THE MOVEMENT UPON US - with Robert Dattilo PhD

THE MOVEMENT UPON US

Today, the free world is being confronted by a movement of a totalitarian centralized government with a pernicious doctrine so dangerous that it could wipe out the very basis of free civilized civilizations, with the final realization in Soviet or Nazi totalitarianism.

In 1957, famed Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote a master treatise on philosophy called, “Theory and History.” In it he warned of the coming of this destructive ideology, that he witnessed first handed that destroyed his beloved Vienna and drove him into political exile, first to Geneve, Switzerland, and finally New York. He saw this movement ruin Russia, enter into Europe, and threaten many other regions of the world and fundamentally threaten liberty itself.

In his treatise he gave this dangerous movement the title of polylogism. The idea is this. There is not one logic, one truth, or one path of thinking. Rather, every group and every interest operates according to its own logic. Every social class, every nation, race, or period of history has a logic that differs from the logic of other classes, nations, races, or ages. No one is in a position to say, this does not follow from that. There are multiple and infinite ways to think and no one is in a position to say what is correct or incorrect, valid or invalid. As a result, there are no real rules for thinking and no right or wrong to finding out what is or is not true. It is a short step to deny reality altogether, but the uniformity of the logical structure of the human mind is denied. So much so that even biology is under unconstrained imagination believing that women can be men, and not only can men be women, but also give birth. Wild stuff !

When you consider these implications, there can be no definite human rights because what is right for one group isn’t necessary right for another. There can be no agreeable language with true meaning. No informed dialogue. No valid arguments, and we are left with the prevailing counterpoint that all arguments are valid, even if they are just feelings, intuitions, or opinions. This leaves us where we are today with the application of the rule of law and the interpretation of the Constitution being deconstructed and always questioned, because there can be no law or constitution because they presume a uniform structure of human aspiration, which does not exist in this discussion.

In Mises view this problem of the denial of the validity of logic began with the vision of historian G.F. Hegel, a half century before Karl Marx. Hegel saw the existence of sweeping forces of historical determinism that operated outside human will and the constraints of logic and old-fashioned notions of truth. Henceforth, we are left with questionable division. He exposed the conflict of truth and logic vs. non-truth and non-logic in his posited thesis of dialectic materialism, a general set of principles for logical thinking. (Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis). Hegel’s thesis was taken by Karl Marx decades later to apply this conflict of truth that exists between different logical systems as they pertain to groups and applied it to the workers versus capital owners that would eventually serve as a demonic weapon to overthrow man’s spiritual faith, undermine human morality, and challenge traditional culture to destroy it in some countries (as we see today in Western Democracies) and even overthrow it in the governments of some other countries (the Communist, and Fascists). Hence, he would create the division of the left-wing Marxists and the right-wing, fascists and the Nazis, who were the unifiers of church, state, and industry into a single divine force. He established the basis for a whole host of warped intellectual pretensions which have worked hand-in-hand to corrupt science, replace normal reasoning with a secular religion used to repress faith and deny morality. His logic was deeply rooted in the concept of struggle. Struggle in the many disciplines of mankind having great effects on the natural sciences, but more importantly in the field of language where we now see the definitions of words and nuances of words twisted to conform with the dystopian control of a centralized government over people. “Freedom” has been twisted to mean a state unrestrained by morality, law, or tradition. Principles such as “all men are created equal” have been distorted to mean finding new genders and gender choices. “Tolerance” to mean accepting all sorts of warped thought and conduct. “Social justice” meaning equality of outcome.

Very interestingly contemporary author Christopher Rufo saw this conflict burrowing even deeper into society and in his thesis, “America’s Cultural Revolution,” posits the hidden history of left-wing radical intellectuals and activists who systematically took control of America’s institutions to undermine them with this Marxist theory of conflict and reapplied it to a series of other settings involving race, gender, religion, nationality, language, and everything else thus creating a crazy world of infinite war between groups, the object being for the radical left to achieve their ultimate objective: replacing constitutional equality with a totalitarian race-based redistribution system overseen by bureaucratic ‘diversity and inclusion’ officials to gain control over the levers of power.

Crucial to the success of any totalitarianism (communism, Nazism, Fascism, or controlled Democracy) is the destruction of traditional rules of logic and all its branches, including mathematics, science, economics, and liberal politics. In a world without the presumption of the uniformity of the logical structure of the human mind anything becomes possible. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is true. All claims are merely beliefs and valid or invalid depending on the political whim of those in charge.

The success of the radical left having society accept this slow-moving metamorphosis of society to this destructive totalitarian centralized one world order of government has been their control over education of schools, colleges, and universities. To not give students the choice to think anymore and not be taught logic, individuals without critical thinking are unable to recognize lies and deceptions. It ensures that the next generation of students will be foolish and ignorant, and vulnerable to manipulation. The only people who encounter the discipline of logical thought are students of philosophy. Not many students major in philosophy today because students are seasoned to major in a field of education that when they graduate can produce an income to obtain wealth and position. Not something a philosophy major may well attain.

Classical education was historically based on the foundation of knowledge to teach the necessary skills in language, reasoning, and communication in what was called the Trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. This foundation of knowledge taught that there were actual rules for thinking, reasoning, and communicating, and no one is taught this in education today. Since the 1960’s this curriculum has been deprecated in all education and relegated to an arcane branch of philosophy studied only by a tiny field of specialists ready to be purged from university curriculums. Today’s Trivium is: complaining, self-obsessing, and grifting.

For those of you who are not aware of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School (a freighting school of thought that is being accepted and initiated by todays liberal Democrats) you should read up about his 1969 essay “Repressive Tolerance” in which he opined that the whole concept of freedom is itself a bourgeois construct that must be overthrown through massive state oppression of traditional elites to put new ones in charge. (So very insane. The new elites being just as greedy and power hungry as the previous elite just change positions to become the new power elites. They now put their priorities ahead of any others. Ridiculous.)

The goal of those working for the demise of the freedom of the individual is not to resolve problems, but as Chiang Kai-shek once said,” is to expand global contradictions to the greatest extent possible and cause human struggle to continue forever.” To incite hatred among people, to create and escalate conflict to only seize power through subterfuge. The protests we see roiling our college campuses is only a testimony to the success of this movement showing the perennial anger to call for the end of the United States democratic form of government and system of free market capitalism and to replace both with some collectivist pipe dream. It is a sorry indictment of U.S. higher education that our students and graduates are so ignorant of the death and destruction wrought by both communism and socialism that they can advocate for Marxism. The death toll associated with a century of communism is almost impossible to grasp. In Russia, 5 million starved to death between 1921-22, and another 6 million in the early 1930’s. In China, as many as 45 million in the Great Famine of 1958-1962, caused by the policies of Mao Zedong. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million. North Korea, between 250,000 and 3.5 million in the famine of the 1990’s. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela reduced the population to abject poverty in just less than a decade. When there is only one producer, only one centralized control anything can happen, and usually that anything is death and destruction, systemic failure. When you consider the counterpoint just look at the market economy of the United States. In our history hundreds, even thousands of companies have gone bankrupt and out of business. And yet, did those bankruptcies leave us with no food, cars, clothing, homes, apartments, death or famine.
NO!
Because some companies failed as a result of poor decisions, unforeseen circumstances, mismanagement, or even fraud, others succeeded with freedoms and the free-market system of democratic capitalism and were even able to provide what the defunct organizations could not.

This isn’t hypothesis or speculation; we’ve seen systemic failure in centralized one government systems happen with regularity in top-down, command-and-control economies in our lifetimes over and over again and again. Now, our government wants more centralized power and control over our agricultural production, our industries, our economy to eliminate the oil and gas industries, radically restructure our automotive industry forcing Americans to purchase electric-powered vehicles, limit the use of appliances and air conditioners, to reduce dairy farming as well as agricultural meat production and consumption, allegedly because of methane in cow flatulence. In the name of “climate change,” a science with many murky counter arguments of its existence, billions of dollars are being spent to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which plants require to grow and then give back to the biosphere oxygen, which we humans need. (Remember photosynthesis, Biology 101)

In concluding, what I tried to achieve in this missive was to expose a concession to the validity that without a universal logic, the state will always take charge of not only education, but also political leadership to achieve this totalitarian centralized government which is what we have occurring today. The division that is being created by liberal administration and supported by distorted and untruthful media, journalists, lawyers, and politicians has been undermining the country’s historic relationship between the individual and the state. Prompting for more calls for government intervention, interaction, and involvement only perpetuating the eventually demise of individual freedoms as we have known in civilized societies. The “long march through the institution’s” is working much better than we have to admit. Liberal educators have undermined traditional education creating degenerate modern art, promote sexual promiscuity and pornography, popularized drug use, and glorify sinfulness and revolting behavior as liberating and expressive weaking the religious roots of civilization, giving rise to new ideological movements grounded in struggle.

The problem isn’t just gaps in scientific knowledge, flawed economic policy, or the control of education; it is too much power in too few hands. When those with all the power are wrong about something the damage their mistakes cause is monumental. The United States has enjoyed the success it has because economic and political power has been diffused and distributed among the states, into local governments, among millions of businesses and tens of millions of people. The ideologues in our ranks who are so certain that they can and should control everything are manipulating the political process-through propaganda, censorship, unaccountable bureaucratic regulation, and executive order, to centralize their power over our lives. Their insidious progressivism is counterproductive to the ideals encapsulated in our founding documents. The lessons from history are clear: anyone given centralized control over our lives will destroy it. Polyogism that Ludwig von Mises wrote about in 1957 sounds like a fancy philosophy but it is nothing but the handmaiden of tyrants.