Deductive Explosion
“If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities…” — Voltaire
This is Chiara de Blasio in a post she made to social media. (The censor bars weren’t on her public post. And yes, there are more posts of a similar aesthetic.) She’s the current New York City mayor’s daughter and recent graduate of University of Santa Clara (“grounded in the Jesuit educational tradition”).
Then there’s Colinford Mattis, NYU Law and Princeton ’10 graduate, who was recently arrested for his misadventures involving Molotov cocktails and setting police cars alight (“allegedly”).
Of course, there is Sarah Jeong (University of California, Berkeley and Harvard Law graduate), who, after a public display of racist fantasia, was hired by the New York Times to serve on its editorial board.
What’s surprising isn’t that these acts of cognitive and physical sadomasochism occur with some and increasing frequency among the young but rather that such acts don’t occur with greater frequency. Such behavior was incentivized and normalized over their 17+ years of education, and your children are probably being taught that flaming police cars and “fuck capitalism” tattoos are logical products of their enlightenment.
And now these well-educated disciples have crowned king a fenty-meth’d five-time convict who’d once put a gun to a pregnant women’s stomach then ransacked her house. (Convicted. Five years.). He, of course, was getting his life together by exiting reality with a potent drug cocktail and passing counterfeit money.[1] Classic turn-around story.
All of this is to be expected given that education was ceded long ago to Marxists.
Systemic Racism
Your kids know Cornel West. He’s been the CEO of Race, Inc. for three decades. He’s one of the leading neo-Marxists who calls for the destruction of America. Have I mentioned that everyone in college has, directly or indirectly, come across West?[2]
“Destruction of America? So, isn’t that, like, treason?”
Technically, it’s sedition, but treason isn’t a wholly inappropriate term.
“Why isn’t he in prison?”
He’s doing time at Harvard, where he teaches your children. He’s an Ivy League recidivist who previously did time at Princeton.
“Sedition? Really?”
Here’s Cornel West just two weeks ago: “I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment … The nation-state, it’s criminal justice system, it’s legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties. …The system cannot reform itself.”[3]
“The system cannot reform itself” is a Marxist call for destruction. We cannot elect better politicians or pass new laws or reform police departments. It all must be dismantled and replaced. West has been preaching this for decades. Your children have integrated the language of destruction into their identities. Creative destruction has stalked them from their English classes to Target.
But, you contend, my [son/daughter] didn’t major in [crazy]. No one actually does.[4] These Marxists and their affiliated majors don’t exist because students actually major in them. They are the thought police — on campus and nationally. They burn the books, tear down the statues, purge the faculties of thought crimes, assign value, and control the narrative. These Marxists destroyed the humanities, corrupted the social sciences, and now are attempting to purge the sciences. So you may seek refuge in the math department, but they will batter the walls with universally required ‘inclusion seminars’ and ‘diversity training’ and eventually infiltrate the department until everyone’s hair is blue and theorems are non-binary. (Yes, a University of Illinois professor has argued that math is racist. Such arguments may seem ridiculous, and you may laugh, but then you send your children to spend four years with people like that. So who’s crazy now?)[5]
Truth Has a New Master
Those who studied the Soviet Union during the Cold War always assumed that the Soviets massaged their numbers: warheads and factory production and everything was “adjusted” by the Kremlin because the USSR only reported good news.
What surprised Soviet analysts and historians after the fall of the USSR was that the Soviets often didn’t massage numbers; they invented them. That factory that’s operating at an unbelievable 98% capacity? Well, it actually doesn’t even exist.
People are generally coming to this realization about the CCP. Beijing massages all information, and if the massage isn’t enough, they just invent the data.
Marx was a social observer and a history theoretician. As social observer he was usually reasonable (though over-rated; Dickens is better), but his main contribution to your child’s identity lays in his approach to history. Marx’s formulation is essentially that history (and its relations: facts, truth, etc) is merely the invention of one group to oppress another group. To escape oppression, you must invent your own history (and facts, truth, etc).
Facts had previously served truth. But with Marx, facts have a new master: power.
More specifically, those who use the term “Marxist ideology” fundamentally don’t understand Marx (and his actuation under Lenin) because Marxism has no ideology. The only substance of Marxism is power. And what serves power is truth. It’s irrelevant whether such truth is factual. Facts serve power as well. (And that’s how you get Chernobyl).
This is not a crazy theory; Lenin spelled it out.
This formulation is profoundly anti-Western yet common almost everywhere outside of the West. The idea that ‘truth’ is a thing unto itself and not a slave to power is fundamental to Western civilization. And yet, this Leninite enslavement of facts and truth to power is the reason that modern dialogue fails.
A factual response to Black Lives Matter propaganda generates nothing but friction and discord, because BLM and affiliated Leninist-Marxists only respond to power.[6] The results are tragi-comical: the senior Brown professor shocked at Brown President Paxson’s stupidity (pro-tip: you speak of facts and logic and she speaks of power…those are two different conversations with no possible convergence). Or the deeply sad case of a Berkeley professor who attempts to dismantle BLM with facts. Marxists, of course, will deploy facts as long as they serve power; once facts fail, they’ll jettison them for new facts or non-facts (it doesn’t matter). In the end, their position is not assailable with facts (or truth or reality or compassion).
These professors don’t seem to realize that Marxists are immune to facts. This lack of agreement on the meaning of ‘truth’ (and ‘facts’ and ‘reality’) makes dialogue impossible, which is precisely the goal of Marxist-Leninist for whom ‘dialogue’ means Prague 1968 or Tiananmen Square or, increasingly, your local police station or Target.
This education-by-propaganda is precisely the objective of Cornel West and Santa Clara University. Or Ohio State or George Soros. (The Institute for New Economic Thinking, which claims to “challenge conventional wisdom and advance ideas to better serve society,” is a Soros-founded and funded agitprop collective that pays professors to indoctrinate your children with what is in fact conventional wisdom among academics). The Marxist struggle sessions wherein you confess the sins of your morally or ideologically impure family and neighbors have scaled from your middle-schooler’s textbooks and social media to your dining room table.[7] The process is psychological torture; the objective is humiliation; the result is a new hierarchy wherein the impure serve the pure.
The deft legerdemain of the left is to transform a widely rejected movement — Marxism — with “systemic racism.” Marxists and socialists alike could never cognitively digest the failure of the workers of the world to unite, so now they must seek another class whose consciousness they can control, manipulate, and weaponize.[8]
This transformation was necessary not only because of the general rejection of Marxism but also because of the universal failures of Democrat policies. Blacks struggle the most in municipalities that have been under Democrat control for over half a century. So instead of having an honest discussion about the failures of the Great Society and the causes of why, on average, blacks today are worse off today than in the 1950s (when racism was sometimes the law), the left jettisons truth entirely.
(It’s amazing how Marxists have simply attempted to scale a facsimile of their past failures. Minneapolis, the epicenter of the current troubles, has had socialist mayors since the 1970s. The last mayor not from the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party was elected in 1969 after widespread urban riots; he was a police officer, and the incumbent he defeated was a socialist economics professor).
And those who state the plain truths of the matter are purged, as BLM is attempting to do now with a Cornell Law professor. And the new allies that the Marxists have marshaled to purge this Cornell professor who dared speak plainly are your children. You may see Chiara de Blasio on the subway, but if you look again, you’ll find a young man in a muddy Ypres trench eating rats and hoping the next chlorine gas offensive delivers the Kaiser’s promised Eden.
Chiara de Blasio majored in Criminal Justice and Women’s and Gender Studies at Santa Clara University, and the department’s mission is described as:
Today the field’s interrogation of identity, power, and privilege go far beyond the category “woman.” Drawing on the feminist scholarship of U.S. and Third World women of color, women’s studies has made the conceptual claims and theoretical practices of intersectionality, which examines how categories of identity (e.g., sexuality, race, class, gender, age, ability, etc.) and structures of inequality are mutually constituted and must continually be understood in relationship to one another, and transnationalism, which focuses on cultures, structures and relationships that are formed as a result of the flows of people and resources across geopolitical borders, foundations of the discipline [Yes, this is actually the entire paragraph, ending on an unpunctuated unsentence. Apparently, grammar is sexist. Also, the bold is in the original because scholarship!]
And so if you’ve wondered why students in Europe and beyond riot over the death of King George, or why students in the U.K. would attack a statue of Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator, or why there are BLM riots and fire-bombings in Greece, which has almost no black people, the answer is that a call to arms has been sounded among the Marxists, who have been indoctrinated at schools across the world. Santa Clara’s “transnational” approach and George Soros’ global funding are but nodes in a new and vast “workers of the world unite” network. And so, we’ve uncovered global systemic prejudice among the very people who were charged with ridding the world of it. And the 1936 Soviet Constitution guaranteed more rights than any other constitution in the world. This would be ironic if truth were a product of reality instead of a servant of power.
Though perhaps most remarkably, you’ve funded your own children’s indoctrination. Your taxes have funded public K12 schools, you’ve sent tuition checks to Santa Clara or Ohio State, you’ve kept quiet at the dinner table when your daughter informed you that she learned in school that the purpose of the American Revolution was to maintain slavery. You raised another piece of tasteless bread to your lips, eventually mailed off another check to some school somewhere, and you kept quiet.
Thus indoctrinated, your children are the infantry soldiers in the war, trained to fetishize their individuality into sadomasochist nothingness and used as a bridge between the corrupted leisure class (probably you) and the uneducated poor. And thus Chiara de Blasio and Colinford Mattis take to the streets with the uneducated poor, fueling their anger with the righteousness of Santa Clara and Princeton professors.
Teleological Ouroboros
I don’t mean to alarm you, but you’re probably a teleological radical. At some point, you want to know the point of something, the purpose, the objective. What are we trying to achieve?
And so, you ask those questions of others, too. It’s only natural. Humans are teleological radicals. In many ways, this teleological predilection is a source of friction that benefits Marxists. Marxist movements tend not to have well-defined objectives. Conversely, non-Marxist movements tend to have well-defined objectives. The Hong Kong protestors have the Five Demands; they’ve literally written them down. And yet, Marxists tend to stick with rhetorically powerful fuzzy demands then watch you suffocate in the quicksand of their logic.
Where is the document that delineates these Marxist’s specific demands (for better/more/reform/less)? It doesn’t exist. Occasionally a specific absurdity (“defund the police”) will be tossed out like old bread to a basement-chained hostage. You’ll eat the bread, mail out another check, and pretend that maybe this all makes sense.
The key to understanding “the struggle” for Marxists is that “the struggle” is the goal. The struggle is perpetual. There is no solution. There is always an enemy (that’s you). This perpetual struggle is the means by which power is produced and held. And so, the process (“struggle”) and objective (“struggle”) are the same; it is a power-struggle that consumes itself.
And so Marxists may produce a demand if they believe it concedes power to them, but there’s no underlying substance to the demand apart from the power it produces. You may analyze the demand, offer other solutions, and attempt to produce dialogue around such demands. All of that is missing the point entirely. The demand itself is meaningless. And the Marxist struggle is an endless cycle of increasingly avaricious demands. The satiation point is complete servitude.
If … obvious, then why…
If this is all obvious, then why does anyone think a productive response consists of facts or truth? When the New York Times’ 1619 Project was unleashed on the world, all senior relevant historians publicly disavowed it. Foolishly, these historians led with facts. The 1619 Project was widely criticized for simply promoting propaganda.[9] So, what happened? It won a Pulitzer and was widely incorporated by public schools into their curriculum. No leading historian would vouch for it, yet your children will be taught it as truth. (In their defense, most of these historians are old, so they largely aren’t aware that facts are passé.) Facts or truth will not stop the Pulitzer Committee or the New York Times or Chicago Public Schools from creating and propagating new “facts” and “truths” just as they have no effect on the CCP from claiming that perhaps the coronavirus was planted in Wuhan by the U.S. Army. Facts have a new master.
It’s been suggested that this is a kind of moral colonialism, which is true writ large but, for children, misaligning a relationship to reality is fundamental to identity formation. The workers of the world — adults — couldn’t be morally colonized thoroughly enough so that they’d reject their culture and civilization. Children, however, are easier targets. They can be convinced that dying in a mudhole in Ypres serves the greater good. From the Ancient Greeks (Plato, Aristotle) to modern philosophers (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943), children are identified as the entry point for saving or savaging a civilization. On corrupting the young through miseducation, Lewis references these lines from a medieval song: So he gave the word to slay, And slew the little children.
Deductive Explosion
So here’s something that most students aren’t taught in school, not so much because it was developed by an old white man (Will Soissons, who’d be about 900 years old) but rather because it exposes the weakness that Marxists have leveraged.
In the 1100s, Parisian logician Soissons formulated a proof known as ex falso quodlibet, or “from falsehood, anything (follows).” The idea is quite simple: in any system of logic, any single falsehood assumed to be true corrupts the entire system. William’s proof wound its way down through the centuries and eventually landed in the brain of Bertrand Russell, a 20th century philosopher.
Russell quite famously mentioned in a class that he was teaching that if given a single falsehood, he could prove anything. The story goes that a student challenged him to prove that 1=0 implies Russell is the pope. One falsehood and anything is possible.
Russell proceeded:
Given the single false proposition that 1 = 0 :
Prove: I am the Pope.
Proof:
Given: 1 = 0
Add 1 to both sides.
Thus: 2 = 1.
The set [me, the Pope] has 2 members. But 2 = 1, so this set actually has only 1 member. Therefore, I am the Pope. (Or, the Pope is me.)
Russell was a bit of a ham so I’m sure he smiled at his proof and perhaps considered whether he really was the Pope. And, of course, he could be the Pope as long as he could convince everyone that 1 = 0.
By Russell’s time, ex falso quodlibet was (and is) known at “the principle of explosion,” or, in a system that contains a false assumption, “deductive explosion,” precisely because a single false assumption will explode the entire system. The presence of a false assumption is so disastrous to logical systems that mathematicians have spent their lives revising their work once a false assumption is discovered, lest their entire life’s work collapse (this is particularly true in set theory). Once a false assumption permeates a system of logic, true/false conclusions become trivial or invalid.
Deductive explosion demonstrates the remarkable fragility of true/false structures. Confuse true/false once, and the entire structure will collapse if tested.
And so Chiara de Blasio’s libertine subway ride need not start with Marx or Foucault or Derrida or bell hooks or Luce Irigaray or Roxane Gay — though it probably did.
All that needed to be planted into Chiara’s head at some point in her education is that 1 = 0. From there, her mind is infinitely corruptible.
…So he gave the word to slay, And slew the little children.
Update. Colinford Mattis, NYU Law and Princeton ’10 graduate, who was arrested for his misadventures involving Molotov cocktails and setting police cars alight, pleaded guilty to making Molotov cocktails. Mattis told the court, “I deeply regret my conduct and wish I would have made better decisions that night.” Perhaps if only he’d been better educated.
[1] Yes, China has been attempting to flood Minnesota with counterfeit money. How Floyd got involved is something of a mystery. https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/counterfeit-bills-seized-at-minnesota-border-international-falls-china/89-920a8623-b78c-4d52-a735-6eb913ffd98d
[2] West’s first published piece was “Black Theology and Marxist Thought” and his PhD dissertation is on black Marxism. His primary influence in his education is Rorty, an anti-intellectual who argues that truth is not a thing unto itself but rather is created by mobs. Rorty taught at Princeton, UVa, and Stanford, and there are probably several thousand graduates who are infected by Rorty’s mob-rule mentality.
[3]https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/05/29/cornel_west_america_is_a_failed_social_experiment_neoliberal_wing_of_democratic_party_must_be_fought.html#!
[4] Apologies to Chiara de Blasio, one of the few who actually did major in Marxist ideology.
[5] Wait until the Marxists discover that all 27 Math PhD students at Yale are male. I pray for the Target that will be sacrificed. https://public.tableau.com/profile/ecf5839#!/vizhome/YaleGraduateSchoolofArtsandSciencesStatisticsWebNoBBS/Admissions
[6] Reminder: “propaganda” is narrative control and not necessarily unfactual. Corporate marketing is propaganda. Lies are lies.
“The task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses toward certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses’ field of vision.” Excerpt from Mein Kampf, as published uncritically in the New York Times, June 1941.
[7] Much of black economic theory was developed by Sir Arthur Lewis, the only black to receive a Nobel in economics. Lewis taught at Princeton and was so profoundly astute that he was employed by several African and Caribbean governments with the predictable result of destroying their economies. Usually Ghana is used as the example of Lewis wrecking havoc, but my favorite example is Jamaica, which was actually much wealthier before the idiot economist infected the government with Marxist nonsense. The fun fact of economic growth is that it usually has very little to do with economics. Despite the widespread destruction he left in his wake, Lewis is highly regarded and widely taught in the academies.
[8] Communism is fueled by class consciousness, with which workers of the world can unite. Of course, this is all theory, and the empirical evidence suggests that it will remain so. It seems that often that in a given community workers have more in common with the capitalists than they do with workers in another community. Of course, communism aggressively sought to alter this affiliation — destroying culture, rewriting history, enforcing consciousness on the supposed unconscious. The substantially greater failure than success catalyzes the perception of perpetual struggle (Marx never said it would be easy), though it looks to many like just another Victorian theory detached from reality (there are many) and makes Communists appear to be just more Victorian fantasists. (https://medium.com/@nathan.a.allen/the-incoherence-of-the-philosophers-1-42753e6370a2)
[9] My criticisms of the 1619 Project are in addition to (not reflective of) many of the core objections to the project; links to many of those core objections by senior academics can be found in the notes here: https://medium.com/@nathan.a.allen/slavery-propaganda-and-the-new-york-times-ca382e14e32a
