Philosophy Now Forum

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 3:44 pm Give it up Appallon. If you can't explain something simply, say so that the average voter would understand it, then you don't understand it yourself. You don't know why the MAGA/Trump phenomenon happened.

Now here is a comment that can be worked with!

::: pats wee Atla on his curly head :::

I propose that we can only look at things through lenses that are like small facets: mere aspects. Glimpses. Renderings. Interpretations.

We see through darkening lenses. The lenses we hope and believe give us clarity actually distort.

How can the events of the day — so many confluences of factors! — be explained simply? I do not deny that positions, whatever they may be, cannot be explained in simple terms, but first one must understand, and this understanding is hard-won.

Think of me as your Intellectual Leader. A mindful intellectual Guide through treacherous waters with whirlpools and dangerous sea-creatures!

I believe (now my voice takes on sincerely pleading & pious tones) that if we put our heads together (and once I get my Frankenstein up and running and introduce him here) that we could begin to offer significant and relevant interpretations of the advent of Trump and much else as well.

Let my mystic flute entice you! Scamper along with me! A New World of understanding awaits!

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 4:15 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 3:44 pm Give it up Appallon. If you can't explain something simply, say so that the average voter would understand it, then you don't understand it yourself. You don't know why the MAGA/Trump phenomenon happened.

Now here is a comment that can be worked with!

::: pats wee Atla on his curly head :::

I propose that we can only look at things through lenses that are like small facets: mere aspects. Glimpses. Renderings. Interpretations.

We see through darkening lenses. The lenses we hope and believe give us clarity actually distort.

How can the events of the day — so many confluences of factors! — be explained simply? I do not deny that positions, whatever they may be, cannot be explained in simple terms, but first one must understand, and this understanding is hard-won.

Think of me as your Intellectual Leader. A mindful intellectual Guide through treacherous waters with whirlpools and dangerous sea-creatures!

I believe (now my voice takes on sincerely pleading & pious tones) that if we put our heads together (and once I get my Frankenstein up and running and introduce him here) that we could begin to offer significant and relevant interpretations of the advent of Trump and much else as well.

Let my mystic flute entice you! Scamper along with me! A New World of understanding awaits!

If you understand an issue, you can list the factors that led up to it, and rank the factors according to importance. You can start with naming the strongest factor. (And no you're not our intellectual leader.)

AJ,

I'm curious: do you have anything good or complimentary to say about anyone in-forum?

Ya know, sometimes a little honey works better than a whole bottle of vinegar.

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 4:20 pm If you understand an issue, you can list the factors that led up to it, and rank the factors according to importance. You can start with naming the strongest factor. (And no you're not our intellectual leader.)

If you go first I’ll one-up you.

Game?

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 4:34 pm I'm curious: do you have anything good or complimentary to say about anyone in-forum?

If they cower before my majesty and grovel a bit I tend to feel some warmth.

But then when things don’t go the way they should I get very angry and the vinegar rises up in me and I EXPLODE!

I am working on myself but it is a slow, tedious therapeutic process. I’ll need 2-3 entire lives to attain basic decency.

How about you?

Compliment deleted, since it wasn't solicited.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 4:35 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 4:20 pm If you understand an issue, you can list the factors that led up to it, and rank the factors according to importance. You can start with naming the strongest factor. (And no you're not our intellectual leader.)

If you go first I’ll one-up you.

Game?

Okay. Imo the strongest factor:

2 out of 3 people are idiots, everywhere in the world and at all times. But before social media, Average Man who is an idiot, couldn't really have his/her voice heard. Since the 2000s however, social media has given the Average Man the ability to have his/her voice heard. Stupidity, which is the greatest power on the planet, was unleashed (a lot) more than before.

Average Man doesn't have the ability to think individually. He/she needs to be told what is true, what to think, what is the case, who is the enemy and why. Average man needs an autocratic leader to follow.On social media the Average people can band together with countless other Average people, form large packs who follow the same autocratic leader.

Trump is an autocrat, they are thankful to him that he's doing away with all this democracy nonsense where you are expected to think for yourself, and be responsible for your choices. Similar trends are happening in a few other countries, this phenomenon isn't exclusive to the US at all.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 4:42 pm How about you?

Me, I'm okay with bein' unrefined, semi-literate, prickly, mean-spirited, stingy, and free.

If it works, leave it be.

I just cranked-up my Frankenstein. All the neighbor’s lights went brown. The electrical current needed was incredible!

Now get this! The first thing it asked was

“Am I a man or a woman?”

I’ve been trying to listen to Phyllo’s preachings. I want to be decent, equitable & fair.

He’s fucking over in the corner, legs crossed, doing his nails!

Now I’ve got a moral problem on my hands!

WWJD?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 4:42 pm
I’ll need 2-3 entire lives to attain basic decency.

Ever think of leaving the forum in the meanwhile and coming back when, in that late sacred hour as filtered by time, you're finally purged of all your involuntary infringements in the art of thinking?

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 4:49 pm…

Your essay is simple insofar as it proposes that for various reasons many men who lack proper qualification are now able to interject themselves into spheres of communication, and perhaps in other spheres as well, and “gum up the works” to use a colloquial expression.

I would contribute further to your analysis by referring to a) Robert Bork’s Slouching Toward Gomorrah and b) Charlotte Iserbyte’s The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.

A comment on Bork’s book (Amazon):

Mr. Bork's basic premise is that two forces, present in our culture for at least a century but jump-started during the Sixties, are the root of all evil: radical individualism and radical egalitarianism. Since the former urges toward complete license and the latter toward complete control, the two forces are logically incompatible yet coexist destructively in their respective spheres: "The Sixties generation combined moral relativism with political absolutism." Thus we see, for example, liberals pushing unlimited access to pornography on the personal level, and pushing racial quotas on the policy level. Moral relativists assert implicitly or explicity that all ideas and behaviors have equal value, yet at the same time, when moral relativists are in a position to exert authority--as judges, university presidents, editors--all ideas and behaviors supportive of Christianity and Western culture are thrown out the window. Mr. Bork brilliantly and brutally exposes these farcical inconsistencies as they apply to the key issues of our day, including judicial activism, freedom of speech, abortion, euthanasia, and welfare. By far his favorite (and most entertaining) target is feminism, which he portrays as a thoroughly disingenuous, shrill, preposterous and malignant intellectual disease that has infected far more aspects of our society than seems possible.

This highly perceptive and well argued survey of American culture is, unfortunately, overshadowed by Judge Bork's relentless pessimism. If you agree that liberal elites in the media, entertainment, politics, and education are laying waste to our culture, then you will be mortified by his ticking off of example after example of liberal success--a process Mr. Bork sees as a juggernaut that will continue to roll over whatever feeble challenge conservatism might offer up. True, he ends with an attempt at optimism, something about the potential of human will to overcome hopeless intellectual odds, but it is only a few pages of roughly sketched out ideas. I wish that he would have concentrated more of his considerable intellect on articulating responses to the liberal challenge instead of merely making my blood boil.

A comment on Iserbyte’s book (Amazon):

As an educator for the past 28 years, and believing myself to be at least a little left of center polically, I found "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" to be the scariest thing I have ever read. Some will brand this book as conservative propganda. But those of us in the teaching profession wonder aload to each other and anyone else who will listen, what politicains are thinking about when they pass educational reform legislation. It would seem impossible to make some of the decisions that are being made without having deliberately set about to wreak the education system in America. If the facts laid out in this book are true (and the book is full of documentation) what is happening to education in Washington D.C. is worse than the Twin Towers tragedy and the attact on Pearl Harbor combined. The promotional material for this book says that it should be required reading for parents. I think it should be required reading for every educator or university student considering a career in education. A difficult read, but eye opening to the point of being painful.

Both Bork and Iserbyte describe, from different angles, what we might label “the cultivation of degeneracy”. The degeneracy of the mind in bad educational systems according to Iserbyte. And the “destruction of hierarchies” in Bork’s.

The Hyper-Liberal progressive system — that which has had great power and influence since the 1960’s — turns out to be destructive of genuine Liberalism. In my view we have to examine and try to locate the “acids” that have eaten away at those “foundations” upon which not only our civilization is built, but more importantly the foundation on which the individual is built. I.e. the very platform that supports the man.

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 4:49 pm Trump is an autocrat, they are thankful to him that he's doing away with all this democracy nonsense where you are expected to think for yourself, and be responsible for your choices. Similar trends are happening in a few other countries, this phenomenon isn't exclusive to the US at all.

Trump is, beyond all doubting, a strange, unruly, complex, and perhaps on could also say “twisted up” figure. Simply put he is strange. And a strange appearance on the US and on the world stage. And he certainly has autocratic tendencies.

But your analysis of him is insufficient and, it is rather obvious, your vision is contaminated to the degree your “blood boils” when your contempt gets the better of you, and therefore your “lens” through which you see projects distortions that arise in your own soul.

You fail to grasp adequately that the “democracy” you refer to as if it is an intact monolith has had an afflicted existence in the US for a long time. In fact I do not think the term is a useful one any longer. It depends on what your sources are, of course, but you could say that the US is run by a giant Public Relations machine. Democratic decision, in that context, becomes oddly stripped of meaning.

I doubt that you have much grasp at all why there is such a large faction of the population of the US who come under the sway of Trump’s populism. They are in a sense “placing a bet” that the very system they are a part of will turn around and serve them again, as it once did. Such political bets are always a risky gamble as all sober men should have realized by now.

Unfortunately — very unfortunately from my point of view — Trump is showing the extreme degree to which he is, in those important areas, serving not US interests but that of the US’s Middle East partner. It seems to that this becomes — daily — more evident. It contaminates many other categories of what his populism-oriented base hoped to have gotten from his administration.

While I definitely agree with you that many people do not know how to think for themselves, and also that people will tend to gravitate to charismatic and demagogic leaders in such times as these, I also think that many more people are being introduced to ideas (views about how the US system functions i.e. not in the interests of the average man) which are really quite radical when compared to “the standard views”.

Times of radical upset, combined with radical technological changes, and in a time where the individual himself has lost ground within his own being (metaphysically adrift), are the times that are upon us. The pressure builds.

I would also focus less on Trump and consider the people that will be assembled around him and then also the Movement known as MAGA; what it is, where it will go.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Mar 23, 2025 2:29 pm Your essay is simple insofar as it proposes that for various reasons many men who lack proper qualification are now able to interject themselves into spheres of communication, and perhaps in other spheres as well, and “gum up the works” to use a colloquial expression.

Not really, I proposed more than that: that idiocracy has literally arrived. These massed don't simply lack the proper qualification, but lack the intelligence to ever be qualified. And they don't just gum up the works: they band together in great numbers and are becoming a dominant force in the works, mainly thanks to social media.

Both Bork and Iserbyte describe, from different angles, what we might label “the cultivation of degeneracy”. The degeneracy of the mind in bad educational systems according to Iserbyte. And the “destruction of hierarchies” in Bork’s.

I strongly suspect that the US was indeed deliberately dumbed down for decades, probably by the deep state (if there is one etc., just another form of mass manipulation/control), but I still don't rank this as the strongest factor that led up to Trumpism. Social media is fairly new still, I think even the deep state is scratching its head because of it.

In my view we have to examine and try to locate the “acids” that have eaten away at those “foundations” upon which not only our civilization is built, but more importantly the foundation on which the individual is built. I.e. the very platform that supports the man.

Whose civilization? If you're talking about the US, does it make most sense to refer to the mentality of the time period between the American civil war and WW1 as the "foundation"? Go back further and it's: stealing land from the Indians and killing some, gaining access to a huge land with plentiful resources without "deserving" it, slavery.

One other factor that (in my view) cannot be denied or dismissed:

The US is really no longer a “unified republic” in which there is a unifying political and social ideology that “unites people” in a genuine sense.

I have at times referred to the symbolism of the Twin Towers attack as both a tangible image of a fracturing event, and then also of a shock-wave that passed through the nation, fracturing the connecting fibres.

I also think that if America had at one time a defined identity-structure (I refer to the first republic up to perhaps 1860?), that the second republic initiated a dynamic change whereby a new identity was forged. Is in the process of being forged. And that “second identity” is bound up with The Culture Wars, with an entire shift in demographics (where “demographics is destiny”), and one cannot dismiss the business aspect an consider America’s “empire” managed as it is by that collusion between government, corporate power, and military powers.

What is “America”?

It is a fractured being — even a schizophrenic — who yet holds Destiny in his badly educated, confused, rootless, half-mentally-ill hands.

Atla wrote: ↑Sun Mar 23, 2025 3:10 pm Go back further and it's: stealing land from the Indians and killing some, gaining access to a huge land with plentiful resources without "deserving" it, slavery.

I reject this picture myself. It was inevitable that a stone age people, when an advanced people encountered them, would be displaced — decimated.

The “stealing land” image places it in an imagined realm of a trial where adjudication is needed.

In fact “decimation” describes what happened. One people displaced and replaced another.

Who “deserves” anything? What a nutty notion.