I Think Critically, Therefore I Am An Outcast in Red MAGA Land

“Do not take what I say as if I were merely playing, for you see the subject of our discussion — and on what subject should even a man of slight intelligence be more serious? Namely, what kind of life should one live … the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates

SocraticMethod graphic - I Think Critically, Therefore I Am An Outcast in Red MAGA Land

Sunday Reader –
By Glynn Wilson

TRUSSVILLE, Ala. – The Marshall Tucker Band is playing on the big TV tuned to YouTube in the other room as I sit down to write this, echoing off the hardwood floors and high ceilings. You could cut a record here, but it would be a lively one. No need for an echo effect machine.

Can you name the song?

I’m gonna take a freight train
Down at the station, Lord
I don’t care where it goes
Gonna climb a mountain
The highest mountain
I’ll jump off, nobody gonna know…

Blues, rock and country music are all full of themes like this. Maybe we all sometimes feel like taking off to somewhere, to turn the page or change the scene and do something else with our time, maybe our lives. Running away from trouble, oppression or simple boredom is clearly part of the human condition. It’s in our DNA.

It must have started with the Neanderthals living in caves hunting for meat and gathering edible plants to survive. Maybe they too got tired of the scenery, the weather, their wives or husbands or maybe the available food supply and hit the trail for greener pastures, so to speak. The grass is always greener on the other side, they say.

Earlier today in another YouTube selection on the computer in my room, Duane Allman was interviewed on the radio in New York in 1970 the week before the live album “At Fillmore East” was recorded there. He talked about getting tired of studio session work and traveling around playing clubs for little money. That’s when he broke free from his time in Muscle Shoals and formed the Allman Brothers band in Jacksonville, Florida. After writing and rehearsing a bunch of songs there, they traveled to Macon, Georgia and hooked up with Phil Walden, who signed them up to a record deal with Capricorn Records, and moved the band to Macon.

After only a couple of years and releasing three records, they were the hottest American band on the stadium tour circuit. “The Allman Brothers Band” came out in 1969, “Idlewild South” followed in 1970, but neither record was a runaway success, until the label took Duane’s advice and recorded live “At Fillmore East” in New York. They took off after that and some rock writers began calling it Southern Rock. Unfortunately, Duane died in a motorcycle crash in October, 1971, and a year later, bass player Barry Oakley died in a similar accident on his chopper.

Neither ran into a peach truck. The myth was that the band used the title for the next album, “Eat a Peach,” because Duane had crashed into a peach truck. Nope. it came from one of Duane’s throwaway lines in an interview. “How are you helping the revolution?” Ellen Mandel of Good Times Magazine asked. “I’m hitting a lick for peace,” Duane responded. “And every time I’m in Georgia, I eat a peach for peace.”

The peach state, doing its part for world peace. John Lennon was proud no doubt.

Of course I’ve been heading down the road for much of my own life as a writer after giving up on rock and roll myself back when. But at this turn in the road, it seems I’m transitioning into a music writer and not so much writing about politics or the environment as beats anymore.

I did take time to read some of the Saturday and Sunday New York Times online. Not so much the breaking news, but the more intellectual op-eds. There is something going on I want to explore. First let me toss out a few headlines and put up the links in case you might be interested in following what I’ve been reading. Maybe you already read some of these too.

The Secret to a Good Life? Thinking Like Socrates

Mark Zuckerberg’s New Bromance Is Off to a Strange Start

Two of the World’s Leading Thinkers on How the Left Went Astray

The Elites Had It Coming

The Interview: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening

Do you notice a trend here?

Clearly the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concept of entropy are speeding up, making it hard for people to keep up with what’s actually going on in the world. Reading takes too long, so most communication now takes place in audio or video forms. If attention spans were not already crashing, social media notifications and short, sensational videos has changed some human brains in ways scientists and social scientists could not have necessarily predicted in advance, although some saw it coming and warned us.

The word “entropy” entered popular usage to refer to a lack of order or predictability in nature, or of a gradual decline into disorder over time. It’s concrete in the hard sciences, but less so in the social sciences, namely sociology, a field that is so unpopular now it has been banned for the most part in Florida and was never really taught much in Alabama anyway.

My studies at the doctoral level included environmental sociology. But when I used the word on the Finebaum Show on the radio in Birmingham some years back, in the summer when he would talk about something besides football every now and then, it was greeted with guffaws. Alabama was already on the verge of going totally red as a one party, conservative Christian Republican state.

That’s one of the reasons I stopped exposing myself to talk radio or cable TV news talk a few years ago. To actually develop and hold an original thought and write about it, you must have peace and quiet to think without all the distracting noise and recurring images, especially all this sensational, political divisive bullshit. It may boost ratings and generate revenue, since humans are drawn to conflict, division and the macabre.

Anyone who is sitting around arguing about politics on Facebook is more than likely to be parroting what the talking heads they like say, thinking it’s their original opinion. It’s not. You can tell by the content of the same old responses and memes. If you ever see an original thought worth passing on there, please let me know. I don’t think you will find it, unless it is from someone who is still sharing news links, which of course the bots are programmed to block. Which is another reason to fear the coming of machine learning or so-called artificial intelligence. The chat bots are learning how to dumb things down to the ignorant masses, just like newspaper reporters were trained to do before them.

Reading the latest intellectual essays on a subject, however, provides both insight and background for launching other original thoughts, ideas and writing. It’s how the brain works, like it or not.

For example, when we appear to be living in a society that wants to run away from anything of an intellectual nature, or even the need for or desirability of education itself, this stupid anti-woke bullshit, does it strike you as odd that a mass circulation daily newspaper would bother to run stories about a philosopher trying to make the case for an “examined” or philosophical life?

To reach out to the lowest common denominator, the masses, and make as much money as possible, most newspapers dumbed their content down to a fifth grade reading level a long time ago. Which I submit is one reason they mostly went out of business. How can you expect to keep people paying to read when most people no longer read? The Times knows they are dependent on a more educated audience, although at times even they seem to be trying to get Trump fans to read them. It will never work. It’s not working at the national broadcast news networks anymore. They are all in trouble. It’s not working on public radio either.

I’m no longer the least bit interested in that. I’m resisting the resistance, going the other way into the great intellectual land of Wokeness, a kingdom with no dictator burning or banning books, defying the rule of law or trying to annex Greenland or the Panama Canal. That shit ain’t going anywhere anyway. Why would anyone bother to write about it? Let them argue about it on the radio and TV. I’m out.

Is the Socratic Method of dialogue between teacher and student, marked by probing questions from the teacher to explore the underlying beliefs that shape the students views and to make them think about that critically, even practiced anymore? Sure, at some universities maybe, although that is being dumbed down in response to all the political pressure from both sides to do things in a certain politically correct way, depending on what side you are on.

Which brings up the Zuckerberg piece. He appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently to lament the absence of “masculine energy” in the corporate world, whatever that means. This is a discussion designed to profit from the Proud Boys. Even the guy who originally created The Facebook seems to understand only one thing. How to suck up to a dictator to earn a pile of money from his followers. All that programming has clearly damaged his brain. If only he had not dropped out of Harvard and actually read some books himself, he might have created something worthwhile that could have helped save the world from a grifter like Trump.

But no, instead, now all the tech billionaires are kissing his ass. Makes no sense to me. With a billon dollars, I guarantee you I could have figured out a way to stop Trump. These pussies like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t deserve the wealth they’ve amassed. If I was dictator, I would jack up the tax rate to what it was less than a century ago to 95 percent. They deserve five percent of what they have, since most of the research that made their companies successful was funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars. We want our money back.

Thomas Frank – author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” – tries to make the case that the Democrats are at fault for cozying up to the elites and the educated, when their natural base was the very lessor educated working class people who now follow Trump. I don’t know about that, but it’s worth reading about to ask critical questions.

One of his thoughts led me to Google the actual percentage of the U.S. population who hold college degrees. According to the internet, 24.9 percent of adults 18 and older had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2022. One quarter of the U.S. population. No wonder we face the mess we find ourselves in today. We should have made education free like Cuba and much of the developed world. Too late now.

Then even though I was skeptical, I took a close look at the piece on Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer who has written online about political theory in relative obscurity, although in recent times, Vice President-elect JD Vance has alluded to Yarvin’s notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called “wokeism.”

The incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Yarvin about how an “American Caesar” might be installed into power. And Yarvin also has fans in the powerful, and increasingly political, ranks of Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist turned informal adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, has approvingly cited Yarvin’s anti-democratic thinking. And Peter Thiel, a conservative megadonor who invested in a tech start-up of Yarvin’s, has called him a “powerful” historian. Perhaps unsurprising given all this, Yarvin has become a fixture of the right-wing media universe. He has been a guest on the shows of Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, among others.

No way will I go any further to read this nonsense on Substack. But to summarize, he apparently argues that Americans should “get over our dictator-phobia” and that “American democracy is a sham, beyond fixing, and having a monarch-style (CEO) leader is the way to go.” He could not answer a basic question: “So why is democracy so bad?” He supposedly suggested a program called “RAGE: Retire All Government Employees.”

His parents were both government employees, so this is probably just rebellion. I don’t see any actual historical research or a coherent government philosophy in this anywhere. But at least he may be the only son of a bitch in the entire MAGA movement willing to admit publicly, even to the New York Times, that democracy should be scrapped and we should go back to monarchy, or at least an oligopoly, running the government like a private corporation. Which is just stupid for all kinds of reasons, number one the issue of no accountability. This is what Trump wants.

Streaming

When the day is done and it’s time for a break at night, I do find movies and shows available for streaming sometimes interesting, although much of that content is also dumbed down bullshit these days as well.

Let me recommend “The Knick,” an American medical period drama television series on Cinemax (Max) created by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler and directed by Steven Soderbergh. The series follows Dr. John W. Thackery (Clive Owen) and the staff at a fictionalized version of the Knickerbocker Hospital in New York during the early twentieth century.

It’s the story of the early days of medical science, when doctors were expected to invent new medical procedures and devices and publish their results in medical journals to advance the field. Dr. John Thackery (partially based on historical figure William Stewart Halsted), the new leader of the surgery staff, balances his cocaine and opium addictions against his ambition for medical discovery and his reputation among his peers. Dr. Algernon Edwards, a Harvard-educated Black American surgeon (probably based on the historical Daniel Hale Williams and Louis T. Wright) who trained in Paris, and is as qualified as the other doctors, struggles against blatant racism to fight for respect among the all-white hospital staff, as well as in the racially charged city.

We are seeing a resurgence of the same religious fanaticism, superstition and anti-science sentiment they faced in those days from a segment of the population, although they began to build the credibility of doctors and the medical profession in public opinion. Not that science and doctors are perfect, mind you, but at least the good ones are trying to help people, in spite of the capitalist agenda of those running the hospitals for profit.

If Trump and his choice of RFKJ for the Department of Health and Human Services had been in power then, we would not have been able to bring polio under control with a vaccine. Millions more would have suffered and died. Think about that, critically.

___
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