Human Mind, American Way

To Think Through, And Carry On

I will contend: America is currently in no serious condition to handle a politics of liberty. All the philosophy necessary to that has been squeezed by mal-education and beaten by force of law out of the culture for whole generations, now.

To begin at the political level of philosophy, the practice of force as a way of dealing with each-other is rampant at every turn, right down to the street-level. This, of course, should not be surprising because of how the force of government has been coloring every aspect of life in America for the entire 20th century: Americans have taken the lessons. The senseless brutality of police enforcing arbitrary laws (a single example, among countless: the War on Drugs) has taught more than two generations that appeals to reason are futile and dangerously naive. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" and its relentless metastases wrought destruction of families so deep and wide that countless millions were left as ethical orphans without a moral outlook that would inform a proper way of human life. All of it has been positively accelerated by government education, which could only-ever have served the purpose of acclimation to slavery.

Descending a hierarchy of philosophy to the more principled level ethics (which necessarily informs and conditions politics), we can see the nearly complete ex-valuation of values (paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche) with the sole exception of collective values: almost every reason for human action presumed by government to be disposable for "the common good". This has resulted in the gang-warfare of democracy finally distilled in the very apt adage that, "If you're not at the table, then you're on the menu". Even intellectual derelicts can sense this viscerally, with the cunning perception of hunted animals.

The harrowing lapse of thought itself (also bound-up in ethical travesties: truth is no longer a value) in widespread inability to maintain even simple contexts for purposes of abstracting necessary implications of facts, or even what facts are. This constitutes a wholesale overthrow of the power and purpose of the human mind, which is the sinking of humanity below its own nature to genuine sub-humanism: an existential crisis that would never have dawned on the puny racist discrimination of Nazis, among the worst beasts of all history.

Arriving at the very bottom; metaphysics has been the banished domain of philosophy for over a hundred years: reality itself is long dismissed as an objective fact. (Students of Pragmatism will understand this.) A working recent example is the case of Alexandra Souverneva, the woman accused of wildfire arson in California who calls herself a "shaman": a person who professes contact with a "spirit world" for the purpose of "healing". The general consequences of a genuine disregard for reality (no mere novel wisecrack, but actual un-caring that existence exists and what that means) are video-observable at any hour in myriad examples; people don’t even know how to live, never mind letting others do it.

The sum of these defects is the general sum of American (indeed: Western) culture with the consequence of general working psychosis at every level from the street to so-called "business" to "the Ivory Towers" and all political institutions. People mal-trained to conduct life as human beings have little way to regard any of it as more than a bestial combat, except for superficial vestiges of ancestral behavior once civilized and now reduced to quaintly observed habit without understanding, and instantly perishable at the least conflict.

The entire crisis of American politics is now taken as exclusively political, without much deeper cause or understanding, and open to exclusively political solution. A more and more common joke that people should "vote harder" refers to this fact. What's actually true is that mounting frenzy to compete at electoral politics is the most informative metric of social disintegration available to anyone with eyes to see it, a mind to think about it, and a will to know the truth of it all.

Understanding reality (the fact of existence itself), reason (application of the essentially-identifying attribute of humanity), and discrimination of values from their myriad opposites are all indispensable to conduct of human life, to include the institution of a rational and peaceful politics. The entire edifice of philosophy, painfully erected over centuries and which only began to serve proper human habitation in the past four hundred years or so, must be effectively rebuilt in order to restore a righteous hope in what mankind can, and should, be.

Until American philosophy is recovered from whole decades and generations of neglect and outright sabotage, no strains at politics will avail anything but intensifying conflict and no way to find peace and prosperity.

This will be an enormous project of thought, contravailing everything that pretends to that, today.

Sober and genuinely thoughtful analysts will be the heroes: not "first responders" or their cynical sponsors, or the whole species of demagogues calling themselves "educators," or the virtual-battlefield marshals known as "politicians".

Only the American mind, to any extent that it can be resurrected, will suffice. A way of thinking that properly apprehends what reality is, exploiting physical senses that saw our ancestors through countless millennia and knowing now how to integrate percepts into concepts according to abstract principles -- and discriminate principles; refined to identify and practice the best ways that any individual human being could live a better life. The singular power of the human mind is the solely prevailing device of human survival, unlike all other species, which are principally physically adapted to their environments. We live by our conceptual capacity, the first task of which is to identify the nature of existence; not for idle speculation but as a matter of life and death.

Throughout the entire human ascent through the ages, Americans have thus far been the highest expression of this way of life. It must be stressed that no matter how badly the idea of all this has been treated in American history, with infamous atrocities in the records of those who stole the premise in the name of the "United Sates," the truest identity politics of all is that which understands the moral necessity of the freedom of every individual human mind, and the political freedom to pursue its own judgments.

It was America, situated as it was in both history and geography, where the idea could be put to practice through the unique energy of New World discovery coupled with Industrial Age productive power. To the extent the they were free from government restriction, Americans demonstrated possibilities open to human achievement as have never been shown in the history of the nation-state.

The highest potential of human achievement cannot be coerced. No rule of force can inspire its own contradiction: the distinctly unruly reach of the human mind toward what the world really is, and how to use that for profit. How to live profitably at peace among countless other judging and discriminating moral beings is an entire ethics that must now be socially reconstituted among generations taught all the opposite premises and whose general world-view demands the thoughtless savagery daily on parade now.

The premise to set is that freedom is a necessary value to human life. This is to distinguish freedom from all forms of collectivism ("communism," "fascism," "social democracy," etc.), which necessarily demand violation of a human being's most crucial attribute: individual judgement; the ability to apprehend reality with his own senses. All socialisms demand intellectual conformity, regardless of individual judgment, contrary to what a human being is, and the basic principle here is that no entity can survive in violation of its own nature. Human beings are no exception to this, no matter the pretenses of all reformers.

If the American mind can be drawn along a course like this, to demonstrate its own heritage and all the reasons for it, then it will be possible to refute and prevail over the variety of socialist impulses rampaging now through ethics and politics. Cries for "union!" ring across the land without seriously asking about principles upon which anyone should unite. The original American ethics of freedom (no matter how badly practiced in U.S. politics) is the fundamental value that struck the word, "union!" into the spiritual chords of the nation long before anyone saw fit to go to civil war over it, and it must be distilled to explicit philosophy again in order to guide anything like an American restoration.