to live lives worth living.

    That increased clarity of understanding, improved Westerner's ability to engage reasonably within a more civil society, and respect what is justly due to others, is what is, and should be, meant by Progress, and how it is recognized and measured.

    Conversely, that which obscures our understanding, dims our recognition of what is real and true, and increases the infringements of arbitrary powers being exerted on and over our lives, is the opposite of Progress... and that is something that we most definitely should have a name for.

    Which Way Western Man: Progress or Regress?
    This cumulative progress in the Western understanding which developed from Moses to Jesus, from Aristotle to Aquinas, and on down to Elizabethan England, accrued some philosophical & political 'mis-steps' as well (see especially Machiavelli, Sir Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume), which opened the door to reintroducing sophistry and mystification into popular thought. At a critical point in that history, however, those regressions were recognized, identified, and, although only temporarily, halted its spread, through the rise of Scottish Common Sense Realism. SCSR, which was exemplified by Thomas Reid, identified the nature of those modern missteps, and restored Common Sense to the western mind in general, and to the American Colonies in particular.

    By 'Common Sense', they did not mean that sense of 'Oh, how very practical and clever of you!', they meant it in the sense of what had commonly been known as the Three Acts of the Mind: to apprehend, judge, reason; as being the sense which all humans share in common, and which forms the basis of our Common Sense understanding that reality is what exists, and that we can know it, and that we can communicate to each other about it (see Robert Curry's excellent "Common Sense Nation"). That Common Sense is what enables us to correct errors and omissions in our own understanding of the world and of each other, and it is what makes it possible for any reasonable person to be brought to recognize and understand what came to be understood to be self-evident truths, which is what enabled the greatest feat of political progress in 2,000 years, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.
    Solid Ground for Standing Upon (Single Page Complete):

    Preliminary Questions: How important is how you know what you know, to what you know?
    Questions of perspective - Understanding our loss of understanding, and the question of getting it back
    Metaphysics: Metaphysician: Heal thyself! 1-4
    The Real Choice - Metaphysician: Heal thyself! pt1
    What the Reality of the Abstract is - 'What is Truth' pt2
    What is Truth: 'it is what it is' or it's 'Turtles: all the way down' - 'What is Truth' pt3
    'IS' demonstrates that what is objectively true, is where the action is - 'What is Truth' pt4


    Causality & its effects parts a-g
    A well rounded knowledge of the root causes - causality & its effects (a)
    The Causation of egg on our faces - causality & its effects (b)
    Of Cause and Causelessness - causality & its effects (c)
    Causation Squared - causality & its effects (d)
    Distracting You With What Isn't Actually There - causality & its effects (e)
    Facts are only as stubborn as you are - causality & its effects (f)
    The Logical consequences of either caring about or ignoring 'What Is Truth?' - causality & its effects (g)


    Epistemology: You keep using that word 1-6 (+1)
    Epistemology: You keep using that word - 1
    Epistemology's meaning is meaningless without Reality - You keep using that word 2
    Logic: Observing and deactivating the boobytraps of modernity - You keep using that word 3
    The Ethics of Epistemology - Escaping the Inigo Montoya Trap - You keep using that word 4
    Would you recognize it if one of your beliefs was wrong? How? - You keep using that word 5
    Enlightening the Dark Ages once again: Grammar as an Epistemology worthy of the name - You keep using that word 6
    Why are our Culture Wars focused upon winning battles instead of winning the war - where's our Gen. Sherman?!


    Destroying Society through Social Epistemology - AKA: Critical Thinking (coming soon)


    At each step in the journey of the Greco/Roman - Judeo/Christian West, some aspect of our understanding of the real nature of ourselves, and of the world we inhabit - such as Aristotle's first rule of thought (Law of non-contradiction), Art's ability to communicate truth and worthy ideals, and our understanding that our individual rights are not the result of negotiations and agreements, but are derived from the nature of being human - Imago Dei; 'All men are created equal' - it became increasingly self-evident that Might does not make Right, and that only a clearer understanding of what is real and true can enable us to recognize what is right, and that truly practical might, can only follow from adhering to that, and so realize that every reasonable person has an equal claim to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

    Each of those steps can be identified as steps of true progress, because they clarified and identified our understanding of what is real and true, in everything from the purposes of the state, and the boundaries that must be placed upon its powers, to maintain those fruits of true progress. The accelerating refinement of learning, science, civil discourse, and manners, and whatever particular form of thought - philosophy, theology, art, science, politics - abides by and builds upon those fundamentals, and any claim to be seeking real progress, must harmonize with them.

    And so it is my contention that every single step forward, across all forms of thinking, from philosophy, theology, art, science, politics, qualified as real progress, because they brought greater clarity of understanding of what is real and true, and so led society to become more moral, virtuous, and able to live lives worth living, within reasonable systems of justice.

    In contrast to that, whatever form of thinking - philosophy, theology, art, science, politics - seeks to confuse, dim, abridge, confound, subvert, outright deny, and/or seek to get away with faking the fundamentals of sound thought, is declaring their desire to regress our thinking to a point that it is no longer bound by what is real and true, so as to gain some level of power over you through your misunderstanding of reality.

    With that being common to all such aims, it seems to me that the proper name & description of those who seek to attain their desires by getting away with thinking in this latter way, should be:
    Pro-Regressive.
    Full disclosure, I've been trying to 'make fetch happen' for 'Pro-Regressive' for over a decade, not as an ideological label for the latest variety of troublesome tactics, but as a word that both identifies and describes what their subversive attacks are engaged in across our fundamental understanding of what is (Metaphysics), upon how we know it (Causality & Logic), and upon what we should or should not do because of our understanding of that (Ethics).

    Those fundamentals are necessary for making clarity of thought possible, but the telos of pro-regressiveism has no interest in anyone successfully pursuing or achieving real progress, because it is by regressing your life and our society, that the Pro-Regressive makes progress in their pursuit of power.

    Whatever may have been the particular disagreements and errors of past philosophers (lovers of wisdom) from Aristotle, to Aquinas, to Thomas Reid and our Founding Fathers, they were seeking to abide by what is fundamentally real & true, and they strove to bring clarity to our understanding of how to live a life worth living. That is what identifies them as the ones who have contributed to the making of actual progress.

    The misosophists (haters of wisdom) who've tried to get away with faking those steps, from the relative innocence of Scotus and Ockham, to the increasingly deliberate efforts of Sir Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Evola, etc., each has sought to get away with faking or denying some or all of those fundamentals, and that is what identifies them, across philosophy, theology, politics, economics, as being: Pro-Regressive.

    How you determine that something is pro-regressive, is not by whether they favor this or that ideological position of the Left or of the Right, but by whether or not they are persistently evading those fundamentals through positions that insinuate misleading presumptions into your understanding (ask yourself what their positions are rooted in? What effect will they have upon your thoughts? What are they aiming towards and why?) in order to get a response from you, that's useful to them.

    Because appearances - especially ideological appearances - can be deceiving, the common nature of the pro-regressive isn't always obvious - especially if you take them at face value and ignore their telos - but if you'll pause and look 'under the hood', you can see that they're more alike than not, in the underlying assaults on understanding, which they all share in common:
    • Rousseau's idea of liberty: "... whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free;..."
    • Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote on the need to "...require many on the right to reconsider some of their unquestioned maxims", which he offers support for by quoting from the character of the psychopathic assassin Chigurh: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"
    • Replying to the charge that he's importing Gramscian thinking into 'The Right', Christopher F. Rufo replies: "We can find utility in Gramsci's analysis of intellectuals, elites, institutions, culture, folklore, hegemony, etc., while rejecting his Marxism. Your argument seems to boil down to a form of word association, in which anyone you label "woke" is somehow beyond consideration..."

    What do School Libraries Support
    1) The Tragic Libraries of Education: 'They're just books'
    2) For an Education to be meaningful, its books must be more than 'just books'
    3) Our Founder's wrong turn towards Education today - The New Normal
    4) Remove this dangerous technology from the classroom: Textbooks
    5) Foundations & Compasses - Books are never 'Just books'
    6) Disorienting America - the modern thinking behind abandoning True North
    7) Never forget that 'Education Reform' is about reforming you
    8) Accepting the 'Science!' of Education Reform
    9) The 1st lesson from the dark wood of School Reform: Good intentions make a map to Hell unnecessary
    10) Pragmatically shifting us off of our Foundations
    11) Experimentally reading ourselves into illiteracy
    12) The Power of Ignorance: 'Back to Basics' Reform
    , do those convey their concern for clarity of meaning, or for evading that to induce conformity? Does either quoting a movie villain to dismiss American 'maxims of' constitutionalism, or presuming that you can easily scrape some utility from the deeply subversive & evil ideas of Marx & Gramsci, without absorbing any of the ill effects which their 'analysis' and tactics for employing them were formulated to cause - do those indicate an understanding and respect for the power of ideas and a concern for what they confront you with, or a shortsighted & shallow effort to manipulate language so as to produce effects in you, that are of use to them?

    What you see that they're rooted in as you look beneath the rhetoric, is a vaguery that shapes popular opinion to their ideological passions, and those are roots that will not bear good fruit. Here are a few more likeminded examples:
    • Ibrahim Kendi writes: "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
    • Sargon of Akhad: "The problem is that reality as we experience it might indeed be radically subjective, and until you can demonstrate that it isn't, then we are in a bind, aren't we?", and that "The critical theorists have been philosophically demolishing us for more than half a century. We have to get ahead of them."
    • Christian Nationalist Doug Wilson, claiming to support American constitutionalism with a theocratic Christian Nationalism where "... a Protestant nation I think is capable of having carveout spaces for Roman Catholics and even for Jews...", although "...Catholic church bells would be okay, but a parade in honor of the Virgin Mary carrying an image of the Virgin Mary down Main Street. No."
    , do they sound like they have an issue with discrimination, or with who has the power to get away with imposing discrimination?

    Economic Labels kill off meaningful Questions - Step out of the Wizard's Circle of 'Common Good'
    1. Labeling - applying answers to abort your questions
    2. The Questionable Label of 'Libertarian'
    3. The Wastefulness of *Economics* requires labels
    4. The wishful thinking of the 'Classical Liberal' label
    5. One Classical Liberal that took liberties with Life, Liberty, and Happiness - J.S. Mill
    6. Political Economy is not just an old label for 'Economics'
    7. The Common Good, Property, Liberty - united they stand, divided we fall
    8. Using the 'Common Good' to harm the good of all


    9. Dazzling us with what's partly seen while abandoning the full reality of what's left unseen
    10. Slow down bro - thinking about rights, government, justice, law, politics, can't start with rights, government, justice, law, politics
    11. IS that so - It all depends upon what the meaning of 'Is', is
    12. Mystifying what the meaning of the word 'IS', is, is the means of making you dissappear from your life
    13. The reality is that a common good must be common to all.
    14. "Letgo of that Republic!' Gimme that...!"
    15. Summing up by returning to the Questions that should precede Hazlitt's 'Economics in One Lesson'


    16. What 'Economics' buys you is Tyranny on a budget
    17. The TURD's Pro-Regressive retreat from the West A.D. to the B.C. past through the Wizard's Circle
    18. The Wizarding World's Tools of Economic Magic: 'Value', 'Growth', and 'Law', reconceived as Semantic Deceptions
    19. Totalitarian Opposition to individual decisions: Breaking the Say's Law
    20. Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with
    21. Exiting 'Economic Thinking' and re-entering into the Reality of what is real and true
    22. Understand Classic American Liberalism and decline to be mislabeled
    And then there's the notion that we're unable to know what is objectively true, which is a sentiment that's been pushed by thinkers from Descartes, to Hume, to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Gramsci, and on down through every post-modernist from CRT's DiAngelo on 'The Left', to the 'post-liberals' like Sargon on 'The Right'. One obvious question to ask of that assertion is, if that's *true*, then how can they know it? For if what they say is *true* and no one can know anything to be objectively true, why should anyone listen to what they have to say about what is or isn't *true*?!

    But the better question to ask, given the popularity (and persistence) of 'their point' over time, is how and why do people give any attention to those who continue saying such things?

    And the answer is that the ability of those who entertain their ideas, to think clearly and effectively about their lives and the world they live within, degrades - regresses - due to their thinking those thoughts within their head, and doing so without the fundamentals in place to safeguard them (hi Dewey!). Improving the clarity of your understanding is not their point, undermining and subverting your understanding, is.

    With that in mind, take another look: does reading their statements bring you clarity of understanding, or the urge to exercise power over others and/or to react against its being used against you? Their rhetorical roots are in preferences resentments, rather than in what is understood to be real and true, because what they aim towards, is power over 'others' (which they'd never impose upon you, of course, nosireebob!).

    Remember, it is not a single action that causes something to happen, and although modernity would prefer that be fully forgotten, Causation has several layers - four of which were identified by Aristotle: the Material (“that out of which it is formed”), the Formal (what it is to be), the Efficient (the active agent), the Final (the goal), and the fifth identified by Aquinas as the Exemplary cause (“what guides their intellect”) - and the Pro-Regressive, by their very nature, are intent upon corrupting one or more of those causes, so as to more easily undermine what a shallow reading of 'cause' would lead you to expect.

    All Ideologies are united in their disregard for metaphysical realism, so as to practice utilizing language to blur key distinctions under your consideration, so as to confuse, dim, abridge, confound, subvert, and deny you clarity about what is real and true. Whatever apparent differences the ideological snippets noted above seem to have, they are but surface appearances that distract from the demolition work which each of their ideas are doing to the structuring of thoughts within your own mind.

    Ideologies assert that their opinion of what reality should be, is what matters most, and under the pretext of urgency, they raise up their favored positions, over principles, to loosen their adherents' minds' grasp upon our shared reality, to overpower our judgement, and to invalidate our ability to know and communicate what is real and true. Those actions are how they increase their power, through your misunderstanding of the fundamentals of metaphysics, causality/logic, and ethical reasoning.

    The test to be applied to what people say & do then, is not an ideological one of Left or Right politics, but a metaphysical one of whether their words and actions clarify understanding and reveal what is real and true and right to do, or do they seek to obfuscate, flatten and befuddle, so as to get away with acquiring the power to do unto you, as they will?

    That shared telos is what defines their being Pro-Regressive, and we neglect identifying and naming that, at our peril.

    So... what's it gonna be men of The West, Progress, or Pro-Regress? It is up to you. ]]>     13844