Philosophy

Here’s another reason for the docility of the post-60s generations: they’ve had more schooling, and a study of people who quit smoking shows that educated people are more easily influenced by others.

That makes sense. The point of schooling is to hook people into the system of official attitude and belief rather than leaving … More ...

We’ve seen that multicultural society is brutish and irrational because accepted concepts of what life is about don’t begin to do it justice. So how can reason, civilization, and other good things be restored?

To some extent we can try to be reasonable and civilized ourselves and hope it catches on. That’s hard, though—man is … More ...

Basically, it’s nonexistent. As suggested in my last post, in order to reason about things we need to be able to identify them. We need to sort out experience and apply concepts to it that tell us what things are and what they mean. The problem is that the ability to do so depends on … More ...

Reason, I suppose, is the ability to form reliable judgements about the world and what we should do. As such, it involves a great many things:

1. Perceptiveness with regard to the world around us and our own states (pleased, regretful or whatnot).
2. The ability to notice similarities and differences, and what things go together and

In the absence of an explicit common understanding of what a good life is, and in the face of a government that has taken on responsibility for the whole of human life, from the rearing of children to the relations between the sexes to the validity of communal loyalties, the people responsible for persuading us … More ...

I’ve been reading a book, The Suicide of Reason, about the tendency of multicultural consumerist liberalism to disarm itself in the face of Islam. The problem the author sees is quite simple: in the West we’re into what he calls reason—that is, we view orderly satisfaction of individual preferences as the highest goal. In … More ...