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I never expected much from academic “philosophers”, but I was shocked at how virtually no religious leaders -- especially Christian leaders who are supposed to believe in the inherent worth of the individual — pushed back against the lockdowns. There were a few notable exceptions like Archbishop Vigano and Artur Pawlowski, but these were rogue voices acting outside of the established hierarchy.

Like you pointed out, this indicates a profound failure in our education system and its underlying philosophy.

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Saved. We are absolutely in need of a new myth to restore the promise of America. I see it all over substack now, a realization that graphs and data and railing against the excesses of totalitarianism is not enough. We have to get creative, reinforce what sustains us, build strong foundations, support the best in us.

I'm convinced transhumans are going to find their augments will make them ill and reduce their life expectancy. Elon is going to be SAD. And yet I fully expect as they are laid low by their tech, they will continue to believe and try to force it on all of us. The real genius is in exemplifying what it is to be human, our innate gifts. We are like a culmination of a billion years of evolution, we are already capable of the most extraordinary things, no brain implants necessary.

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Dec 4, 2022·edited Dec 4, 2022Liked by L.P. Koch

A note on the moral failure of eduction

The moral failure of education is likely a result of the systematic refusal to teach the principles of meaning/sense, for the sake of indoctrination. Those who desire to indoctrinate cannot at the same time teach children how to think rationally because that would prevent indoctrination (which is provably irrational and therefore false as the basis of knowledge).

There are more than 100 recognised logical fallacies, but they are all reducible to just 3 laws: the law of non-contradiction (two opposite claims cannot be true at the same time and in the same respect, or, no claim can be both true and false at the same time and in the same respect), the law of excluded middle (a claim can be either true or false with no intermediate possibility), and the law of identity (everything is identical ONLY to itself, or, no two things are identical in every respect). The 3 laws are in fact just different articulations of the same One law of logical sense/meaning, and one could simply rely on non-contradiction to reach the same conclusions. These laws are not taught at schools, apart from University courses in philosophy or law; institutional dogmatism and the fallacy of ‘trusted sources’ are taught instead, under the guise of “critical thinking”. I have made significant effort to persuade the Australian department of education and the affiliated curriculum committee to integrate these fundamental laws of logic into the national curriculum across all levels of eduction, as one of so called ‘cross-curriculum’ priorities. I received no encouraging response, possibly because the people responsible for designing the national curriculum are themselves ignorant of logic and are terrified of it. Understanding of the laws of logic makes you powerful, able to identify and defeat lies; the lack of such understanding makes you weak and psychologically dependent.

Those who have not learned how to think rationally, or what is nowadays the case, have been taught to think irrationally, are bound to make moral errors early in life (which are errors of rationality that are of a special kind: they affect our constitution as rational beings). Moral errors are cumulative in a sense that they corrupt and displace our moral consciousness, with the ultimate result of total loss of moral discernment. A subject who is entirely demoralised in this sense is controllable, a vehicle of pure propaganda, at the mercy of experts and the authorities, but also no longer human to themselves. I recall the term ‘organic portal’ which is a good symbolic fit for this state.

There could be other mechanisms involved in the present failure of education. Perhaps the capacity for knowledge, and especially moral consciousness, is epigenetic, developed over many generations and cannot be ‘learned’ from a blank state in a single lifetime. If this is true than we may indeed be surrounded by moral zombies, internally dehumanised by systematic demoralisation occurring over many generations. But we can act only in the present, and the elephant in the room is the irrationalism and demoralisation that is occurring in schools right now, under the guise of education.

Thank you L.P. for your understanding and endorsement.

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Dec 4, 2022Liked by L.P. Koch

Glad to have found your writing, and I look forward to, " a rebirth of truly important, interesting, and impactful philosophical discourse. "

The bell curve of human nature has been exploited by the wrong tail of that curve for far too long.

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Dec 5, 2022Liked by L.P. Koch

This was very interesting to read, I wish I had found you during all of the Corona craziness because you give such good detailed explanations and information and insights that really would have been helpful in explaining and understanding what we were all forced to live through. No one pushed back except a couple of Christian ministers and a few small family owned businesses and restaurants. All of our institutions failed us, in Canada our charter of freedoms and rights became a worthless piece of paper and meaningless in protecting us. So it wasn’t just the philosophers and think tanks and academia that let us down, but yeah boy would it ever have been helpful to have had something like this to read at the time because any pushback of all of this being okay would have really been appreciated.

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Feb 2, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch

"intelligence and education seem to be hardly correlated at all with the ability to perceive a totally obvious, blatant lie by those dominating the public discourse that breaks with everything we have supposedly been agreeing on before. In fact, the split has been revealed to cut wildly through social classes and milieus, education levels, and almost any group you can think of."

Indeed. Apart from "intelligence and education" seeming to be somewhat correlated to sociopathy anyway (CEO sociopaths, the Hannibal Lecter problem [see Will Graham's comeback: "I know I'm not smarter than you...You're insane."]), there's also the phenom that Jonathan Revulsky calls "High IQ Idiots." These are the people who don't see patterns, and like Charlie Brown constantly fall for Lucy's football trick; but moreover, unlike people who are simply dumb, the HII is loud and proud about how clever he is not to "fall for some conspiracy theory." Lone gunmen, every war going back to 1895 starting with a false flag BUT NOT THIS ONE, etc. They constantly try to get you to focus over and over on the details of one current instance, rather than recognizing the pattern. "Sure, the govt has always lied to us, and run medical experiments on the general population, BUT WHERES YOUR EVIDENCE THIS TIME. " It's like they never heard of induction and everyday is a fresh start, like Groundhog Day (the movie). Sure, there are artificial situations where we pretend like to do that, like court trials where you're just supposed to focus on the evidence for this particular case, not his vast criminal record, but this is real life, not a courtroom: you're not going to let your daughter date a rapist just because "there's no evidence right now," you make the inference.

Anyway my point is that these HII's will stare at an "obvious and blatant lie," and then smugly "wait for all the evidence" to "reach a correct decision." By then of course everyone's vaxxed and dropping dead "for no reason."

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Dec 4, 2022·edited Dec 4, 2022

💯 J'accuse. Philosophers/Intellectuals-in-name-only are left bereft of arguments in their defence.

If I were to choose between Kant- or Mill-based demolition of world gubmint actions’ anti-rationale, it’s a no-brainer—both, w/o so much as a shadow of doubt! The brilliance is almost incompatible w/ sight.

~~

PS Etc. = by far the most persuasive bullet in the list leading to ‘no, thanks.’ Frankly in a league of its own 😂 [Disclaimer might be in order: small joys in unlikely places compare to nothing when it comes to enlivening the dreary tapestry of life in this here age. No? 😉]

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Forgive me time-travelling back to this post but I didn't comment at the time: I love this so much, because it puts into excellent clarity what I've been incoherently ranting about to my friends all this time. I keep sending it to people and I will not stop.

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💬 In fact, the split has been revealed to cut wildly through social classes and milieus, education levels, and almost any group you can think of.

↑↑ Somewhat rhymes with 0+2+4+6 vs 1+3+5 divide 🤔 Though in [very appealing!] Grant Smith’s framework, it’s not even close to 50/50: even-numbereds comprise a decisive majority.

https://radicalamerican.substack.com/p/populism-is-dope

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