Amos's River of Justice

Category: The Passing World

The continuing influence of Plato is a contradiction in democratic societies. Plato’s doctrine or Forms or Ideas never had a sound political basis. But today the impossible utopia he created is more real in our philosophy and religion than the world we live in, even though it offers no remedy for the supposed corruption which inspired it. And yet, people of all political persuasions applaud him. Will Plato remain the ruler of the new age? I hope not. I believe his ideas must be the first casualties of the passing world.

  • Fascists Like Literary and Historical Fantasy

    Roger Griffin argues that nostalgia for a holistic cosmology is important to the Italian sacred Right’.1 This explains why fascists like literary and historical fantasy. According to Griffin, they are motivated by a mode of aesthetic politics. They have this in common with the Left, with some important differences.

    The Fascist Use of Literary and Historical <br>Fantasy
    An old church door, Stow-on-the-Wold, England. Credit: RichVintage

    Griffin’s Argument

    Roger Griffin came to the field of history by way of literature. Along the way he learned that

    “all disciplines develop colonial or neo-colonial attitudes if they do not accept as an implicit premise of their ractivity that there are areas of human reality they are less well-equipped than others to document or explore.”

    Griffin p, 102

    Unfortunately, the boundaries between literary and historical phenomena are not clear in the case of fascist ideology. This becomes obvious to Griffin in the context of J. R. R. Tolkien.

    A group of articles appeared in 1983 to mark the publication of Tolkien’s biography. One of them was written by the president of the Tolkien Society in Italy. It was entitled Why He Became a Cult for Us. The author was Gianfranco de Turris, a prominent propagandist of the neo-fascist Right. De Turris was ‘one of Italy’s major publishers and cognoscenti of literature of the fantastic.’ And he wasn’t the only fascist to appreciate Tokien.

    Marco Tarchi wrote in his programmatic, Beyond Right and Left, ‘we had an example of what it means to belong spontaneously to a cohesive group-mind without any leadership in the years in which many of us discovered Tolkien, the fantastic, the saga‘.

    Probably the most meaningful indication that the Italian neo-Right had adopted Tolkien as one of its official sources is the name the neo-fascist Movemento Sociale Italiane (MSI) chose for its youth training base in the Abruzzi, ‘Camp Hobbit’.

    Tolkien and the Left

    The Left has Tolkien and the love of fantasy in common with the Right. Griffin cites William Irwin Thompson’s book, At the Edge of History. This book discusses the new idols of the Aquarian Age. Thompson’s book includes everyone from Blake to Edgar Cayce, the I Ching to Velikovsky, and the Mayas to Arthur C. Clarke.

    A hitchhiker introduced him to The Lord of the Rings, presenting it as the real history of this planet. This description led Thompson to formulate a theory. Maybe the history of the world is a myth, and myth is the remains of the real history of earth.

    The Fascist Use of Literary and Historical Fantasy
    Escaping the Ringwraiths. Credit: Sergei Dubrovskii

    Griffin expands on this idea.

    To ignore the cults the metaphysics growing up outside academia, to put one’s faith in them as the dawning of a new phase of industrial society or to indulge in breast-beating about the threat they pose to high culture may throw considerable light on the psychological make-up of the historian but little on history. What the historian is surely called upon to do is identify causal structural factors shaping events, and what is being argued in this article is that the Italian ‘sacred Right’ demonstrates how important the nostalgia for a holistic cosmology can be as a component of the ideological forces at work in contemporary history.

    Evola and A Kinder Gentler Fascism?

    At the time Griffin’s article was published, (2005) right-wing authors claimed Euro-fascism was no longer just a revival of the fascist creeds of the thirties. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one fascist program or ideology. That said, Griffin was able to place de Turris, Tarchi, and Rauti within the ‘sacred’, ‘metaphysical’ Right.

    Julius Evola influenced all three of them. Evola is important first as inspiration to their youngest recruits; second, as one of the most qualified representatives of Right Wing culture; and third, he has supplied the theoretical basis for neo-fascist violence.

    Evola’s Two Forms of Society, the Modern, Unsubstantial Form, and the Superior, Traditional Form

    Griffin says the best introduction to the principles at the heart of Evola’s writing is The Revolt Against the Modern World, published in 1933. In this book, Evola identifies two fundamentally opposed forms of society: the ‘modern’ is essentially secular and based on the ‘inferior realm of becoming’. It represents an onslaught on the other form of society. That would be the original type based on the ‘superior invisible realm of being’, the only one with any substantial reality. ‘Traditional is the term for the ‘superior’ type. It is a key term for understanding contemporary neo-fascist thought.

    A Traditional society is one in which the individual is an organic part of a hierarchical state governed by a caste of warrior-priests, custodians of supratemporal metaphysical truths, and headed in their turn by a monarch.

    Griffin p, 104

    Myth and civilizations of the distant past are evidence that Traditional states existed. For them, life was an initiatic experience. Ritual, the rule of law and caste protected them against the degenerative forces of secularism, egalitarianism and individualism.

    The Forces of Degeneration

    In this view, Western society is in an advanced stage of decline. This process is said to be irreversible. (Remember Oswald Spengler and his saga of decline?) Yet the fascists remain, glowering and threatening.

    In the 1934 and 1951 editions of Evola’s book, he wrote that international fascism would bring a cultural rebirth and a new Golden Age of Traditional values. In the postwar edition of his book, he advocated a stoic response to the decay. He believed ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Americanism’ would eclipse the true ‘immortal principles’ for the foreseeable future. The only suitable political response was a refusal to dedicate one’s self to any political cause. This is the Traditionalist worldview.

    Is the Answer a New Approach to History?

    Griffin speculates that if there are ‘two cultures’, maybe the division has to do with they way the two sides deal with modernity. Some learn to live with partial knowledge. Others only feel at home in a total explanatory system. This second category needs a vision of the world.’ Or is that naive?

    The Ring cycle is based on Christian experience; Tolkien hated apartheid and rejected racist policies in his native South Africa. Maybe this is not a both-sides kind of issue. The differences are crucial here and now.

    Conclusion: the Historical Implications of Radical anti-Modernism Have Not Gone Away

    Perhaps these differences were overlooked and that’s why the world got German Romanticism, idealism, neo-paganism, and the rise of Nazism. And we can’t forget that the ‘historical implications of radical anti-modernism did not disappear at the end of WWII.

    Tolkien portrayed the modern, secular intellect as the evil Saruman. Perhaps his intuition was sound. But some of the ‘hobbits who are planning the revolt against the Sarumans of the modern world are not mythical, but specially trained in the Abruzzi, confident in the knowledge that they are serving another sentinel: Julius Evola, ‘closed in his tower which is certainly not of ivory, romantic and decadent, but the tower of a castle, a fortress, classical and aristocratic.’ 2

    1. Roger Griffin, Revolts against the Modern World: The Blend of Literary and Historical Fantasy in the Italian New Right, Oxford Polytechnic, ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2005 ↩︎
    2. De Turris, Testomonianze, Op. cit. This is how Aniceto del Massa opens his piece entitled ‘The Tower as a Symbol’, pp. 97-101 (as cited by Griffin) ↩︎

  • Anglo-Saxon Philosophy Lost Its Way

    Anglo-Saxon Philosophy Lost Its Way
    An engraved image showing a 9th century map of the kingdoms of Anglo Saxon Dark Age Britain
    taken from a Victorian book dated 1882 that is no longer in copyright iStock.com/TonyBaggett

    In the video summarized below, Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Wen Yang claim that Western Philosophy has deviated from the right path. A more blunt way of saying it is Anglo-Saxon philosophy lost its way.

    I don’t disagree that the West needs guidance. I appreciate Professor Sachs’s speech and I think the Eastern cultures represented by Professor Wen Yang have a lot to offer the West. But I also think it’s important that we don’t end up in someone else’s dream of a traditional society by making choices we don’t understand. I am summarizing this video because these ideas need further discussion.

    I also want to point out that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is loaded with meaning. During World War II, the Axis Powers, which included Nazi Germany, the Kingdom of Italy, and the Empire of Japan, used this term for Great Britain and the United States. The relationships and differences implied by this identification will be discussed in future articles.

    Aristotle or Confucius

    The video goes back and forth between Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Wen Yang, a researcher at the China Institute, Fudan University. Professor Yang agrees with the speech by Professor Sachs for the most part. He says it is particularly relevant today as we witness the catastrophes taking place in the world. But he disagrees with Sachs in one important way. Sachs cites Aristotle’s works on politics and ethics as a starting place for a sound political philosophy. Professor Yang, on the other hand, thinks we need to go back another 200 years in time. This would bring us to the time of Confucius.

    Professor Yang thinks Confucius is more relevant because he dealt with large territorial states, while Aristotle dealt with small city-states. Confucius is also important to Wen Yang’s arguments because both Confucius and Aristotle had the benefits of the Axial Age.

    Machiavelli’s focus on power

    The video begins by pointing out a strange fact; apparently, there is nothing worth mentioning in Western politics or philosophy between the time of Aristotle and the time of Machiavelli.

    It is Sachs who brings up Machiavelli’s handbook for political science. He stresses that, in contrast to the West’s traditional roots, the focus of this handbook was how to hold on to power.

    In turn, Professor Wen Yang wonders how it is possible that Machiavelli’s treatise, when it finally appeared, was able to change the course of Western political philosophy. He believes that the core of the problem was the innate deficiencies of Western civilization. And these began very early. The problem with the West is that it did not experience the Axial Age.

    Professor Yang on the importance of the Axial Age

    The Axial Age is a theory developed by German philosopher, Karl Jaspers. Jaspers proposed that in a relatively short span of years, various cultures experienced a state of spiritualization or self-awareness. This experience gave rise to several religions. These religions include Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Unfortunately, when the current form of Western culture arose in Northern Europe around the year 1000, it was a ‘newborn’ culture which had not experienced its own period of transcendence. Nor did it share the knowledge of older cultures. This was partly due to the fact that it had little contact with them.

    According to Wen Yang, the West remained a primitive society, without moral and ethical judgement, and men remained individual and insatiable. He believes that’s why Machiavelli’s writings were adopted as a political philosophy. Such ideas would not have gained wide acceptance in a mature civilization that had experienced an Axial Age.

    Professor Sachs on Thomas Hobbes’s view of human nature

    Jeffrey Sachs doesn’t respond directly to this description of the problem. The video juxtaposes his speech, which was made independently, with that of Professor Yang. When we return to Sachs, he cites Thomas Hobbes’s work, Leviathan, written in 1640. (This was the period when Western science was taking shape.) Hobbes’s model of human nature was one of unbounded desire. In Hobbes’s view, it was impossible for humans to develop virtue. For that reason, institutions were needed to keep a grip on harsh reality. He believed that in order for people to not kill each other they need an ‘overarching power’, or a Leviathan. There was nothing in Hobbes’s philosophy about cultivating the good. It was all about controlling the bad.

    Guanzi’s solution to human reality: four pillars of a civilized state

    Wen Yang says there were similar opinions about human nature in China, but the results were not the same. He cites Guanzi in China, who lived more than 2,000 years before Hobbes. Guanzi wrote that there are four pillars to a civilized state: a sense of propriety, righteousness, honesty, and humility. In Wen Yang’s opinion, ‘It would seem that such a level of self-awareness and ethical self-regulation was not attainable in the West, not in Hobbes’s time and not now.’

    Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees: the world view of the British Empire

    Sachs speech continues. Theories of empire were added to the West’s philosophical and political development. This began with Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees. It furthered a world view which led to the British Empire, with its traffic in slavery and all kinds of evil deeds.

    Confucius: education leads people in a virtuous direction

    By comparison, Confucius had placed great importance on education to shape and lead people in a virtuous direction. To illustrate the difference, Yang tells us that Xunzi had similar insights to Hobbes in the third century BCE. He also saw the negative potential of human nature. He believed that if people were driven by nature and guided by impulses they would be trapped in struggles. So he suggested a system in which intellectuals will bear the responsibility of safeguarding a just society.

    Adam Smith: market forces will tame human nature

    Professor Sachs continues by describing the thought of Adam Smith in 1776. Smith agreed with Hobbes and Mandeville concerning human nature, but he thought market forces would tame those troublesome traits. Smith was obviously unaware that Xunzi had predicted long before Smith’s time that contentions, or ‘competition’, would lead to poverty.

    Two world views, two civilizations

    According to Wen Yang, the difference between Smith and Xunzi represents a difference in world views. When Xunzi used the word ‘people’, he meant the world in its entirety, not a small group of individuals. Smith and Mandeville on the other hand, envisioned a small political entity acquiring political power for overseas conquest. Wen Yang tells us that the only way the world can know peace and prosperity is if all the world’s countries choose to cooperate.

    Professor Sachs seems to agree on the timeframe and philosophies that were responsible for this difference. He says Anglo-Saxon philosophy broke free of more than 1,800 years of Western tradition, which had been based on Aristotle and Christianity. As a result we got the British Empire, which was focused on power. Next, Sachs traces steps in this downward spiral.

    The West forsakes the poor: John Locke, Thomas Malthus and Charles Darwin

    The poor became the enemy because they were a drag on society. John Locke, in particular, wanted harsh treatment for the poor so they would not be a burden on society. Then came Thomas Malthus in 1798. He said that all the various ‘hives’ in the world are in competition with each other for survival because there are more people than can be supported. Trying to help the poor will inevitably fail because it will increase the number of poor people.

    Then, Charles Darwin and Natural Selection took the stage. Other philosophers after Darwin developed his theories into the idea of a struggle across nations. They imagined that whole peoples were in a struggle with each other for survival. This became known as Social Darwinism.

    According to Wen Yang, this phase is the root of the current problem. The British Empire brought extinction wherever it went, and, unfortunately, the US Empire is an extension of the British Imperial Establishment. The main difference is that the United States has the ability to end human existence in a split second. The Anglo-Saxon empires have proceeded exactly as Social Darwinism would predict.

    Crimes against humanity

    Sachs: This progression gave rise to the worst crimes in history. Nazism is a philosophy based on Social Darwinist pseudo-science. It was based on the idea that either the German people will survive or the Slavic people will survive. As a result, World War II was a war for extermination. Even though that war ended, the West is still in the same mindset, so the crimes continue.

    Wen Yang: Noam Chomsky says that 50 to 55 million people around the world have died since World War II as a result of Western colonialism and neoliberalism. Most of these deaths were caused by the United States and justified under the name of freedom and democracy.

    Is there a remedy?

    Yang returns to 300 BC and the ideas of Mencius. Mencius was a Confucian philosopher who said there are four essences of human nature that are common to all: a heart for compassion, a sense of shame and guilt, a faculty of reverence and a judgement of right and wrong. Suppressing these essences was a precondition of Western liberal capitalism. Philosophical writings in the West fulfilled this precondition. They glorified selfishness and greed in the name of freedom.

    The question now is, what can be done? Yang and Sachs offer similar advice. According to Sachs, there are roots of Western culture that we can use to find the ethical path of virtue in politics which was lost by the Anglo-Saxons. He says what we need is for the world to return to the common ethical principles of virtue. These principles were lost mainly as the result of the rise of the British Empire. Later, the British Empire taught United States everything it knows.

    As a comparison with Professor Sachs, Professor Wen Yang believes the current problems can’t be explained by saying the West lost its way. He seems to believe that the West never had a way. Because the West never experienced transcendence, it is regressing back to the level that existed before the Axial Age.

    If that’s as far as you got in the video, you would say we are doomed. But surprisingly Yang thinks we are at a crossroads. This implies that we can still choose. He ends by asking, ‘Are we going to choose a society based on virtues, or are we going to condone a rat race to the bottom, and assured destruction?‘

  • Plato’s Influence on Our World

    Plato's Influence on Our World
    Rethinking Plato’s Influence on the Modern World

    Plato has ruled the world for 2500 years through his lasting influence on philosophy, politics, and religion. It’s time we paid attention to Plato’s influence on our world. He is considered an authority on politics, even though in his lifetime, his writings were not compatible with the politics of his home country, Athens. Some of the worst attitudes of the modern world can be traced to him. He proposed a so-called link between societal ‘decay’ and race. He was also a misogynist. And yet he can’t be easily discarded. He is too much a part of us. Instead, I believe Plato’s influence has to be explored, discussed, and evaluated for its usefulness to contemporary society.

    I am going to try to follow Karl Popper’s moderate approach to Plato. Popper admits there is some good in Plato’s works, but objects to specific ideas which have caused lasting damage. On page 517, for example, he talks about the mischief–a term used by Samuel Butler–done to mankind by our secondary schools and universities. These were virtually invented by Plato. In this article, I would like to discuss Plato’s emphasis on perfectionism.

    Plato’s Influence and Motives

    Plato took his cue from Hesiod and other early Greek philosophers, but especially Heraclitus. Heraclitus ‘discovered’, during a period of political turmoil, that every sensible thing changes constantly. He eventually became disillusioned about the changes he observed and argued against the belief that the existing social order would remain forever. But Heraclitus was not giving up on the existing social order. This fact becomes clear in another element of his philosophy with the potential for a new kind of turmoil. According to Popper, 1 the emphasis on change in Heraclitus’s philosophy was combined with a belief in an immutable law of destiny.

    After Heraclitus, philosophers including Parmenides, Democritus, Plato and Aristotle dedicated themselves to solving the problem of a changing world. Both Parmenides and Plato relegated this world world to a phantom-like existence. They theorized ‘that the changing world in which we live is an illusion and that there exists a more real world which does not change‘. (p. 127) In other words, the world we live in is just a copy of that perfect world. The world we can’t see is more real than the world we live in.

    The Capture of Western Thought

    One wonders how, in 2500 years, this has not been identified as blatant trickery. How odd that we never get around to questioning the relevance or theoretical usefulness of perfection itself. How strange that no one objects to their world being superseded by an ideal world in Plato’s head.

    It is true that Plato didn’t invent the idea of perfection. Previous to the ancient Greeks, Hinduism saw perfection as its primary spiritual goal. But in the Western world it was Plato’s realm of perfect things that influenced Christianity.

    Plato wrote that one had to transcend the imperfection of reality; Aristotle defined perfection as potential being fully realized and expressed; St. Thomas Aquinas concluded from Aristotle that perfection should be one of Christianity’s highest goals.

    Plato’s ideas have also mingled with Jewish and ancient Greek mystical cults to create the tradition of Western mysticism, including Hermeticism and Gnosticism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, and some forms of modern Paganism. In addition, Theosophy influenced the early Western perception of Tibetan Buddhism.

    Plato’s Influence on Education and Career Choices

    Fortunately, context is becoming more clear regarding the effect on individuals of perfectionist beliefs. In an article entitled The Illusion of Perfection, Robert Fritz acknowledges that perfectionism carries built-in assumptions that remain unquestioned. For example, he questions Richard Bach who said, “There is such a thing as perfection… and our purposes for living is to find that perfection and show it forth…”

    One common result of this belief is the responsibility it puts on people to strive for unreachable or undesirable goals. “It reminds me of what Lucy said to Charlie Brown when he told her that we are here to help others. ‘What are the others here for?’ She asked.” (as cited by Fritz)

    Fritz’s article follows perfectionist thinking to its cultural conclusion. “Schools give their students aptitude tests designed to measure their abilities. Then, guidance counselors sit down with these students, and give them advice. Their advice usually suggests pursuing a career based on their aptitude. If the student is good at math, become an engineer; if you are organized, become a manager...”

    In this way many end up in careers they never cared about because they thought they were obligated to develop their talents and abilities without regard to other possibilities.

    Another result of this approach is that many people believe they can’t learn and develop unless they already have gifts to develop. And if they do have gifts, their identity becomes tied to this purpose. They think they are defined by how well they develop their gifts. Since there is no way to reach the ideal of perfection, there is no way to win.

    Democratic Utopias

    If may be that the idea of perfection can be discarded without any great loss of culture or history, but we don’t know that yet. We haven’t explored it thoroughly enough. Democratic versions of utopianism also exist. For example, Sir Thomas More’s book, Utopia. In addition, American colonists created several utopian communities. They all emphasized spiritual perfection, although they differed in their beliefs. From the American example, we can see that the meaning of perfection differs from one group or individual to another, and also from one era to another.

    Today, it is assumed that ‘the American Dream’ is economic. However, that is not how it started out. “The concept of the ‘American Dream’ was created by Puritans in the early 18th Century American colonies. It was also based on the idea of perfectionism. Puritans viewed this New World as a fresh start from the old World of Great Britain and strived to create a society of elite people held under the highest standard of God.”

    The Link Between Puritanism and Transcendentalism

    It is time we paid attention to Plato’s influence on our world.

    1. The Open Society and its Enemies, Routledge, London and New York, 1994 ↩︎

  • Popular Culture Manipulates the Public

    A neoconservative attempt at self-perpetuation can be seen in two of the Star Trek series. According to David Greven, the Enterprise series is the first Trek series to openly break with Trek’s core liberal values. Regardless of whether this was intended to manipulate, this is just one influence driving American culture to the right. It’s likely that popular culture manipulates the public.

    “Enterprise appears to be a Trek series for those who felt Trek had undergone an appallingly ‘sensitive’ makeover in its incarnations of the late-80s and 1990s… “

    Restore America and Star Trek

    This break had a purpose. Greven cited Daniel Leonard Bernardi’s recognition of an effort called ‘Restore America’. However, Bernardi associated The Next Generation, which originally aired in 1987, with this ‘neoconservative moment’. In his opinion, racism, sexism, and heterosexism worked together to ‘roll back’ the political gains of the 1960s liberalism, such as civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.

    Greven also cites Richard Chase, who thought Hermann Melville represented the ‘new liberalism’, as opposed to ‘Bad, ‘old’ liberalism. Neoconservatives preferred the new liberalism because it was ‘unequivocally’ opposed to totalitarianism. Suddenly these former liberals decided their old liberal goals of ‘progress,’ ‘history,’ and ‘the liberation of the masses’ was ironic. In other words, it was doubtful they could ever be realized.

    The effort to perpetuate this view in The Next Generation was apparently more successful than Enterprise. The Next Generation ran for seven years; Enterprise ran for less than 4. There was immediate resistance to beliefs expressed by the Enterprise crew. Viewers complained about the series’ direction, and stopped watching it. This led the writers to make hasty changes. However, according to Greven, Enterprise remained ‘a deeply misogynistic, reactionary Trek series.’ According to fans, the neoconservative fantasy expressed in Enterprise, was a ‘return to a time before progressive, politically correct new values ruined things for everybody and policed the expression of good, salty, enjoyable, essentialist, racist and sexist views.’

    Is Donald Trump part of the Restore America Agenda?

    Greven’s article makes me wonder if there have been ongoing neoconservative influences in American popular culture. If Donald Trump is the latest attempt at a course correction for liberal values, it stands to reason there have been continuous attempts since Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Enterprise. No wonder so many people are mesmerized by this agenda.

    Popular culture manipulates the public.

  • Was the Enlightenment Democratic?

    Was the Enlightenment democratic? According to Harold Kaplan, Americans do not question the effects on the United States of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. He wrote:

    “We do not question that the twin roots of American national history were the religious revolution, which broke the Catholic hegemony, and the secular Enlightenment, which finally broke the traditional political structures, monarchical and hierarchical, of Europe…” (p. 14)

    ((Harold Kaplan, Democratic Humanism and American Literature, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1972, p. 14)) (T

    When I first started thinking about the social effects of America’s mythology, I questioned the religious basis of the Enlightenment. Now I’m questioning its democratic basis.There is no question that those events made the United States possible. But there have always been concerns about the Enlightenment. Are we capable of talking about these concerns in the Enlightened United States?

    The short answer is, not necessarily. One faction of our enlightened forefathers, the federalists, wanted a continuation of Britain’s monarchy with a king-like president. Others wanted to create a new kind of government unlike Britain’s. Unfortunately, the new-government faction lost the debate. The best they could do was add the Bill of Rights to curb federal power.

    Although we might wish the anti-federalists had been successful, they were part of the same class as the federalists. One result of their class outlook was that they did not see a problem with inequality, slavery in particular.

    American Politics versus Enlightenment Governance

    Was the Enlightenment Democratic?
    Was the Enlightenment Democratic?

    As stated above, America’s government is an Enlightenment creation. In this light, it was interesting to discover that during the 2016 presidential election that we are not allowed to elect our chosen presidential candidate. After loudly objecting to our defeat, most of us accepted our limitations, unlike the Trump faction. That’s who we are.

    Trump

    Trump’s base apparently missed that demonstration of how democracy works. He used our act of good will to promote himself. Now we are observing billionaires and Freemasons trying to claw back democracy, and Trump’s supporters don’t bat an eye.

    You could say the aftermath of the 2020 election has been a Free-masonic temper tantrum. And it’s not going away. Freemasonry is part of our political history. The important lesson here is that our system offered no protections against a candidate like Donald Trump.

    Biden

    On a positive note, the Biden Administration has responded to many of our demands. It’s not what we envisioned in 2016. We thought a complete change of direction was needed to address climate change and the shortage of resources. But the truth is, no politician, including Bernie Sanders, can run a campaign on a platform of lower living standards and personal sacrifice. And this is what we need. If some mythical self-sacrifice candidate were to win anyway, the markets would remove him in short order.

    However, Biden’s political situation has been complicated by events in Palestine. As a recipient of AIPAC money, he supports Israel’s attack on Gaza. In addition, AIPAC is threatening to primary any political candidate who criticizes Israel’s bombing campaign. And our government does not object. Perhaps the most worrying part of this is that it is taking place over the objections of people all over the world. This is another lesson about American politics.

    Class Structure in America

    America has always had distinct social classes but no one bothers to explain how this came about. Immigration, of course. Groups immigrating to the colonies included Puritans (religious fundamentalists), Quakers (religious liberals), and Borderers. This last group wanted personal liberty without interference from society or government. But the largest group of English immigrants to the United States arrived between the years 1642 to 1675. They consisted of 45,000 Cavaliers of King Charles I, and their indentured servants. They had lost their former status in England because they were on the losing side in the English Civil War. However, they remained royalist, Anglican and Aristocratic.

    Some say they wanted to re-create in Virginia the hierarchal, farming society they had left behind. When their servants began to die, the Cavaliers’ descendants imported African slaves. Cavalier immigrants included ancestors of George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, and other first families of Virginia.

    The descendants of the Cavaliers only stopped supporting the Stuart kings during the reign of Charles II. They turned against King Charles because he appointed his own people to offices in Virginia and gave cultivated land to his favorites, among other injustices.

    Summary

    Was the Enlightenment a democratic movement? Not as much as it could have been. It seems Ben Franklin was not quite honest when he said democracy is ours if we can keep it. Therefore, it is reasonable to question our form of government and the Enlightenment ideals that made it possible.

  • Popular Culture is Being Used to Manipulate the Public

    A neoconservative attempt at self-perpetuation can be seen in two of the Star Trek series. According to David Greven, the Enterprise series is the first Trek series to openly break with Trek’s core liberal values. Regardless of whether this was intended to manipulate, this is just one influence driving American culture to the right. It’s likely that popular culture is being used to manipulate the public.

    “Enterprise appears to be a Trek series for those who felt Trek had undergone an appallingly ‘sensitive’ makeover in its incarnations of the late-80s and 1990s… “

    (more…)
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