MDERPELDING FORCES ME TO LOOK AT THE IDEA CHAIN | 2008-08-10
It is a shame when mderpelding goes into a cynicism kick or some other dead end, because he is so valuable.
Let me hasten to add that I go into funks and dead ends myself. When I am talking about BUGS with others, I love tell them about the time I started bitching about how tired I was and how I might have to quit, hinting it was because you were failing me.
One of our BUGS told me exactly what I would have said to anybody else here: "Bob, for God's sake, if you're going to quit, QUIT. Stop WHINING about it."
Not only can I take a kick in the ass when I need it, I am PROUD of it.
So whatever mderpelding gets off on, I read carefully what he says. In the midst of his diatribe, he said he was not interested in General Lee, he was interested in people who WON.
This got me to thinking about his point, and that led me to talk about someone who was a winner almost perfectly parallel to us: Franz Boas.
Franz Boas was a Prussian Jew who came to America full of hatred for all white gentiles. His are the ideas that the Greatest Generation imposed on all Americans. Franz Boas knew all about the chain of ideas.
In Boaz's time the chain of ideas began at the universities. Since nobody is interested in the chain of ideas but us in BUGS, no one but me notes that this is where a giant change has taken place in my lifetime. There was a time when you could trace an idea back to its ACADEMIC origin: Kant, Marx, DeGobineau, Nietzsche, Keynes. All the ideas came with a name out of academia.
It should be headlines that this is no longer true. Every new idea comes out of the Internet now. Academia now is like the churches in the nineteenth century: they are out to suppress all heresy.
But in his time, Boas saw where the chain of ideas began and acted accordingly. If you look at the books of Boas, Kluckhohn, "Ashley Montague," and Margaret Meade, it is amazing how often they simply quote each other. The declared purpose of what they decided to call "social anthropology" was to prove the races equal...
They formed one of those little cliques Dave refers to when he says that all great changes in thought come from a small group of that sort.
Yes, mderpelding, I was wrong to emphasize General Lee on several counts. He not only lost, but the Civil War itself was the result of a failure in the Real War, the one we are waging, the one Boas waged. When a country descends into civil war, the idea chain has long since FAILED.
The REAL war is right here, in the idea chain. War occurs when those who should have fought through the chain of ideas decades before the conflict starts, have failed.