Ideas are back and The Establishment hates it
About 9 months ago, I posted an article to this forum, it was about how the EU makes law. Since then, it has been viewed over 30,000 times. The chance of something like this being published, before the worldwide web, would have approached zero. But 30,000 thought it sufficiently interesting to take a look.
The old days of establishment control, where ideas could be effectively censored from books, newspapers, television and radio, have gone. Internet publishing opened the door after decades of the establishment doing its best to eliminate new ideas. It had a cringing fear that ideas would feed ideology and bring back the political hell of the mid-20th century where ideology caused millions of people to act in a robotic and inhuman way. They tempted fate, thinking starving ideology of ideas would keep the monster in check.
The cunning plan depended on control of every branch of the media and on colleges and universities. In the latter, philosophy wreckers such as Wittgenstein and his pathetically obedient admirers reduced the subject to empty semantic parlour games. For over 70 years, the plan was a spectacular success.
New ideas about politics and society were strangled at birth by academics. Meanwhile, the media made sure any that happened to survive this fateful campaign promoting ignorance were headed off at the point of distribution. In this way, society was deprived of the new ideas that it must have to protect its foundations.
The fruits of this cowardly and foolhardy plan are now clear. Old, dangerous ideologies are rising from the grave. We see people labeled Liberal openly attacking democracy; religious ideologues slaughtering innocent people in the name of Utopian beliefs; people yelling ‘Fascist’ as they burn and riot; an establishment, caught like a rabbit in headlights, refusing to counter murderous intimidation by religious ideologues; the breakdown of the rule of law turning into ‘the rule of laws’ with PC overturning formal law; and people shouting hate with hate in their eyes.
Modern western society has been thrown back to primitive thinking. The intelligentsia has been disarmed by decades of deliberate suppression of new ideas. This has created a vacuum which is being filled by a ideas from all sources and of all types. You can easily find a tub-thumping sermon from a mullah justifying slavery, exhorting obedience to Sura 5:51 and strongly approving of the killing of Apostates; perhaps also there might be a dash of Suras 8:12 or 4 47:4. Likewise, you can find other stuff, including my little effort on The Way the EU Makes Law.
The establishment lost control.. It thought it clever to create a vacuum that is now filled by a tidal wave of ideas which are out of its control. Ideas call for action. Some nestle in program words forming mental algorithms creating the prospect of a new ideological age that utterly terrified the Establishment many decades ago.
They saw robotic inhumanity in Germany. They saw the utter horror of Stalinist Marxist ideology. The impact was so great, they wanted to destroy all new ideas. The old ones could stay because they were discredited but new ones- unknown horrors to come- had to be suppressed at all costs.
During my time at Manchester University in the mid to late 1970s, the word ‘idea’ was treated as if pure poison. The nearest any academic was willing to come to taking them seriously was to consider ‘A history of ideas’. New ideas were as good as asking them to drink a cup of cold sick washed down by 4 week old flower water. Wittgenstein was considered the fount of all wisdom… the argument can be seen here: http://writerbeat.com/articles/15312-Wittgenstein-stuffed-Philosophy-
Ideas are back. Politicians must engage with this reality or be destroyed by it. They can either try to censor them as before, or establish a dictatorship where what people think is irrelevant, or, horror of horrors, start developing new ideas to underpin democracy and modern society.
The last option is the only moral and ‘correct’ one. After the ideological idiocies of P.C., I find myself writing the ‘c’ word and it is quite shocking. But that is the only way UK and Western society is going to find a way out of what appears to be growing and terrifying political instability with a real threat of a return to barbarism and utter horror.
Ideas must be taken seriously if society is going to survive. We must return those primitive and terrifying ideologies to their graves, locking them away for all eternity, armed by triumphant, new and better ideas. This is the only way we can stop the living dead resurrected with hateful intent to drag the future back to the past.
Read more at writerbeat.com
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