The Educational Establishment and the Incarnation of Stupid

Before reading Common Sense Nation, I had never heard of the philosopher Thomas Reid, the intrepid discoverer of Common Sense. Prior to him, no one had any or knew what it was. It was as if the whole world were populated by MSNBC hosts.

All gaggery aside, Reid founded a school of thought known as common sense realism. Right away you can see why this wouldn't appeal to the tenured, as their whole mystique is based upon the essentially gnostic idea that they possess some special knowledge inaccessible to the restavus. Therefore, common sense realism blows their cover and reveals them as the phonies and frauds they are, without so much as a fig leaf of credibility to cover what amounts to a naked will to power.

Nevertheless, academia has been dining out on this anti-intellectual hoax for half a century, although there are signs their bubble is in the process of bursting.

As ususal, aphorisms come to mind:

--Instruction does not cure foolishness; it equips it.

--The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly.

--The State imposes obligatory and free instruction, for making a stupid man still stupider at the public expense.

--Modern education delivers intact minds to propaganda (Dávila).

Note that, for reasons of self-preservation, the last thing the state is going to do is promulgate a philosophy that undercuts the very need for statism. In short, education must deny, obscure, and debilitate the functioning of common sense.

Indeed, this is why public schools don't teach children logic, economics, or ethics, for if they did, they might produce self-governing individuals animated by common sense instead of intellectually enfeebled and dependent drones. Someone like AOC is a pure product of our public and higher educational system. She's not an accident. She's the epitome and quintessence, the very embodiment of the negation of common sense.

According to Prof. Wiki, Reid enumerated

a set of principles of common sense which constitute the foundations of rational thought. Anyone who undertakes a philosophical argument, for example, must implicitly presuppose certain beliefs, such as "I am talking to a real person," and "There is an external world whose laws do not change," among many other positive, substantive claims.

The point is, the very possibility of rational discourse presupposes various implicit principles that cannot not be, on pain of rendering rational discourse strictly impossible. Likewise,

For Reid, the belief in the truth of these principles is not rational; rather, reason itself demands these principles as prerequisites, as does the innate "constitution" of the human mind. It is for this reason (and possibly a mocking attitude toward Hume and Berkeley) that Reid sees belief in the principles of common sense as a litmus test for sanity.

Which is why, for example, the American Psychological Association is no longer a promoter of sanity, but rather, has become an enthusiastic proponent and enabler of personal and collective insanity, e.g., transgenderism, intersectionality, and identity politics.

Reid observed that "before men can reason together, they must agree in first principles; and it is impossible to reason with a man who has no principles in common with you." Sure, you can do other things with such people. That's what relatives are for. It's just that they are "not fit to be reasoned with."

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time (Dávila).

Anyway, it turns out that this proponent of common freaking sense and rudimentary sanity was a huge influence on the founders. For Reid, what he calls common sense is the very power in us that renders understanding possible.

Think about that one: when you understand something, it is because understanding is possible in principle. Therefore it is appropriate to ask: by virtue of what principle(s) is understanding possible?

I haven't actually thought this through in a completely systematic way, because I am not a systematic guy. More of an intuitive guy. But as I've said all along, one headrock principle surely must be that the world is intelligible to intelligence. If not, then we're all done here except for those tenured pretexts for a naked Power Grab alluded to above.

For Reid, "self-evident truths are true and discoverable by us because of the constitution of our human nature." In the absence of the latter, "we would lack access to the foundational truths we require to be able to reason..." Thus, human nature is conformed to certain self-evident and ineradicable truths that allow it (human nature) to realize its potential.

The following passage caught my eye, because it too is a point I have often belabored: self-evident truths -- our innate cosmic principles -- are not arrived at by logic per se, but are the very basis of logic.

In other words, a thing cannot be true merely because it is logical, but rather, logical because true; obviously Truth is higher than logic -- one reason why Truth manifests in any number of extra- or translogical ways.

Again, the truths we are discussing are not "conclusions" but perceptions; we don't shine the light of intelligence upon them, because they are that light (i.e., intelligence is ultimately composed of the light it is able to discern). Analogously, although the moon gives off light, you wouldn't use the light of the moon to try to illuminate the sun. For those of you living in Rio Linda, reason is the moon, truth the sun.

The Founders wrote our Constitution in such a way that any person using his God-given common sense could understand it. Which is why you have to be a constitutional scholar in order to twist it to the nonsensical ends of the left.