What Is Going On?

I am well-established in my philosophical orientation towards the world: I have my own theology, my own metaphysical outlook, my own moral system, my own epistemology, my own political philosophy--mostly Mark Levin's political viewpoint, plus constitutional republicanism, run by supercitizens, individuators, pro-free market, citizen-soldiers and patriots--and my own psychology of human nature. I never had even an undergraduate degree in philosophy, so there are huge gaps in my knowledge and competence as a philosopher, a deficit which I am now trying to backfill and remedy late in life. That brings me to this blog entry issue. I have been wrestling for over a year with mastery sought in epistemological study, centering mostly on Ernest Sosa's virtue perspectivism, as a way into this daunting world. It appears that now, over two hundred years away from Kant's death, we are all still haunted and dominated by his convincing assertion that we cannot get outside our heads, to encounter perceptually that world of noumena. The epistemologists seem to accept that absolute reality is a realm that humans cannot know for sure. As an epistemological moderate, I agree mostly with the naive realists that we can know the world of noumena through our senses, ideationally through our awakened and function logical operations and our rational intuitions about how the premises and conclusions flow, and what we can emotionally intuit, in an honest, realistic mood of receiving sentimental glimpses from both internal and external sources of stimuli. As my minority stance of outlook, I am a skeptic and relativist: we cannot know the world out there or inside for sure, that the best we can achieve is knowledge about the world with high probable certainty. I believe we are complex, contradictory creatures, and that our epistemology reflects this--our epistemological orientation to the world is objective-subjective, as laid out just above. It could be that, for humans, the epistemology and psychology of moderation that they live with and operate by, works in a radical different way: perhaps these dogmatists are able to sense directly infallibly, absolutely and empirically, feel as experiencers and deciders, and rationally intuit about premises, inferences, conclusions and instant, cognitive generalizing about what the thinker experientially encounters, envisions, concludes and hypothesizes, on the one hand, while, simultaneously, living, experiencing, sensing, feeling and thinking about stimuli, internal and external, in a fallible, error-prone, subjective, contradictory, relativistic, falsehood-embracing, illusion-polluted, Stirneresque mode of mentally and experientially encountering, acting upon and reacting to inputs, internal and mental, and external and material, from reality. I am 67.5 years old, or thereabouts. I still work as a maintenance engineer full time as a nursing home in Minneapolis for mentally ill adults. The residents have their issues and disabilities, and that is one matter. The staff are college educated, some with advanced degrees in nursing and psychology, and others are administrators, managers. At times I wonder who is crazier, the residents or the ‘normal’ people caring for them. The staff are a microcosm of modern America. The management style of the building are strictly hierarchical. Jordan Peterson says that we cannot escape hierarchies and he is correct, where I work is more about those running the place being more competent, reasonable and just than being incompetent, callous, corrupt, inefficient, though profitable and tyrannical. And there is a caste system here. Owner, top managers, middle managers, nurses and mental health workers, and at the bottom of the rung, dietary staff and facilities staff of which I am one. I have addressed these issues elsewhere, so I shall not dwell on them here--where upper staff ignorance, worst practices, laziness, unworkable stinginess and wastefulness, incompetence, cruelty, selfishness, class-consciousness and general dysfunctionality run rampant, It is not as nearly as bad as what was depicted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kasey, but there are eerie if faint parallels. Please forgive the digression, but I was trying to set the stage for my pondering about what is a good, wise humane practice and what is not, and I am trying to apply what I am learning in epistemology to what I encountered during an 11.5 hour shift yesterday. Part of the heating system was down so some pipes needed to be cut out in the boiler room, and new pipes welded in with a heavy, expensive, replacement motor and pump system. They were wired in and installed by the technicians from our mechanical company. Four white males, (from 25 to 50 years of age) extremely skilled union technicians worked for 10 hours, feverishly, nonstop to get the heating system up for these vulnerable adults so that they could have heat in the 34 degree weather. It was awesome, impressive and inspirational to view two pipefitters, a journeyman electrician, and the air-conditioning and heating technician from that company, working calmly but by stages to get the old pump out, and install and get running the new pump and motor. What Stephen Hicks refers to as the World of Modernism in America at work, and working beautifully and efficiently--the ethics, the epistemology, the ontology, the smooth cooperation demonstrated un-self-consciously and automatically by these union workers was something to see. I admire skilled, competent people that know what they are doing, what they are about, and get it done on time and well (for $10,000 or less)--that was the reality at work--that was no corrupt, male patriarchy at work. That is the world of America from Hofferian years in the 1950s that still functions and excels here in 2021 if we allow men, and all Americans, to function as Americans always did. Then I went upstairs at 700 pm to get a set of contractor keys from the security officer/night receptionist. He was a white male, nice, smart guy, nice-looking, with long hair (6 feet, 5 inches tall), wearing a dress with see-through nylon stocking and high heels. I handed the keys to the vendor and, as I was leaving before this tile repair guy would be done, I told him to return the keys to "this gentleman at the desk". The cross-dresser looked at me in a huff and answered: "I am no gentleman." I mentioned to the woman on duty that I think I hurt that guy’s feelings. She said gently that we appreciate you understanding that he deserves respect and courtesy, and he prefers to be addressed as she or her. I did not say anything. This same woke, nice, politically correct, Leftist, postmodernist, winsome Mom has made so very impractical, foolish management decisions on the floor for residents that she manages, that we in the basement are angered and horrified by, and we have to clean up needless crises, inefficiencies and mistakes, perpetrated and perpetuated by college-educated direct staff workers that act and believe that they are smarter and better than we sub-humans in the basement. But, she was spot-on, attuned with the needs that that transgender receptionist, at the front desk that they hired, because he is competent, but also to make a political and cultural statement at a desk, a few feet from the sign on the vestibule glass about prohibiting guns on this premises, a building where the night guard sleeps half the night, and a side door is often left unlocked all night, in a very dangerous neighborhood with well over 100 hundred vulnerable adults asleep inside. The insanity, inconsistencies and general hypocrisy and silliness allowed and sanctioned by the sane, humane people running the place would make a great TV sitcom. I left at 825pm and heard 10 pistol shots go off a few blocks away across the freeway along Franklin and 13th Avenue. Let me try to sum this up: the ethics, epistemology and ontology, the Modernist and American traditional culture gave us the greatest country in the world, and those technicians fixing that heating system in short order in a smooth, quiet, polite way. The Marxist/Minneapolis/Postmodernist culture with its ethics, epistemology and ontology give us transgenders at the front desk, guns banned at the door, hierarchical disrespect and mis-treatment of facilities employees in the basement by Leftist, caring, noble, elitist, snobbish, poor-functioning but endlessly self-confident and self-aggrandizing. I cannot agree, at least at this point, with the foundationalists, that we can have certain truth about the world of noumena, but there may be a way to be certain dogmatically. Until that point is made clear, if it can be made clear, I must posit that the world of Modernism is objectively wise, humane, desirable and realistic, as far as we can determine. The world of Marxism and postmodernism can only bring us pain, tyranny, poverty and misery, but their skepticism and subjectivist interpretation of the world add to our knowledge, wisdom and ethical stance towards how to live and function in the world today, as individuals and as a people. Perhaps the world is just a true paradox: we can know the real world and gather certain knowledge about it, and the law of noncontradiction and Aristotelian logic are consistent and represent the world, worked out logically as valid, sound syllogisms; we are Stirnerian, suffering from our ego predicament, never able to get outside our heads, never able to ascertain the nature of noumena, if it even exists, or is identifiable. We are alone in our own solipsistic dream and whatever truth we claim is our mere personal opinion. The paradox is reality, and we need to come to grips with it as it is. This may be ontological reality.