Opening Insights: No Longer Feeding Vanity
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity,
you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Today's people, in the age group spanning from late 30's to late teens, are the products of a particular mixture of mind-altering technology, unceasing propaganda assault, overtly inflated reinforcement of self-importance and complete disconnection from reality and the other people who live there. These are the millennials and the damage done to them through social engineering now threatens to infect and disassemble society as we know it.
Many are aware of the destruction caused by the social engineering of the millennial generation and know that something must be done if our organizations and our country are to survive. A few are taking action to break the spell over those who can still be reached. Read on to learn about a Faulkner University law professor's approach for introducing his students to the real world and holding them accountable for their thinking and actions, thereby giving them the tools to question their indoctrination.
Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason.
Adam J. MacLeod, Ph.D.
Informational Insights: Minds Held Hostage
The following article was published by New Boston Post, "a home for conservative, libertarian, classical liberal, and moderate voices." It was written by Adam J. MacLeod, "an associate professor of law at Jones School of Law at Faulkner University in Montgomery, Alabama."
I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
They cannot learn until their minds are freed from that prison. This year in my Foundations of Law course for first-year law students, I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi. Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits. So, a couple of weeks into the semester, I decided to lay down some ground rules. I gave them these rules just before beginning our annual unit on legal reasoning.
Here is the speech I gave them.
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Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason. For many of you have not yet been educated. You have been dis-educated. To put it bluntly, you have been indoctrinated. Before you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.
Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been taught to label things with various “isms” which prevent you from understanding claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.
Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as “diversity” and “equality.”
Reasoning requires you to understand the difference between true and false. And reasoning requires coherence and logic. Most of you have been taught to embrace incoherence and illogic. You have learned to associate truth with your subjective feelings, which are neither true nor false but only yours, and which are constantly changeful.
We will have to pull out all of the weeds in your mind as we come across them. Unfortunately, your mind is full of weeds, and this will be a very painful experience. But it is strictly necessary if anything useful, good, and fruitful is to be planted in your head.
There is no formula for this. Each of you has different weeds, and so we will need to take this on the case-by-case basis. But there are a few weeds that infect nearly all of your brains. So I am going to pull them out now.
First, except when describing an ideology, you are not to use a word that ends in “ism.” Communism, socialism, Nazism, and capitalism are established concepts in history and the social sciences, and those terms can often be used fruitfully to gain knowledge and promote understanding. “Classism,” “sexism,” “materialism,” “cisgenderism,” and (yes) even racism are generally not used as meaningful or productive terms, at least as you have been taught to use them. Most of the time, they do not promote understanding.
In fact, “isms” prevent you from learning. You have been taught to slap an “ism” on things that you do not understand, or that make you feel uncomfortable, or that make you uncomfortable because you do not understand them. But slapping a label on the box without first opening the box and examining its contents is a form of cheating. Worse, it prevents you from discovering the treasures hidden inside the box. For example, when we discussed the Code of Hammurabi, some of you wanted to slap labels on what you read which enabled you to convince yourself that you had nothing to learn from ancient Babylonians. But when we peeled off the labels and looked carefully inside the box, we discovered several surprising truths. In fact, we discovered that Hammurabi still has a lot to teach us today.
One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”
Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way.
Furthermore, diversity and equality are not the most important values. In fact, neither diversity nor equality is valuable at all in its own right. Some diversity is bad. For example, if slavery is inherently wrong, as I suspect we all think it is, then a diversity of views about the morality of slavery is worse than complete agreement that slavery is wrong.
Similarly, equality is not to be desired for its own sake. Nobody is equal in all respects. We are all different, which is to say that we are all not the same, which is to say that we are unequal in many ways. And that is generally a good thing. But it is not always a good thing (see the previous remarks about diversity).
Related to this: You do [...] not know what the word “fair” means. It does not just mean equality. Nor does it mean something you do not like. For now, you will have to take my word for this. But we will examine fairness from time to time throughout this semester.
Third, you should not bother to tell us how you feel about a topic. Tell us what you think about it. If you can’t think yet, that’s O.K.. Tell us what Aristotle thinks, or Hammurabi thinks, or H.L.A. Hart thinks. Borrow opinions from those whose opinions are worth considering. As Aristotle teaches us in the reading for today, men and women who are enslaved to the passions, who never rise above their animal natures by practicing the virtues, do not have worthwhile opinions. Only the person who exercises practical reason and attains practical wisdom knows how first to live his life, then to order his household, and finally, when he is sufficiently wise and mature, to venture opinions on how to bring order to the political community.
One of my goals for you this semester is that each of you will encounter at least one idea that you find disagreeable and that you will achieve genuine disagreement with that idea. I need to explain what I mean by that because many of you have never been taught how to disagree.
Disagreement is not expressing one’s disapproval of something or expressing that something makes you feel bad or icky. To really disagree with someone’s idea or opinion, you must first understand that idea or opinion. When Socrates tells you that a good life is better than a life in exile you can neither agree nor disagree with that claim without first understanding what he means by “good life” and why he thinks running away from Athens would be unjust. Similarly, if someone expresses a view about abortion, and you do not first take the time to understand what the view is and why the person thinks the view is true, then you cannot disagree with the view, much less reason with that person. You might take offense. You might feel bad that someone holds that view. But you are not reasoning unless you are engaging the merits of the argument, just as Socrates engaged with Crito’s argument that he should flee from Athens.
So, here are three ground rules for the rest of the semester.
1. The only “ism” I ever want to come out your mouth is a syllogism. If I catch you using an “ism” or its analogous “ist” — racist, classist, etc. — then you will not be permitted to continue speaking until you have first identified which “ism” you are guilty of at that very moment. You are not allowed to fault others for being biased or privileged until you have first identified and examined your own biases and privileges.
2. If I catch you this semester using the words “fair,” “diversity,” or “equality,” or a variation on those terms, and you do not stop immediately to explain what you mean, you will lose your privilege to express any further opinions in class until you first demonstrate that you understand three things about the view that you are criticizing.
3. If you ever begin a statement with the words “I feel,” before continuing you must cluck like a chicken or make some other suitable animal sound.
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To their credit, the students received the speech well. And so far this semester, only two students have been required to cluck like chickens.
https://newbostonpost.com/2017/11/09/undoing-the-dis-education-of-millennials/
This article originally appeared on November 9, 2017 in NEW BOSTON POST: Undoing the Dis-Education of Millennials
Possibilities for Consideration: Change HOW We Think
Professor MacLeod's approach to "pulling the weeds" from the minds of his students is the kind of logical and down-to-earth exercise that would benefit an entire nation of self-important, emotionally insecure and divided individuals. Imagine, while attending a leadership strategy meeting at work you were required to cluck like a chicken for choosing to place priority on your feelings instead of your thinking.
Professor MacLeod created within his classroom a peer environment where the insanity is obvious to all and not acceptable to anyone.
To overcome the challenge faced by a whole generation requires a new approach to thinking. In order to be accepting of a different way of doing things (change) the readiness for change in individuals must be seeded and cultivated.
Historically, lasting change has been all but impossible to achieve for most people, organizations and cultures.
What if a lasting socially responsible change (to change the way we think, reason and act) could be successfully implemented at a community scale – one community at a time?
Awareness Communication Technology, LLC (AwareComm®) is a multi-gold certified Microsoft Research and Development partner with the mission of harnessing the collective power of Microsoft Technologies with AwareComm’s Technology, Methodology and Sentience Data Science to solve systemic organization challenges, which in turn solves systemic community challenges. This process raises Adaptive Intelligence (AdI™) and drives social-cultural change.
By raising AdI™ in individuals, teams and organizations the power for collective change is created and the power of deceive, divide and conquer is eliminated. This is the strength of collaboration and unity that the AwareComm® platform was built to propagate.
If the ideas of personal accountability, living and working in reality and cultivation of critical thinking are important to you and you wish to see them take hold in all aspects of your environment then examine the questions below. If answers come to you as a result, then consider completing the SocraticQ exercise toward the bottom of this page.
Add Your Insight
Take a moment and examine…
- As you reviewed the material above, what stood out to you?
- What is the potential impact, economically and/or socially?
- What action is needed to stop or support this idea?
- You may want to consider whether you:
- want to be aware of,
- should become supportive of,
- would want to be active in this topic?
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.
LEONARDO DA VINCI