Much has happened in the world since my last blog post on March 12. I have resisted blogging because of other projects. One project has been my study of artificial intelligence. I conjecture that my work in epistemology, as expressed in my book A Validation of Knowledge, will have applications to AI. At the least, I expect that studying AI will greatly enhance my understanding of epistemology.
I generally do not blog until I feel so compelled to write what has not been written that I become distracted from my other work. I will start with one recent issue and how it connects with other recent issues. Then I will present a general thesis.
Complete this thought.
He feels he’s a girl. Therefore, he’s a girl. They feel oppressed. Therefore, they are oppressed. It is feelings, not reason, that matter. It is the collective, not individual life, that matters. All human interaction is based on power. I feel they should die. Therefore, …
Progressive education in American schools, from the American philosopher John Dewey (see Peter D. McAllister for analysis); critical race theory in American schools, from American Marxist-racists (see C. Bradley Thompson and James Lindsay for analysis); sexual grooming in American schools, from American LGBT activists (see Thompson and Lindsay); killings in American schools—these problems are not separate. There is a causal chain.
It is not guns that are causing shootings by American boys. It is Leftist American teachers.
C. Bradley Thompson makes the same point in depth in this excellent series.
Our Killing Schools, Part 1
https://cbradleythompson.substack.com/p/our-killing-schools-part-1
Progressive Education and Our Killing Schools
https://cbradleythompson.substack.com/p/progressive-education-and-our-killing
Nihilism and Our Killing Schools
https://cbradleythompson.substack.com/p/nihilism-and-our-killing-schools
Here is a passage from Part 3 of Thompson’s series:
By teaching and promoting intellectual subjectivism, Progressive education breaks down a student’s capacity for conceptual learning, resulting in pervasive anxiety due to the student’s inability to intellectually grasp reality and cope with it. By teaching and promoting moral relativism, Progressive education breaks down a student’s capacity to make independent, reality-based moral judgments. By teaching and promoting group-think and group acceptance, Progressive education breaks down a student’s reality-based self-esteem in favor of an other-oriented, pseudo-self-esteem characterized by conformism and narcissism.
The net result for those students affected is perpetual anxiety; aimless “self expression”; a preoccupation with the standards of the group, either in conforming to the group or rebelling against it; a substitution of narcissism for reality-based self-esteem; and moral nihilism, which can take the form of refusing to make moral judgments or enacting vicious fantasies.
In other news, the Left melted down over the offer by Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Leftists expressed outrage and despair over the prospect that they would no longer be able to censor dissenting opinions, nor would they still be able to censor the mere reporting of facts contrary to Leftist doctrine on numerous issues such as Covid (efficacy and adverse effects of vaccines, of treatment protocols, of masks, and of lockdowns; origin of the virus), sexuality and sex, racism, the integrity of elections, and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The Dobbs decision was leaked (almost certainly by a Leftist) and then issued, and the Left melted down over the prospect of facing the moral consequences of their sexual promiscuity. I do not agree with the position, held by many conservatives, that the right to life begins at conception. But I consider this error a lesser error than the position, held by many Leftists, that abortion at any stage of pregnancy is morally acceptable. (I hope to find time to write a desperately needed essay on the ethics and politics of abortion. In the meantime, see some preliminary comments I made in 2016: go to this post and search for “abortion.”)
Of course, the stalking of Supreme Court justices, the attempted murder of Justice Kavanaugh, and the more than fifty violent attacks on anti-abortionists were barely reported (if at all) by the Leftist (mainstream) press.
Meanwhile, the January 6 sham hearings went on with Leftist fanfare while political prisoners from that day remain confined and abused.
Worst of all was Pride Month and the LGBTx movement it represents. For an understanding of this movement, see my book, Masculine Power, Feminine Beauty: The Volitional, Objective Basis for Heterosexuality in Romantic Love and Marriage. Here is an excerpt (pp. 113 –114):
The general LGBT theory is as follows. Infants are “polymorphously perverse,” to use Freud’s term. That is, an infant will be sexually excited by anyone and anything anywhere. Freud considered this infantile state an early stage of development. [Herbert] Marcuse and many LGBT activists, in contrast, consider this state the ideal end state for adults. According to Marcuse, people leave this ideal state only because they become repressed, limiting the kinds of sexual responses available to them. The repressed energy of such people becomes channeled into economic production. (I’m not kidding; this is the theory, and the psychological professions buy into it.) That is, productive work is the repressed alternative to blissful, indiscriminate sex.
Capitalism, of course the system of greatest economic production, is hence also the system of greatest sexual repression. Heterosexual males, who dominate and oppress other groups under capitalism, are the most sexually repressed and therefore the most driven to production and to dominance over everyone else. The sexual repression and economic productiveness perpetrated by heterosexual males is codified in the socially constructed idea of masculinity. The oppression of women, by these men, is codified in the socially constructed idea of femininity, which entails submissive weakness and the oppressive task of raising children. According to the LGBT movement, the feminist movement figured all this out. And now the LGBT movement has figured out that heterosexual males oppress homosexual men as well as heterosexual women, because homosexual men threaten the notion of masculinity.
The solution to this whole problem is to eradicate capitalism, masculinity, femininity, and families, with everyone returning to the polymorphous perversity of an infant, and with the community of such adult infants collectively in charge of rearing actual infants.
In the same book, I write (p. 158),
Transgenderism—the “T” in “LGBT”—lays bare that the LGBT movement is the most evil ideological movement in the history of the English-speaking world, because this movement advocates and practices the purest form of mindless indulgence of emotion—in the service of destroying Western civilization, poisoning the sexual potential of children, and mutilating their bodies.
In the coming years, there will be two concurrent great waves of suicides. The smaller wave will consist of individuals who, in childhood, chose the physical and spiritual mutilations of transgenderism and related perversions. The larger wave will consist of their parents who “affirmed” them. Whereas Mengele mutilated children in death camps, Leftist parents—blinded by their ideology—are consenting to and even instigating the mutilation of their own children.
Recently, the LGBTxyz alphabet soup has added a Q for “Queer” and “Questioning.” As James Lindsay identifies, “Queer Theory” is overtly Marxist.
Eventually, the LGBTxyz soup will include a “P” for pedophilia. Child sexuality is wrong because children do not have the reasoning ability to deal with sexuality. But if sexuality is mindless, as LGBT ideology holds, then children do have the ability to deal with sexuality. Indeed, if the alleged polymorphous perversity of children is the sexual ideal, then children having sexual relations with adults is simply the sharing of virtue. And if children should be encouraged to choose their sex, as transgenderism holds, then why shouldn’t they be encouraged to have sex? In short, pedophilia is an inevitable result of LGBT ideology.
The most influential LGBT intellectual in history is Michel Foucault, who has more than a million citations on Google Scholar. In a 1978 radio interview, Foucault said,
where children are concerned, they are supposed to have a sexuality that can never be directed towards an adult, and that’s that. Secondly, it is supposed that they are not capable of talking about themselves, of being sufficiently lucid about themselves. They are unable to express their feelings about the whole thing. Therefore they are not believed. They are thought to be incapable of sexuality and they are not thought to be capable of speaking about it. But, after all, listening to a child, hearing him speak, hearing him explain what his relations actually were with someone, adult or not, provided one listens with enough sympathy, must allow one to establish more or less what degree of violence if any was used or what degree of consent was given. And to assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable. … In any case, an age barrier laid down by law does not have much sense. Again, the child may be trusted to say whether or not he was subjected to violence.
Foucault frequented homosexual sado-masochistic bath houses in San Francisco and died of AIDS.
Note also the following sequence of passages from the 1982 book, The Homosexualization of America: The Americanization of The Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press), written by highly influential pro-homosexual activist Dennis Altman:
Altman 1982, 184:
Once sex is desacrilized and separated from its procreative function, it becomes evident that there is no reason to regard it as a form of behavior set apart from others. If it is regarded as legitimate to have a meaningful discussion with someone one meets on a voyage and will never see again, why cannot it be equally meaningful to have a f— with someone in similar circumstances? [Literal obscenity removed.]
Altman 1982, 185, favorably quoting Rita Mae Brown:
I want the option of random sex with no emotional commitment when I need sheer physical relief: erotic freedom.
Altman 1982, 200:
One might also argue that since no one advocates preventing all interaction between children and adults, it is making too much of sex to argue that this relationship alone should be prohibited.
Altman 1982, 201:
If sexuality were free from the sorts of pressures that exist in our society—it would be utopian to argue for no social pressures that exist in our society—I suspect child/adult sex would be fairly common, though not perhaps as common as sex among children themselves.
Regarding pedophilia and the LGBT movement, see also this reading and analysis, by Lindsay, of “Thinking Sex,” a seminal essay (no pun intended) by pioneering queer theorist Gayle Rubin.
The LGBT movement has a built-in protection: it is so disgusting and subhuman that wholesome people have a reasonable resistance to investigating it. For a tiny indication, here is a link to one nine-minute video documenting one Pride parade in Washington, D.C., where depraved individuals performed depraved acts in plain view of young children. (Here is a backup link to use when the Left removes the original link.) I don’t recommend watching the whole video; a few seconds is enough to get the idea. Just keep in mind that the Left is exposing most if not virtually every American child to this depravity every day in American schools and libraries. The depravity serves as grooming not only for sexual perversity but also for Marxist political activism. (See for example, an exposé by James Lindsay of the now-ubiquitous Drag Queen Story Hour.)
Of course, none of the other prongs of the woke movement, including critical race theory, have abated.
What do all of these facts add up to? Here is one important conclusion: The United States of America has the most virtuous Right and the most evil Left. The Right, continuing the tradition of America’s founding generation, stands for individual rights: life, liberty, property, and the rational, individual pursuit of happiness. The Left stands for the abolition of reason and the sacrifice of the individual to the collective.
Since the founding of America, some Americans have defied the principle of individual rights. The most glaring example was the support for slavery among many Americans. Today’s Left blames the Right for the past evils of the Left’s own intellectual ancestors. Enemies of freedom committed evils, and today’s Left blames the defenders of freedom. The Left’s solution to slavery of some in America’s past is slavery—that is, socialism—for all in America’s present and future.
To understand the virtue of America’s Right—the virtue of the Right is my formulation—read these works by C. Bradley Thompson:
See also my essay, Judeo-Christian Conservatives Are Today’s Main Defenders of Western Civilization.
But what makes America’s Left the most evil of all Lefts? I offer a philosophical answer and a historical answer.
Philosophically, the American Left endorses the purest form of mindless indulgence of emotion. To expand upon the mentality expressed in my opening: “I feel I am a boy; therefore I am a boy.” “I feel oppressed; therefore I am oppressed.” “I feel like taking the wealth of others; therefore I will.” “I feel like having promiscuous sex; therefore I will.” “I feel like killing my child or my neighbor’s child; therefore I will.” “I feel empathy for this group; therefore I will take and destroy and kill for this group.”
Historically, the main cause of this emotionalism is the philosophy of John Dewey, widely considered the father of American education. For generations, Dewey’s philosophy dominated American education as in no other country. Contemporary Marxists have made contemporary American education even more emotionalist (see this and subsequent podcasts by Lindsay on Paulo Freire), but Dewey started the trend. (See again McAllister and Thompson). As Thompson writes,
The source of the American version of moral relativism is, once again, John Dewey, the intellectual godfather of Progressive education. Dewey believed, and his Progressive followers teach, that all values (i.e., the objects of our desires, according to Dewey) are legitimate and are nothing more than a “plurality of changing, moving, individualized goods and ends.”[16] While it is true that there are no moral absolutes for Dewey, it turns out that there is a moral standard by which all action is to be judged—the liberation and satisfaction of every child’s spontaneous whims and desires. At the core of the Progressive school is the celebration of unreasoned emotion and will, or what Dewey called the child’s “spontaneous instincts and impulses.”[17] In effect, his teaching says “if it feels good, do it.”
There is a related causal factor pertaining to the distinctive evil of the American Left, arising from the emotionalism of Progressive education. Ayn Rand identified that
The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
—[1943] 1994. The Fountainhead. New York: Penguin. Reprint of hardcover edition by Bobbs-Merrill. Part Four, Chapter 18, p. 717. Howard Roark speaking.
Ayn Rand also wrote,
What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
The American Right and the American Left both fall for altruism. But there is a crucial difference. An altruist on the Right typically believes that he should sacrifice for others. An altruist on the Left typically believes—feels—that others should sacrifice for him. That is why the American Left is so violently criminal. Emotions of envy, resentment, and inadequacy are easily channeled to demands placed on others. America Leftists believe that if someone does not help them as they feel they are entitled, then they are entitled to take or destroy by force.
Why is it important to understand that America has the most virtuous Right and the most evil Left? Here is one reason: Do not blame the problems in the U.S. on the Right. The problems are caused by the Left. Some problems in America are worse than in any other country because America has the most evil—the most purely emotion-driven—Left.
What can be done? I reiterate this solution, which I proposed in 2017: End Leftist Privilege, and Maybe Leftists Will Really Leave.
And I reiterate another solution, on a personal level: Live in a Right community in a Right (red) state. A recounting of my personal experience in such a community gives me an opportunity to end this post on a happy note:
I relocated from a lifetime spent in blue centers of blue states to a red dot in a red state. The move saved my soul, and this is an atheist writing. I find the culture in my new home far superior in every way—intellectually, philosophically, morally, politically, artistically, and romantically. The people here learned from childhood how to hunt, fish, farm, build, make a home, live in the wilderness, defend themselves and loved ones, sing, dance, perform theatre, play music, create fine art, and become masculine men and feminine women, while blue-metropolis ignoramuses like me were watching TV and doing I don’t know what. The farmers and computer programmers I have met here seem more well-studied on the political foundation of our nation than were the humanities professors I had at Cornell and MIT—and more well-studied than I, a published writer on politics. The first neighbor I met, a college student and carpenter almost young enough to be my grandson, owned a more extensive library of books on philosophy than do I, a published philosopher. I feel as though I have stowed away on a UFO and been brought to a more advanced civilization, and that I will have to work the remainder of my life to try to catch up in knowledge and ability compared to those around me.