The American Crisis: Defined
Journal Entry #8
…bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic. - Charles Sanders Peirce

The mold of a man stems from the mind of a child. Educators and Emperors have known this from time immemorial; so have Tyrants. – Epilogue, The Special One; The Outer Limits

One might reasonably ask what the study and practice of philosophy has to do with our political FREEDOM (or, for that matter, with anything else of day-to-day importance). It is a worthy question. The answer is: Everything. The degree of our political FREEDOM- as, indeed, of all our freedoms- depends, from start to finish, upon our intellectual FREEDOM; upon the precision and vitality of our philosophical activity. Historically, there is no dimension or realm of human civilization that can be isolated or exempted from philosophical activity.

From the perspective of history we observe the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, within which the inseparable connection between freedom of thought and political freedom is perfectly illustrated. As a matter of necessity, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia established ministries of propaganda (there was no independent media; all information was regulated, censored or created by and through this ministry) along with internal organs of repression- domestic secret police agencies- to quash political dissent and prevent deviation from official doctrine, thus ensuring ideological compliance and societal obedience.

Of the many duties the propaganda ministry discharged, the most critical was the exercise of absolute control over education in order to promote “correct” thinking and especially, to indoctrinate the youth for future service. Only those intellectual pursuits that served to support and validate the official political doctrine were tolerated. Deviationist thinking that encouraged heresy was extinguished. Imprisonment, reeducation, internal exile or execution awaited those who further persisted in such dangerous thinking.

Now if we unwisely were to regard totalitarian style government a relic, a political phenomenon of bygone centuries, then we ignore the existence today of the Peoples Republic of China- hardly a model of liberalism; or that totalitarianism is the exclusive product or vestige of Western, late medieval, monarchist-absolutist political tendencies, we then risk neglecting the Persian example of tyranny in today’s Iran- a nation of decidedly Middle Eastern orientation, thoroughly imbued (to permeate as if by dyeing) in Islam.

Consider this: The President of Iran was invited last year to deliver an address and speak freely at the United Nations and Columbia University (both widely covered and broadcast by the various media), though he extended no reciprocal offer to the American President to address the people of Iran. And couple this with the recent arbitrary arrest and detention- allegedly for espionage- of several visiting university professors, we readily gain a clear sense of the dictatorship in Iran.

Here in America, most of us would soon detect the emergence of, or even a gradual shift toward a totalitarian society, citing the establishment of various authoritarian tools of repression such as propaganda ministries, shadowy police agencies and their midnight goon squads, erosion of political, civil and personal liberty, all united under a dictatorial leader. Such is currently the case in Venezuela, as many of the citizens there have taken to the streets to protest and oppose Hugo Chavez’ gathering of all political authority into his own hands, henceforth to rule by arbitrary decree as “President for Life”.

Virtually all the totalitarian regimes we’ve explored are fundamentally the product of, and live to support authoritarian political and social ideologies. The exception is Iran, which is a product of religious dogma rather than political ideology. Nevertheless, all of these authoritarian societies basically share the identical feature of establishing, operating and extending themselves according to flawed philosophical methods, characterized by illogical reasoning that always culminates in a pronounced cultural hostility toward the correct use of reason.

At this juncture we need to ask ourselves this crucial question: by the exercise of these same flawed philosophical methods, are we in America equally vulnerable to the loss of our liberty- our FREEDOM- by the establishment of some degree of totalitarianism? Put another way, can a people deliver themselves into a de facto (not established by law, but by habit or custom) social tyranny of their own making while maintaining some semblance of political freedom?

The answer is: most definitely yes. We currently retain in America the image or sensation of being free by exercising the freedom to say and do and think many things, with one exception: the unrestrained freedom to pursue TRUTH. With the end of World War Two- an outcome secured as much by high industrialism, science and technology as by military strategy- it was largely perceived that the future international order would be shaped by space and the atom (that is, science and scientific thinking) in addition to politics and diplomacy.

The overwhelming (and quite logical) fact routinely overlooked however, is that the post-War era would be shaped increasingly more by the unresolved philosophical forces that had been at work thirty years before World War Two, and had made totalitarian government and total war possible in the first place. These philosophical forces would be clearly and sharply manifested in the global Cold War conflict between Western Liberalism and Soviet/Chinese Communism.

In short order, all of these Western ideas would come into violent conflict with Pan-Arab and then Pan-Islamic philosophies and worldviews. With the course of domestic and international events being so heavily dependent upon a basic understanding of philosophy, and the imbalance in American education of philosophical instruction, we can better comprehend the current social, political and economic instability we now are experiencing and which will, if not remedied, certainly precipitate a structural failure of democracy- perhaps catastrophic failure. Consequently, we shall turn our attention to the systematic method of Philosophy and the precise workings of Logic in order to distinguish bad reasoning from good, thereby departing Tyranny and ensuring our FREEDOM.

In a sensible world, using the standard meaning of the term, philosophy is the systematic search for truth, and the formulation of truthful statements about the objectively existing order of things, in the absence of preference or prejudice. Unfortunately, it is this critical philosophical function- to align as closely as possible, our thoughts and ideas with the actual order of existing things and processes- that Western culture, particularly in America, has now come to reject.

In its elemental form, according to Professor Edward Craig in his wonderfully concise Philosophy; A Very Short Introduction, philosophy proceeds with the understanding that all of us are, to a great extent, philosophers already. We all “have some kind of values by which we live our lives…And most of us favour some very general picture of what the world is like.”

According to the values we live by and the pictures we have of the world, we unconsciously answer two basic philosophical questions: “what should we do? And, what is there?” Formally, these questions are: “How ought we to live? And, what really exists?” These two questions imply a third: “how do we know, or if we don’t know how should we set about finding out- use our eyes, think, consult an oracle, ask a scientist?” When we set to work answering these questions, we inescapably begin to philosophize.