Laigle’s Forum

Glenn Beck and how Americans got this way

By Don Hank

Recently, a lot has been written about Glenn Beck and his refusal to look at the eligibility issue and his disdain for those of us who care about it.

First, let me be clear: I am a birther. By that I don’t mean that I am claiming Obama was definitely born in Kenya (where they have erected a monument at the place where he was born). I mean that I don’t know if Obama is a natural born citizen because he has never proven it. Therefore Beck is remiss to dismiss birthers’ concerns. We have a constitutional right to know, and judges who say otherwise are derelict in their duties and don’t deserve to be called judges any more than those judges who in 1973 decided that humans in the womb aren’t humans.

Ironically, though, despite Beck’s vexing unwillingness to admit what an increasing number of Americans know or sense about Obama’s eligibility to be president, no one has taught to the broad masses the sources of Marxist brainwashing – how we got to where we are – better than Glenn Beck. Others have written books that changed the way scholarly conservatives think, but Beck popularized this knowledge in ways that made scholars of ordinary people. He went into detail on the origins of “progressivism” and that is important. Without a comprehensive knowledge of how millions of ordinary decent Americans have been turned into glassy-eyed liberals, we are easy prey both to the propaganda itself and to those who accuse us watchdogs of McCarthyism.

Even if you are put off by Glenn’s histrionics, his shows have been a classroom for a long time – especially his TV show, where he has reviewed important eye-opening books night after night. He did his homework. If Patriots view Beck with a jaundiced eye today it is partly because he fails to see the importance of the eligibility issue but also in part because they have underestimated the role of propagandists in turning America leftward and they fail to see how much Beck has pulled back the curtain for millions of us, providing us a glimpse into the sordid world of Marxist disinformation in which we find ourselves.

Further, without Beck, there would not have been the Washington tea party. Like him or hate him, Beck has changed the nation.

This is as good an opportunity as any for a quick review of how we got where we are today, and we can start with a video of an interview with ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov, who shows how Americans were brainwashed through KGB methods such as demoralization and manipulation of and by the media. One thing that sticks in my mind from Yuri’s talks is that people brainwashed by these methods refuse to believe the truth and are essentially dead to the truth. “These people cannot be changed by logic. The change is complete and irreversible,” as Yuri puts it.

Remember the last time you tried to debate with a “liberal” zombie? The change that zombie underwent at some time in his life was complete and irreversible, wasn’t it? Facts are irrelevant.

Only a nucleus of people who read history, keep up with talk radio and web sites like Laigle’s Forum have even a pinch of understanding of what is going on around us and why. The average American will look you in the eye and tell you with a straight face that our “liberalization” is a result of a natural evolution process. We just keep getting smarter and more sensitive to the needs of others. Praise be to Darwin!

The Soviet propaganda source laid bare in the above-linked video is only one of many. Our education system, as Yuri mentions, has undermined us almost to the point of no return. But the influence came not only from Soviet operatives. Another powerful agency was the Frankfurt School, a group of German Marxists who came to America to escape Hitler and showed their gratitude by teaching their host country to hate its founders, its traditions and its culture. Herbert Marcuse, a famous 60s radical and member of our pseudo-intelligentsia, was a scion of that group. Still another group was the more-or-less home-grown communist agents like Saul Alinsky and Cloward and Piven, who taught other leftists how to manipulate us. Then there were our early educational theorists like John Dewey and his myriad clones. Reaching way back, there were psychologists like Freud and Pavlov, and later the “sexologists” Masters and Johnson who taught that sexual promiscuity is our reason for living. Then there was Dr. Spock who taught us how to spoil kids, and Timothy Leary, who taught spoiled kids how to do drugs. Radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin, pushed for welfare and abortion and aided in breaking up families by redefining “abuse” of women, making it include things as prosaic as “giving your wife the silent treatment,” and hypocritically warned of child abuse while endorsing pedophilia. Thanks to their efforts, the institution of “no-fault divorce” was born, which converted the marriage contract into a worthless piece of paper for millions of husbands, who were often rendered penniless in “family” court in the headlong national effort to “protect women and children.” Similar agents of change were pedophiles like NAMBLA founder Allen Ginsberg, and homosexual activists who introduced and pushed for “gay” marriage to further undermine what was left of the American family. The Liberation Theologists made minorities feel oppressed and helpless and urged them to “strike back” at whites, their “oppressors,” rather than raise themselves out of poverty and ignorance through hard work and study, the only way to raise oneself out of poverty and ignorance. The net effect of these hate mongering racists, working in tandem with the educational left, was to create walls of ignorance, prejudice and hatred that will take decades to tear down. Likewise, the developers of the Delphi method, whether wittingly or unwittingly, made a significant contribution to mind control, manipulating participants to accept ideas – even dangerous ones – by “mainstreaming” them. Finally, as David Kupelian reminds us, Madison Avenue advertisers have contributed mightily to plunging us into a bottomless moral abyss where good is evil and vice-versa. (I’m sure you can think of many more such contributors to the brainwashing of America).

If you look at the sleaze surrounding Obama in his college days you get an idea of who many of the other movers and shakers were in the movement to destroy traditional America and replace it with Marxist utopian ideals.

We find that almost all of the ideas promulgated by these “agents of change” are now chillingly mainstream or close to it. Likewise you will find very few liberals who care that the White House resident has communists among his czars or his past mentors. In the ghetto, you’ll find almost no one who objects.

The Dems have them firmly in place down on their plantation.

So where does this leave Glenn Beck?

If I had Glenn Beck in front of me I would say:

You have focused bravely on monumental issues and I admire you for it. In the final analysis, every single one of these issues – from socialist health care to welfare for rich bankers – stems from the unwillingness of American politicians and judges to honor the Constitution. But the Constitution also has rules governing who can be president and who can’t.

I am therefore asking you to focus fairly on the eligibility issue. Give it its just due and please respect truth seekers whose quest has taken them down other trails than yours. They are your potential allies and you can win them back with a little extra effort.

Anthony Horvath is a staff writer for Laigle’s Forum, the Executive Director of Athanatos Christian Ministries, and the author of three books, two in the Birth Pangs series and a pro-life book called We Chose Life.

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The Cloward-Piven Strategy is a deliberate series of tactics designed to bring a system down in collapse so that a preferred system can be erected in its place.   Named after two Columbia University professors, it was actually employed in the early 1970s.  I want to repeat that:  it was actually employed.

This is not your ordinary conspiracy theory.  In this case, we know that the strategy was employed and had some effect.  Namely, by deliberately burdening New York city’s welfare system, they managed to bankrupt the city, which so declared in 1975.

Cloward and Piven, therefore, have made it impossible to take at face value measures which are put forward as being ‘for the poor,’ especially when those plans emerge from people associated with them or their organizations.

Cloward taught at Columbia University for almost five decades.  During his tenure, a certain Obama attended.  Did Obama and Cloward ever interact?  Did Obama ever take any of Cloward’s courses?  No one can prove he didn’t because Obama refuses to allow Columbia to release his transcripts.   In 1982, Piven returned to New York.  Did Obama interact with these two individuals? Read the rest of this entry »

We are honored to carry another article by Olavo De Carvalho. Laigle’s Forum is the venue of this its English language debut.

Don Hank

 

Weapons of Freedom

Olavo de Carvalho

Diário do Comércio (São Paulo, Brazil), December 17, 2009

Translated by Alessandro Cota

The most obvious thing about the analysis of history and society is that when a situation changes considerably, you can no longer describe it with the same concepts as before: in order to account for unheard-of facts, not classifiable under known categories, you have to create new concepts or perfect the old ones through criticism.

With the stage of world government implementation already in full swing, it is pathetic to notice that political analysts, whether in academia or in the media, continue to offer the public analyses based on the old concepts of “national state,” “national power,” “international relations,” “free trade,” “democracy,” “imperialism,” “class struggle,” “ethnic conflicts,” etc.,  when it is clear that none of those bear much relation to the facts of today’s world.

The most basic events of the last fifty years are: first, the rise of the globalist élites, detached from any identifiable national interest and engrossed in the building not only of a world state, but a unified and entirely artificial planetary pseudo-civilization, conceived not as an expression of society, but as an instrument for the control of society by the state; second, the fabulous advancements of the human sciences, which have placed in the hands of those élites means of social domination never dreamed of by tyrants of other times. 

As early as several decades ago, Ludwig Von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), the creator of General Systems Theory, aware that his contribution to science was being used for undue purposes, warned, “It is perhaps the greatest danger of the systems of modern totalitarianism that they are so alarmingly up-to-date not only in physical and biological, but also in psychological technology. The methods of mass suggestion, of the release of the instincts of the human beast, of conditioning and thought control are developed to highest efficacy; just because modern totalitarianism is so terrifically scientific, it makes the absolutism of former periods appear a dilettantish and comparatively harmless makeshift.”

In his 1998 book, L’Empire Écologique: La Subversion de l’Écologie par le Mondialisme (The Ecological Empire: the Subversion of Ecology by Globalism), Pascal Bernardin explained in detail how the General Systems Theory has been used as a basis for the construction of a world totalitarian system, which in the last ten years has definitively gone from blueprint to patent reality — a reality which is clear to all but those who do not want to see. Von Bertalanffy, however, was not referring only to his own theory. He speaks of “methods” in the plural, and ordinary citizens of democracies cannot have any idea of the plethora of scientific resources now at the disposal of the new lords of the world. If von Bertalanffy had to mention names, he would not have omitted Kurt Levin, perhaps the greatest social psychologist of all times, whose Tavistock Institute, in London, was founded by the global élite itself in 1947 for the sole purpose of creating means of social control capable of reconciling the permanence of formal legal democracy with the total domination of the state over society.

Just to give you an idea of how far all this goes, the educational programs of almost all nations of the world — which have been in force for at least twenty years now — are determined by homogeneous rules directly imposed by the United Nations, and calculated not to develop children’s intelligence or conscience, but to make them docile, malleable, morally characterless creatures, ready to adhere enthusiastically and without discussion to any word of command which the global élite may deem useful for its objectives. The means used to achieve this are “non-aversive” control techniques conceived to make their victim not only feel as if he is acting of his own free will when he yields to impositions from authority, but also to develop an immediate reaction of irrational defense to the mere suggestion that he should critically examine the subject in question.

It would be a euphemism to say that mass application of such techniques “bears influence on” public education programs: these techniques are the whole content of current schooling. All disciplines, mathematics and science included, have been reshaped to serve psychological manipulation purposes. Pascal Bernardin himself meticulously described this phenomenon in his 1995 book Machiavel Pédagogue (Machiavelli the Educator). Read it and you will find out why your child cannot solve a quadratic equation or finish a sentence without lapsing into at least three solecisms, even though he comes back from school bossing you around like a people’s commissar, demanding “politically correct” behavior of his parents.     

The quickness with which sudden mutations of mentality — many of which are arbitrary, grotesque, and even absurd — are universally imposed without meeting the least resistance (as though they had emanated from an irrefutable logic and not from despicable Machiavellianism) could be explained by the simple school brainwashing that prepares children to accept new fashions as divine commands.

But obviously, school is not the only agency engrossed in producing such results. Big media, now massively concentrated in the hands of globalist mega-corporations, play a fundamental role in dumbing down the masses. In order to achieve this, one of the most widely employed techniques nowadays is cognitive dissonance, a discovery made by psychologist Leon Festinger (1919-1989). This is how it works. If you read today’s newspapers, you will see that Tiger Woods, the golf champion, one of our most beloved citizens of late, is now under heavy attack by newspapers and TV news shows because the poor man has been found to have mistresses. Scandal! Horror! General indignation threatens to drop half of the adulterer’s sponsorship deals and strike him off of the list of the “beautiful people” who appear on advertisements for sneakers, bubble gums, and miracle diets. But there is a telltale detail: aside from the protests against the sportsman’s immorality, there are fierce attacks on “right-wing extremists” who do not accept abortion, gay marriage, or the inducing of children to premature sexual delight. The two moral codes, mutually contradictory, are simultaneously offered as equally obliging and sacrosanct. Excited and impelled to all kinds of sexual debaucheries, while at the same time threatened with character assassination in case he may practice them even to a modest degree, the anguished citizen reacts through a kind of intellectual breakdown, becoming a servile fool who no longer knows how to orient himself and who begs for a voice of command. The command can be empty and meaningless, as for example “Change!,” but when it is uttered, it always sounds like a relief. 

Blaming scientists for this state of affairs is as idiotic as pinning the blame for murders on weapons. Men like von Bertalanffy, Levin, and Festinger created instruments that can serve both the building up of tyranny and the reconquest of freedom. It is we who have the obligation of taking those weapons out of the hands of their monopolistic owners and learning to use them for the opposite purpose, freeing our spirit instead of allowing it to be enslaved.

Further reading:

Olavo Decarvalho’s site carries quite a few articles in English. Each one is full of fascinating nuggets of vital information you’ll wonder why you someone didn’t tell you before:

http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/english/articles/090220dc_en.html

This article on Darwinism reveals that it was Darwin himself who invented “Intelligent Design”:

http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/english/articles/090220dc_en.html

 

Speaking of changing the subject:

As you read the following, please keep in mind that it is vastly understated due to a deficiency of the English language to plumb the depths of, well, what’s the word…?

On a slightly different but related subject, if you don’t know yet about the gross, miscreant PIG that Obama has chosen as the “safe” school czar and the absolutely, utterly disgusting, pukingly SICK, scummy, slimy subhuman (sorry, none of this comes close to describing it) things this loathsome, despicable, beyond-sick, twisted, incurably, irredeemably mentally ill, perverted DIRTBAG (sorry, this description falls flat) has been propagating in American schools around the country (with the blessings of equally sick and perverted administrators in desperate need of hanging!), and especially if you thought Obama had even an ounce of decency or humanity, then do read the item linked below because you have no idea. None at all. If you have a weak stomach or are allergic to out and out wretched, horrid, nauseating, unspeakable filth, take an Alka-Seltzer and read it anyway. It’s that important for you to know what the LEFT really is and has been all along – it’s worse than you ever dreamed. AND it wants your child and his/her innocence as of yesterday. Friends, America will be lucky to survive this Obaminable administration and I say that with tears in my eyes and the deepest pain in my heart. Oh, Lord, please forgive us:

http://www.diigo.com/annotated/cffe92a9430a864446c0df52a3fae740

Communist boot camp in Delaware:

Dave Levine is one of the best equipped commentators to talk about PC on campus. He grew up on a major campus and saw PC when it was in its infancy. It’s gotten more nutty than ever.

http://thedavelevineshow.ning.com/profiles/blogs/university-of-minnesota

Stephen Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell”

By Don Hank

Stephen Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell” may be the most enlightening book I have ever read.

Please try to get it if you haven’t yet. It contains all the answers I have always wanted at my finger tips for debates with Darwinists on the origin of life (I don’t let them drag me into the species change arguments, because I would quickly be in over my head). Having been in thrall to a rigid Darwinist view of life’s origin for many years, I feel liberated about having the origin-of-life side of the theory blown sky high. The origin of life is the key aspect because it gets into the existence of a Creator.

You see, Darwin’s step by step evolution from simple to complex only seems feasible on the macro side — that is, developed plants and animals which develop even further. Darwin could show beyond a doubt that evolution had happened from wolf to dog, for example, under human guidance and from there the idea that such changes would have happened in nature in response to environment was but a stone’s throw. But on the micro level, as researchers found out about the processes in the cell (ever since the early 50s), they discovered that even the simplest cells were factories with the most complex imaginable machinery and computer systems complete with software that for all the world appeared to have been designed and written by someone. The more origin-of-life scientists looked for answers along the accidental Darwinian route, the more confused and baffled they became. The old lightning bolt in the mud theory had failed in the lab and didn’t cut it any more. So much so that today there is absolutely no consensus and the field is in complete disarray. The only scientists who appear to form a consensus are the few dedicated to the notion of intelligent design. But that is a heresy in today’s academe, where intelligence is not allowed because it is eerily reminiscent of that pesky ”God delusion” along with its moral code of do’s and don’ts for mankind. Darwin was to have driven a stake in its heart.  Now it was coming back to haunt them.

The heart of Meyer’s book, which will be the chief stumbling block for Darwinists from here to eternity, is the part describing the “CAD-CAM” (CAD=computer assisted design; CAM=computer assisted manufacture) machinery inside the cell that performs gene expression by recognizing and reading the DNA code, written in nucleotide triads, and transcribing and sending the coded specs (for protein synthesis) for translation. In the ribosome (cellular protein factory), the blueprint is then read and implemented, enabling the synthesis of a specific protein to specification by the ribosome based on the information originally contained in the DNA and transferred to the RNA in a different format. Note that the data-bearing DNA, a sort of master copy, is located in a part of the cell far away from the ribosome (factory), so the transcription, for example, isn’t at all like, for example, simply making a carbon copy by just piling 2 sheets of paper on top of each other with a carbon in between and pressing hard as you write or type. Transcription (along with subsequent translation and implementation of the blueprint) is genuinely analogous to a CAD-CAM system, with its own software code.

I suppose that Meyer would groan at this description because I am still grappling with the sticky parts. It is much more complex than this, but you get the idea.

(For an illustration of gene expression in protein building, click here to go to Stephen Meyer’s web site and click on the button at the bottom right to see an amazing animation of the cellular machines at work).

Not to get mired down in detail, but Meyer also mentions machines in the cell that edit the information and others that straighten out the DNA helices and then rewind them once they have been “read” by the RNA.

Oh, BTW, the computer in the cell is capable of processing several times more data than any silicon chip known at this point. Bill Gates is cited as acknowledging this fact.

Meyer makes 4 blockbuster points:  

1 — The message is actually a true code. It is language, it is words. Although in both DNA (original data repository) and RNA (data transmitter), it is in the form of nucleotide triads (called codons), the constituent nucleotide bases constituting the code have no special chemical affinity for the proteins they signify in the code (just as ink has no meaningful chemical affinity for paper that would make certain letters stick to certain parts of a page), so the processes of recognition, transcription and translation involved in making a protein are pure language utilization processes, not chemistry! That makes the “recognition” part quite unobvious and esoteric, requiring a deciphering system that is not based on the chemical properties of the constituent parts (against initial intuitive hypotheses), so that the message borne by the code is independent of any recognizable physicochemical laws–making it a mystery. This fact alone points unequivocally to a designer who started his process with the use of words.

2 — Meyer also makes the point that the protein synthesized by this system (as all proteins in all living cells — even the simplest — are) not only could not exist without the DNA but the DNA could also not exist without the protein (because both the protein and the DNA are both part of the protein synthesis machinery and “software” essential to the manufacture and maintenance of cell constituents). Thus, unlike the chicken-or-the-egg question, there seems to be no way either could have come first. That makes evolution a very tough sell indeed. (One could actually speak of an “evolution delusion” to paraphrase Richard Dawkins).

3 — Besides the living cell, there is nothing known in nature that encodes, decodes, transmits and reads specifications and builds or reproduces machines (living or other) in this computer-like fashion. The only scheme that resembles this enormously complex machinery and computer system is man-made and requires a designer. The designer is logically the default explanation.

4 — Meyer’s colleague, statistical mathematician William Dembski, calculates that the probabilities of the simplest cell producing all the necessary proteins it needs to survive by chance is 1 in 10 to the power of 41,000. This probability is so small as to be utterly negligible. In other words, the advent of life on earth was not an accident.

No one who reads this book can come away believing in the standard academic explanation that life came about by accident. Neither, claims Meyer, do many microbiologists and/or origin-of-life scientists, who are either “baffled” or are on his side.

I think this is the final blow to neo-Darwinism, at least intellectually. Now all that remains is break down the intellectual barriers on the campuses that were erected and maintained by the Lilliputians who inhabit and rule them with an iron fist. But that will be the toughest job of all (as shown by Ben Stein’s movie “Expelled”). Government, the media and campuses are living proof that no common sense or any relationship with reality is required for corrupt systems to stay in place almost indefinitely and make a majority of the populace believe the Wizard of Oz is real.

Although I love education and learning, I am actually encouraged that colleges are now laying off profs in various places — like California — and enrollment is down. I say that that because learning under the principle of free inquiry is no longer taking place there. (For insight into the sad state of US universities, click on the last link under “Related”).

I hate to say it but I hope colleges get so out of reach that parents, for the time being, stop sending their kids to these indoctrination centers — at least until the colleges start returning to common sense principles.

I believe distance education is the wave of the future and courses that actually prepare for careers — non-government that is, will be the focus again.

Too bad the whole system may have to be destroyed by the bad guys before that can happen.

Related:

http://laiglesforum.com/2008/05/02/expelled-exposes-flat-world-academics/

http://laiglesforum.com/2008/04/22/254/

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/11/23/meyer.intelligent.design/index.html

The Republic, In Honor of Plato

 

By Mecha Miles

Plato, so much like Archimedes – centuries ahead of his time, perhaps the first social engineer and, indeed, a premier scholar and philosopher – changed for all time the way in which students of government would think of sovereign social entities. In my opinion, he falls second to none in terms of his ability to parameterize the underlying mechanisms of a stable social order into well-defined philosophical principles. Perhaps the most prominent of such is what has been called ‘Indoctrination by Myth.’ He details the construction of this governing mechanism in what is perhaps his greatest work, The Republic, in which he instructs his zealous pupil through the character Socrates. The characters conversationally traverse the importance of each facet of government including a mental restraint designed to cultivate loyalty to the state. Timidly, Socrates says, “…I really know not how to look you in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. They are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise her for good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers.”

Audacious indeed, but why does Plato convey his reluctance to share his idea with the student? Perhaps because he feels some moral stigma about lying on such a massive scale, or maybe it is because he knows that in order to protect the collective consciousness of the state in the long term its citizens must be reduced to singular mechanical units with no will apart from that of the state. Does this dehumanize the individual? I am convinced that it does. More to the point, have we as denizens of the United States of America, the purportedly singular bastion of freedom that holds the line between the liberty of the West and godlessness of the east, been the subjects of a large-scale dehumanization experiment? Perhaps the best place to derive a meaningful answer is where the spark of liberty is planted within the minds of the youth – the schools. Why is it that the government pays for twelve years of compulsory schooling for its minors? Is it out of the benevolence of our sovereign’s heart? This seems unlikely given that the government, at its core, can be reduced to the terms of a multinational business, and as we have already learned in this class, the ethics of businessmen were formed in the age of the primordial.  So is the government’s establishment of a public paradigm for schooling and ultimately a standard measurement of the intellect really benign at all? Or should we have expected the results to go horribly wrong from the initial?

To give this subject due rigor it is important to include all the relevant history in the time following the establishment of public schooling. Within the context of this essay it would not be appropriate to address all the contending factors, but to scratch the surface one need only a cursory sense of recent history and the knowing to ‘follow the money.’ Who were the first people to push for public education? Was it Jefferson? After all it was he that said democracy is wholly unsuited for an uneducated mass, but he also despised government intervention in nearly every conceivable facet of society. No – the men responsible for government take-over of the schools are those that sacrificed their money to initiate ‘pro-education’ policies. Two men immediately come to mind, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. At the time in our history these men were by far the most financially powerful individuals in the United States. They could have indeed bought the entire Nation and perhaps they did so by buying the minds of the future United States. These men were not philanthropists; they were fierce, shrewd businessmen who raised their companies from nothing, and did so through wise investments in innovative ideas. With their successes came trouble as well, and if the test of an individual is the measure of his or her ability to solve problems within reason then it is a test these men failed. Along with their extreme wealth these men are known for having treated their employees as little more than farm animals. Why do we have child labor laws?  Because of these men. Why do we have unions and minimum wages?  Because of these benevolent capitalist monarchs.  Rockefeller is known for having used a mob of thugs to quell a worker uprising that was due to low wages, poor working conditions, and unreasonable working hours. So instead of making some concessions, the already well-established multimillionaire had the workers fired upon.

Like Henry Ford, the inventor of a kind of hell known as the assembly line, they knew that the sort of people fit to work in factories are not the innovative, curious, enlightened people forged by a true education, but rather, the dumbed-down, complacent, ignorant consumers who have spread through the west like an unchecked disease. Why has this phenomenon become so rampant? The answer brings me back to my thesis – public education. Both Carnegie and Rockefeller used their massive wealth to engage the establishment of a national schooling system and as history shows us, they were successful. This was seen by many as a philanthropic move and thus earned them decent places in the history. I say, however, their motives were quite the opposite.

Adam Smith is a very astute man; he absolutely hit the nail on the head with his laissez-faire principle, “…that in competition, individual ambition serves the common good…” Rockefeller and Carnegie likely knew that their businesses and investments in new factors of production caused the economy to boom regardless of their lack of moral scruples. They of course were not interested in the betterment of society as a whole, and they would have known that as long as a relatively free market existed potential competition also existed. It was, therefore, necessary to contrive a way to break the system and maintain a lasting monopoly over a newly birthed proletariat. They did this through the establishment of a structured Federal system designed to bring about an overall decrease in human potential through the removal of genuine intellectual growth by replacing it with a system of state-ordained rules and ethics designed with the specific intent to dazzle, baffle, and overwhelm the now diminutive human mind.

What is taught in schools? The simplistic answer is nothing worth knowing, but that is truly not fair to the brand of education or rather, indoctrination, the youth is forced to indulge in each day of the working week. While Plato wanted to tell the subjects of his hypothetical state that they were all born of the land, I would say that the situation the U.S. faces is far worse as the things that are taught here are in many respects believable because they are coated with the right amount of known truth. What has become important to teachers? In short, getting across a necessary amount of trivial, unsubstantiated, completely disconnected factoids in order to pass an exam set to the lowest common denominator. This is of course referred to as teaching to the test. But that’s not all! Oh no, now the teachers are also responsible for instilling a sense of stately morality within each student. It is of course important that third graders be educated in the practice of safe sex and by the way, if someone does get pregnant be sure to tell them where the nearest abortion clinic is; god forbid you drop out of school, you have so much more to learn in terms of drug awareness, tolerance, and the all important knowingness to blindly subscribe to the rules of an arbitrary authority.

Is the learning of all these things necessarily bad? I say no, but I am wondering that with the burden of this grandiose agenda where is the time for learning about Plato? Socrates? Andrew Carnegie? And my personal favorite Archimedes? The less than subtle point I am making is that there is flatly no time for such an education because this is not the motive for education. Instead humans are being de-educated and being forced to subscribe to a slave mentality in which we are all joined together in a flagrant bandwagon of uncertainty in which we employ jargon like, ‘like’ every third word and statements like ‘you know?’ – with that ever comforting security blanket that is a question mark tacked to the end of our sentences.

So why would these two men engage in political moves that would largely take place after their lifetimes?  To ensure the consolidation of wealth among a select few in order to maintain a new type of aristocracy. It’s no wonder that the middle class is dying. It no longer has the intellectual capacity to engage the powers that be. It does, however, continue to vote to pass bailouts that make rich men richer. But we were saving the economy right? If by saving the economy it is meant preserving the status quo on Wall Street, then yes, we saved it. But did it improve your life? Maybe it kept it from getting worse? That is of course the fear of an uneducated mass.

And what of college? Everyone is encouraged to go now, so even if students didn’t get a substantial education in primary school they will no doubt get it in college, right? From what I have observed, this assertion is absolutely false. In most cases, the first year and a half of college is spent in classes that cover material that should have been learned in high school. Why does there exist a collegiate level course for algebra? Why does there exist a composition course? Why have we not been taught to be an articulate generation? The answer is because it is not necessary for you to learn these things to become a ‘functional’ member of society. Everyone knows that the moment you acquire your first job you will be trained to do it by a veteran slave. It used to be that being a functional member of society meant being a multifaceted individual with a vast array of talents that allowed one to traverse many different paths in life. Now it is your duty to specialize in a single occupation and ultimately become a cog in the corporate machine, much like the poor individual working the assembly line. All the above culminates in a very Marxist-Orwellian reality in which fear, and ignorance give yet more power to the sovereign resulting in bills such as the Patriot Act and soma-like drugs to fight the depression you likely now have because you find your single-faceted life unfulfilling. Why is all of this happening? In short, I think Mr. Carnegie would have said it thusly, ‘because Communism is the ultimate monopoly and we must train them accordingly.’

 

The author is a multifaceted college student majoring in the sciences but with obvious gifts as a writer and philosopher – a rarity in today’s America. Because the world he describes in this his first published article is real, with philistines lurking everywhere, he has chosen to write, for now, under the pseudonym Mecha Miles.

mecha.miles@yahoo.com