You would have done yourself a favour if you had not mentioned your piece of paper. At least I would not now have to tell you that you wasted a considerable part of your life. It is not even your ghastly anti-Semitism or your addiction to conspiracy theories that I mean; I mean the fact that you are wholly unaware of the range of possible opinions and views. You are an obvious anti-Semite, and do not know it; you believe in conspiracy theories of the most debased kind, and you are shocked and angry when people point it out to you. In all your time at school and college, you have evidently never once discussed any of these matters in any meaningful way.
What is more, you are uneducated at the most basic level: you never learned to think. That was the second and deeper source of that subtle sense of horror that struck me when I read your comment. Your thinking is not constructive: that is, it is not reason. You do not present theories. You do not debate hypotheses. You just accumulate a series of unrelated questions, not to demonstrate anything - because they don't - but to give yourself leave to deny whatever it is that you wish to deny. That is to say, your thinking faculty is enslaved to your will. That is the procedure of all cranks, piling up grassy knolls upon extra bullets, not because they prove anything, but because they want to believe that "the truth has not been said".
My favourite philosopher, Karl Popper, used to say that the most basic task of education is to teach people to distinguish between an expert and a charlatan. For you, the process you call education has done the very opposite: it has taught you to be a charlatan, to mishandle evidence, to subject perception to desire. And this failure is a systematic failure, in the same way that the difference between expert and charlatan is a systematic difference.
The darkness of your mind is such that I do not know whether I can render this difference in any way that will make an impression on you, without being swatted away by another parade of mishandled cliches and half-understood platitudes. But I will try.
The point about expertise in any field is that it is itself authoritative. It is authoritative because it is coherent and answers to the facts. The scientific mentality does not "challenge authority"; only cranks do that. The scientific mentality, if it finds need to challenge current assumptions - and that is a big if - conceives alternative theories which it tests. That is, it conceives different systems of authoritative explanations; which, once accepted - and they may be rejected, according to whether or not experiments on the subject succeed - acquire that same quality of authority that the previously held theory had. Indeed, even discarded theories are part of the weave of scientific and scholarly authority, because it is important to know what a successful theory rose to challenge and in what ways it improves upon previous ones.
The same goes for politics. Nobody ever got anywhere by "challenging authority". Both Washington and Lenin were not interested in "challenging authority"; rather, they had their own views of how political authority should work, and they were damn well going to enact them. In a sense, tsarism had as little relevance to Lenin and Trotsky as the rule of George III and his ministers had to the authors of the Federalist Papers; neither was rising merely against an existing kind of rule, so much as insisting on forming a wholly different one. In fact, in the American Revolution, much of revolutionary politics consisted in defending local institutions that the British were trying to tear down for no reason that the Colonials could see.
I think it is my duty... part 2
What is more, you are uneducated at the most basic level: you never learned to think. That was the second and deeper source of that subtle sense of horror that struck me when I read your comment. Your thinking is not constructive: that is, it is not reason. You do not present theories. You do not debate hypotheses. You just accumulate a series of unrelated questions, not to demonstrate anything - because they don't - but to give yourself leave to deny whatever it is that you wish to deny. That is to say, your thinking faculty is enslaved to your will. That is the procedure of all cranks, piling up grassy knolls upon extra bullets, not because they prove anything, but because they want to believe that "the truth has not been said".
My favourite philosopher, Karl Popper, used to say that the most basic task of education is to teach people to distinguish between an expert and a charlatan. For you, the process you call education has done the very opposite: it has taught you to be a charlatan, to mishandle evidence, to subject perception to desire. And this failure is a systematic failure, in the same way that the difference between expert and charlatan is a systematic difference.
The darkness of your mind is such that I do not know whether I can render this difference in any way that will make an impression on you, without being swatted away by another parade of mishandled cliches and half-understood platitudes. But I will try.
The point about expertise in any field is that it is itself authoritative. It is authoritative because it is coherent and answers to the facts. The scientific mentality does not "challenge authority"; only cranks do that. The scientific mentality, if it finds need to challenge current assumptions - and that is a big if - conceives alternative theories which it tests. That is, it conceives different systems of authoritative explanations; which, once accepted - and they may be rejected, according to whether or not experiments on the subject succeed - acquire that same quality of authority that the previously held theory had. Indeed, even discarded theories are part of the weave of scientific and scholarly authority, because it is important to know what a successful theory rose to challenge and in what ways it improves upon previous ones.
The same goes for politics. Nobody ever got anywhere by "challenging authority". Both Washington and Lenin were not interested in "challenging authority"; rather, they had their own views of how political authority should work, and they were damn well going to enact them. In a sense, tsarism had as little relevance to Lenin and Trotsky as the rule of George III and his ministers had to the authors of the Federalist Papers; neither was rising merely against an existing kind of rule, so much as insisting on forming a wholly different one. In fact, in the American Revolution, much of revolutionary politics consisted in defending local institutions that the British were trying to tear down for no reason that the Colonials could see.