Articulate

 

I work full time at 69 and ½ years of age, and I am trying to develop still my philosophy of Mavellonialism, so I have not much time, and many competing priorities eating away at my leisure time.

 

One of the sources of intellectual temptation for me is reading snippets of interviews or lectures from two of my favorite thinkers, Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson. I could spend all  my time reading and reacting to what they have written, and what lectures, debates and interview that they have conducted, and snippets of all these fascinating interactions are all over Facebooks and other outlets.

 

I am trying to limit how much time and effort I put into responding to these snippets from these two thinkers, but it is sometimes more than I can resist to capture one and respond to it on my blog site.

 

Today, 1/16/24, I observed on of these Facebooks snippets, an interview between Jordan Peterson and someone; it seemed like this short video was capture and recirculated by something called achieve.success. com.

 

I took notes on the video and will respond to what he said.

 

Here is Jordan (J after this): “Look at the what the rich people do to their kids historically.

They send them to get a liberal arts education. Do you think they are stupid? That’s not why they did that.”

 

My response: This snippet is Peterson is superb; he is brilliant, wise, articulate and providing sound advice as I have ever hear him be: it is exceptional. He is right, historically, that the noble classes of Europe and the rich merchants and captains of commerce, these hereditary or economic ruling classes aspired for their children, that they get an classical, liberal arts educated so they would be able to think for themselves and well communicate, and to be cultured enough to mingle with the educated and cultured people of their generation, to feel at home with their intellectual, cultural peers.

 

They were not motivated by snobbery—perhaps a bit of that—they wanted their children to be well-educated, well able to think and communicate in order that they could compete and function fluently and competently among their peers, and help run their communities, their enterprises, their nation. These motives are idealistic but also sensible for a leadership class needs to know how to think, and how to speak.

 My social innovation is to make the common people, lumpy with talent as Eric Hoffer reminds us, as articulate, educated and literate, as any member of the British aristocracy in 1897. When the masses are superior and aristocratic in intellectual and demonstrated merit, as used to be the young adults members of the educated ruling class, than we in America will field a society whose culture, business, science, Academia and political process, is superbly, efficiently and sensibly run by supercitizens, from the bottom up.

 

 

Now the liberal arts education up to say 60 years ago was a liberal arts education that was the standard of academic excellence that would teach the young to be cultured, learned, intellectual, independent-thinking and able to express themselves in clear, simple language.

 

Most liberal arts colleges today are woke centers, or mind-factories spitting out human, cloned widgets of indoctrinating youths, immersed in and accepting that social justice activism and cultural Marxism are they future and missions in life. Leftists and postmodernists have taken over and destroyed liberal arts colleges and liberal arts colleges at big universities. Still, some small liberal arts colleges like Hillsdale College in Michigan still provide a fine, rounded liberal arts education, the kind of formal, degreed education that Peterson is advocating, and which was once standard at any institution of higher learning but no longer.

 

By the way, what Jordan is offering here is available to all Americans and eventually we hope to humans everywhere. It matters not if one can find a liberal arts program near one that is not woke, anti-intellectual and poisoned by brittle-ideology peddled by slanted, intolerant, authoritarian, rigid, slanted professors. It matters not if one cannot come up with $70,000/year to attend Hillsdale College. It matters not if one is a doctor or surgeon working in St. Louis or a guy working on a fishing fleet out of Anchorage, one with a high school diploma.

 

If one understood and lived by the principles of self-realizing intellectually, morally, spiritually, emotionally and practically, one can get that liberal arts education formally and other-taught, or informally or self-taught; the end results would be similar: one would be literate, articulate and a critical thinker, easily able to understand and participate in any circle of conversation in academia, as an avid student of and practitioner of political advocacy in running and shaping our constitutional republic, or among mentally alive and searching adults engaging one another on an online chat line.

 

 

J: “They know there is nothing more powerful than being literate and articulate. And you might say, well, you didn’t get trained in anything specific. And maybe you should buttress your liberal arts degree by training in something specific.”

 

My response: The anarchist-indivudator supercitizen of the future will be empowered, powerful and self-empowered and self-liberating, because as an original thinker that is literate, articulate and a coherent thinker and communicator.

 

She can be as specifically trained and educated as technician, scientist, welder, or nurse as she needs to be and should be to make her living, but she then should be educated formally or informally so she can be extremely literate and articulate, able to debate and converse with anyone about anything.

 

J: “There is nothing that serves you better than being able to communicate. Do you want to be articulate or stumble over everything that you try to think and communicate? How are you going to get anywhere? You don’t even know who you are under those circumstances. This massive feeling that is expressing itself, maybe in violence because you cannot find the words.”

 

My response: This is stimulating and exhilarating speech. Jordan invokes in each person the self-challenge to get educated so that she can think and speak, so she can know who she is, what the world is, and who others are, and how she should intermingle with others, and pushes back against others to push the world in a better direction.

 

When the masses learned that God has granted them the permission and the authority, individually and as a people, each to think for herself and to become and participate in the democracy, as an articulate, liberated, powerful, articulate and engaged supercitizen, there is no way for ruling elites to run thing from the top down any longer.

 

There will be far fewer frustrated citizens seeking after a guru-demagogue, an active mass movement, or an ism, a holy cause, an ideology, to lose themselves within, to find fake, mendacious, substitutes systems offering meaning and purpose for each lost and worried citizen.

 

J: “And you stumble around and bump into things. You are clunky and dull; you are not witty, and you do not sparkle. I mean you need to read, to learn, to communicate, to negotiate, to plan, to strategize, to encourage other people, to bring them on board, to put them on your side.”

 

My response: Man, is this guy a gifted wordsmith, one of the best, and he speaks wisdom, the truth, and his motive is to uplift the common people. What a stirring, exciting snippet from Peterson. It gives me hope that millions of people receive such messages from the conservative sages of the West, like Jordan is.

 

Such personal awareness, disseminated via mass social media, will perhaps, sooner or later, awaken the American people to their responsibilities as committed individuating supercitizens.