October 16, 2018

The Magic Squaw and Blazing Ford; Reality and Magical Thinking in Modern America

Timothy Birdnow

Nothing comes out of a vacuum. Ideas, like germs, infect and grow and move from place to place, body to body. Sometimes these ideas are good, like the concept of Inalienable Rights, or free markets, or that slavery is an evil thing (most people in history would have strongly disagreed with that last.) As with viruses there are many that are neither good nor bad, simply that exist. And then there are very bad ones, which cause untold damage to society. Those last are usually embraced by the Progressives and the radical Left.

And they don't just go away. like viruses, they mutate into new forms and assert themselves in ways we cannot imagine at the time.

Take the concept of subjective reality. Western philosophy (and Eastern as well) began embracing this notion a long time ago based on a number of key observations about the imprecision of human senses. Parmenides of Elea argued that motion is impossible and therefore a sensory illusion.That was back in You also had Pyrrho 360 BC – 270 BC who also made the case that our senses are lacking. You had Heralclitus who said reality itself was the problem.

Then you had the one who has had such a profound impact on post-modernist thinking - Protagoras. He famously said:

"Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not."

End quote.

This may as well be the motto on the Progressive coat of arms. Reality is but a construct of the human mind, to Protagorus and those who have followed in his footsteps.

Modern philosophy is riddled with Idealism. That is not the pedestrian idealism of everyday usage but the philosophical concept that reality is a mental construct, a thing intimately intertwined with human consciousness. This notion - which is in many ways in direct contradiction of Christianity and Judaism, makes Man his own god. It has been buttressed by philosophers since the Greeks, certainly there are whiffs of it in Hegel and Nietzche, although neither of them were pure Idealists. Nietzche, of course, had his notions of the Will and even if he didn't believe his "Superman" could completely overthrow reality he thought they could change it with sufficient effort and determination. (Nietchze rejected idealism even while supporting the idea that reality was rather malleable.) And prior to him we had Descartes who said reality is unknowable. Oh, and Nietzche went mad as a result of his thinking.

At any rate, this is not an exercise in the history of philosophy. I DO have a real world point to make.

Two great scientific breakthroughs in physics had a profound impact on modern thinking. Einstein's Theory of Relativity made it plain that the role of the observer was critical to a situation, and many bizarre things come of it. Time is relative to the observer, and two men moving at different speeds to each-other experience time in a slightly different way. This extends to changes in mass and energy, too; the faster you move the greater your mass. But there is no such thing as absolute rest, so time and energy and mass are all dependent on your viewpoint.

The second was Quantum phyiscs, with the critical nature of the observer. You can't know both the energy state and the position of a subatomic particle; the act of measuring one affects the other. And you have to be looking; you "collapse the wave front" and it appears as a particle in a specific spot. But it does not exist in a specific spot but rather in many places at once.

These two breakthroughs did great damage to the idea of a concrete reality, one that is immutable and outside of human consciousness. Modernity is chock-full of it.

We're finally there.

The modern antipathy towards concepts of concrete reality leads us to many strange things. Two such strange things have now intersected in the political realm. The first was the Kavanaugh hearings, where the SCOTUS nominee had his name dragged through the mud. The second is Elizabeth Warren's DNA test.

When Christine Blasey-Ford made her accusations against Judge Kavanaugh, the Democrats used in a vile attempt to derail his nomination, holding the accusation until the hearings were complete. They then held a show trial in which the accuser was given absolute credibility and the accused was said to be guilty because he forcefully denied being a rapist. See, in modern America it is not the nature of the evidence but the seriousness of the charge. How can that be? America was founded on the principles that God created Man, and endowed Him with inalienable rights. Thus the accused does not have to prove a negative. Rather, an accuser must present evidence or we assume it did not happen. We base our system of rationality, on the idea that reality is real.

But the modern Left has other ideas. What is real for some, they argue, is not real for others and the reality of the individual must be respected no matter how crazy. So Blasey-Ford, without a shred of evidence, is automatically believed because "women don't lie about such things" even though we have direct contradictions of that assertion. Remember the Duke lacross case? Or "Mattress Girl"? But if it involves a member of what is considered the oppressed classes - and women are so considered - then their reality trumps the reality of white men. Mrs. Ford didn't have to prove anything; she merely had to shout "J'accuse"!

See, there's no reality here; just subjective viewpoints. (Remember Star Wars: Return of the Jedi where the ghost of Obi Wan Kenobi blathers on about truth being "from a certain point of view"?)

Now, since society at large has determined that Women Don't Lie About These Things we can dismiss objective evidence as immaterial. That Blowsy Ford may BELIEVE her allegations is all that matters. Not even that; as long as someone believes it, it is true because it is true - from a certain point of view.

Which brings us to Cherokee Lizzy Warren, old Fauxcahontas herself. She told everyone who would listen that she was a Cherokee Indian, a real life squah. She benefitted mightily from her self-identification as a "person of color" based on her claim that she was a Native American. When she decided to run for the Senate people began looking at her claims and they began to fall apart. Donald Trump mocked her for them, and, now that she is running for President, she has decided to get in front on this by taking a DNA test.

Well, there is a very tiny percentage of Native American DNA in her profile. It's as low as 1/1,000th, or essentially so little that it makes her as white as the whitest of white people.

But that doesn't matter. What matters is she BELIEVES herself to be Cherokee. And she has made much whampum from it, too.

Writing in The Federalist, David Harsanyi stated:

"One of the talking points proliferating online and also featured in the Globe article, so Warren will surely use it is that Trump's criticism of Warren is comparable to birtherism, and thus racist."

End excerpt.

On the news being read on KMOX radio (a CBS affiliate here in St. Louis) the broadcaster called this a response to "a racial slur by Donald Trump". How is this a racial slur? He's saying she's NOT Native American, not that it is bad to be Native American. There is no slur involved. But the media wants to delegitimize Trump wherever they can so they are going to try to turn this into racism. And what with the "Walk Away" movement, they have to stop losing Blacks, Latinos, and others to the Trump bandwagon. They are going to pull out all stops in claiming he is a racist neo-Nazi Klansmen over the next two years, and this is going to be a big part of it, methinks.

So there is much collective pressure to redefine reality to promote Warren's Wigwam belief. Reality is, after all, what people believe, individually or collectively, so who is to say she's NOT an Indian?

The media has gone into overdrive to say this proves Trump's - and everyone else's - assertion that Warren was lying is false. But it actually does quite the opposite, showing that she has more white blood than most other people categorized as white. But it serves a political purpose, and so they want to create a collective belief in her colorhood.

It's just like the way the media keeps promoting "transgenderism" as a real thing. They refer to men in drag as "she" because the person "self-identifies" on the theory that reality is simply based on what one or many believe. "Gender" (sex) is a societal construct, this theory argues, and it is to be overturned by the rebellious who don't "feel" that way.

So, we are to believe a woman was raped based on what she or others might believe sans evidence, we are to believe a person is the race they "feel" they are a member of, and we are to believe a person is the sex they choose, be it male, female, shemale, xemale, e-mail, xmail or what-have-you, based on how that person feels on any given day. And now the fringe is starting to move ever closer to the hallowed halls of credibility. We have people who think they are animals demanding to be considered such, or able-bodies people who don't "feel" like they have legs being called handicapped, or people who want to be babies rolling around in poopy diapers with pacifiers in their mouths demanding to be taken seriously. This all stems from a willful refusal to accept that there is a reality that is independent of our inner minds, one created by God.

He who believes himself god will surely go mad. That is where our culture is now.

But, but, but, what of all the philosophy? Of the science?

Science is a matter of probability, and at the quantum level probability becomes more pronounced. But at our level things follow laws pretty solidly. Theoretically it's possible to walk right through a wall; in reality you will get a bloody nose. It's a horribly myopic understanding of these things that make people adopt this Idealism. Reality exists within a range of probabilities. It's like oxygen; too little you die, too much you die. There is a range that is necessary. Now, the Idealist would argue that you can exist without it if you click your heels together three times and believe, but that is only going to get you killed. And death is absolute, I might add; no amount of refusing to believe will reanimate a corpse. Death alone is absolute proof of the concrete nature of reality; nobody wants it but it comes for everyone. If reality could be altered by an act of will that would not be the case. And even if we exist in private realities our realities intersect to a degree and at those intersections we would see the discrepencies. We don't. Everybody croaks.

All progress has come because of a belief in the objective nature of reality. Prior to that we had Magic - the superstition that we could believe our way to a better tomorrow. Magic is inextricably tied to pagan religions, and it is a fools game, a red herring that leads us away from progress (and from God, who is the source of all progress.) What we are doing in modern America is recreating the idea of magic as a guiding philosophical principle.

In the end, this is a dangerous road to travel, one that will lead us into another Dark Age. Nietzche predicted this, arguing that eventually Western materialism would begin undermining it's own core beliefs. Once concepts like reality and knowability are discredited then the old gods, the magicians, the necromancers, the chanters and potion brewers would come back with a vengeance. Man needs structure. He needs a sense of power over his circumstances. Science, philosophy, and religion all offered the structure needed. But science got out of hand, moving from a pursuit of truth to a tool of "advancement" and we have seen repeated examples of science at the service of ideology. Global Warming is a great example. There is scant evidence for it, but it looks good on paper and it serves a purpose to the powerful and those who want a globalist state. So we continue to pretend it is science and it does irreparable harm to all science in the process, because it is essentially irrationalism, a Millenialist doctrine packaged as a scientific theory. Global warming is something you have to BELIEVE in, not accept on a rational basis.

With science corrupted, and the traditional faiths weakened to extreme geriatric sclerosis, what is left? Make way the path of the old gods.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:45 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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