Killing Philosophy

How Philosophy Destroyed the University and Fostered the Development of the Left Wing.

He’s the brooding young man sitting in a coffee shop drinking lattes and spouting off aloof and inconsistent ideas. He proudly says that he’s an anarchist, and yet with equal vigor he declares that we also have a moral duty to help the rest of the world with increased aid, oblivious to the contradiction he supports. He believes corporations enslave man and are the root of all evils, ignoring the fact that his coffee shop is a business, his clothes were made at a factory, his Birkenstocks are composed of petrol, and his measles were cured by the wonders of science and capitalism. Further entrenching this hypocrisy is the fact that his first seven years of an enlightening humanities education was heavily subsidized by those same corporations and the people working for them. He says that trade destroys culture, pretentiously eliminating an individual’s ability to decide for him or herself what their culture is or who they want to be as people. And when this self-proclaimed rebel is pressed into argument, his retorts are based on an innate spiritual awareness that we, the establishment can’t understand, or strong perceptual images meant to derail conceptual arguments and support pragmatic methods. And yet, he still commits to action (aggressive protest), even when his only fully consistent, logically understood ideology is in fact anti-ideology. The commitment to action without a conceptualized agenda, other than being a frustrated and terrified part of a confused mass leads illiterate children to fight vehemently against something only ever expressed as the “system”, not realizing that they’re its most predictable and obedient servants.
Young people attend universities to gain the theoretical knowledge needed to guide their practical actions throughout the rest of their lives. But today universities have no interest in such methodology. They in turn teach the countries most impressionable minds that it’s impossible to say anything positive about reality (metaphysics) as “true reality” is distorted by our senses and tainted by our biased mind. And because all knowledge is relative to environments and minds, this serves the purpose of making it all equally relevant and thus ultimately, irrelevant (epistemology). This logically leads earnest students to their predictable conclusions: knowledge is subjective and biased towards social-economic background, which makes ethical (ethics) statements naïve, as they’re the extension of this flawed knowledge. Finally political (politics) statements, are nothing more than the culmination of these individual subjective whims and simply put “whose to say what’s right”! A mind trained with this type of philosophical foundation characterizes the university’s most inquisitive and conscientious minds. The activist is only expounding on the doctrines he’s been taught, treatise which eventually produce the expected existential temperaments of fear and depression, conditions which typify the apologists of relativism, collectivism and existentialism. These doctrines, the consequence of the abandonment of reason characterize the last half-century’s intellectual climate.
Kant and Hume weren’t the first ones to refuse the notion of individual reason, but they were the first to achieve widespread and enduring respect for their break from it, ironically by using reason itself. It was Kant that first explained so artfully that which is known to us about the world is only known through the filters of our senses, thus leaving us unable to say anything about nature’s true reality. The inability to know or be able to say anything substantial about the real world, amounts to metaphysical nilhism, or said differently existentialism, which, for the sake of its own epistemology, states, that since all knowledge is flawed and relative, the only relevant truth is man's own subjective truth.
And we’re surprised that a worldview like this, one in which uncertainty and instability is our usual state, produces citizens filled with neurosis, panic, and insecurity, clinging to collectivist agendas for their dear lives. Reason as a means to fight back has been choked by the philosophical traditions stemming from Kant, Hume, Rousseau, Comte, Dewey, Camus and Chomsky, and today, professors, students, and the left wing in general are all slavish products of this original fatalist philosophy.
Professors lecture under the hip banner of pragmatism. They stake their iconoclastic rebellion on the fact that they take no moral stands, are unwilling to express any viewpoints, and endorse teaching methods that consist of leaderless “group discussions” with the epistemological justification that “there’s no such thing as truth, man”, and “its wrong to judge”. They ignore the idea that a university’s goal should be to equip its students with the ability to judge and evaluate, instead adopting a anti-philosophical base that renders all paradigms of thought as useless. This succeeds only in frustrating and depressing the most eager minds, condemning them to an endless maze of contradiction, hypocrisy and inconsistency, with little chance of discovering any solutions. It’s a tragic situation, worthy of Shakespearean consideration, that students were smart enough to understand the necessary outcomes of what they had been taught, but not independent enough to reject the theories themselves.
These intellectual values have left students without any resources in which to counteract the unknown, for their only resource, the mind was disavowed by their vacuous mentors. Reason is man’s mechanism for comprehending his complex reality. The faculty of reason separates man from common animals and thus is his metaphysical reality: a rational animal, and not one fooled by perceptual knowledge on a consistent basis. Using reason lets man form complex conceptual relationships about reality (perceptual data), allowing him to make objective and abstract conceptual models about reality. Understanding this rationality, man knows his true individuality lay in the fact that he makes his own choices. This inherent individualism declares he’s a sovereign individual able to make rational choices for himself, which leads to logical respect for other human beings as other rational sovereign individuals, thus affording everyone certain inalienable rights: the right to exist, to be self-sustaining and self-generating. The logical belief in individual rights eventually takes on a political meaning when the question of organization arises. The belief in and respect for individual rights rationally leads to laisser-faire capitalism. Capitalism is the only political system that consistently rewards reason and punishes irrationality. It guarantees freedom and equal opportunity. It bars force from relationships, as all actions are contractual and voluntary. It was capitalism that abolished the aristocracy, eliminated the caste system, and ended slavery. North America is not free by chance, but by choice. This type of philosophical system produces confident minds able to discriminate between fact and fiction, valuing self-determination over other imposing, corrupt and inefficient forms of organization such as socialism and mixed economies.
Instead our intellectuals academics and teachers refute this logic supporting a philosophical base that teaches students, as Ayn Rand once said “existence is an uncharted realm, an unknowable jungle, where fear and uncertainty are man’s permanent state, where skepticism is the mark of maturity, and cynicism is the mark of realism, and above all the hallmark of an intellectual is the denial of the intellect.”