Science, Tech, Philosophy, Are Thoroughly Entangled

Our human world is founded on science (making sure of what we know), technology (using what we know by fabricating tools) and philosophy (love of wisdom). Fire science of 1.3 million years ago has been forgotten, but we are colonizing the Solar System, and grafting hearts, because of it.

There are scientific methods and philosophical methods. Philosophical methods tend to be more based on intuition, guesswork, one-case studies. Scientific methods tend to be more empirically founded, more logically or even mathematically articulated. Conflicts among scientific and philosophical approaches are often a local affair and may be very significant or completely ridiculous. Aristotle was scientifically minded when he sent his students to report on life forms. But then he was silly and not scientific at all when considering the laws of mechanics (Buridan corrected that around 1340 CE, with the same tech level, basically…)

The philosophical methods use guesswork often more systematically… But no science can be launched without guesswork, that is, without some philosophical approaches. Why to worry about this? What is it exactly to worry about? What are we trying to achieve? Why to doubt the world of the Ancient Ones?  

More philosophical and more scientific layers are diffuse, interpenetrating and entangled all over the theories of knowledge and technological practice. Generally, the less philosophical the more uninteresting a science is, and then it can become so successful, it’s simply a crucial technology.

Even math is full of philosophy all over the place… The FAS, Fundamental Axiom Systems, are a matter of taste… As a deeply contradicted David Hilbert was forced to discover from Godel, Turing, and others… Any piece of math leads to non demonstrable propositions and choosing among them is according to wealth and taste… One’s interpretation of wisdom.

Science is more or less scientific.

LCDM (Big Bang Lambda Cold Dark Matter) contains a HUGE amount of guesswork (whatever guys who were there for the proverbial “first three minutes” think)… Funny thing is that some physicists who attack philosophy do so, precisely because they follow the LCDM cult… As they vaguely felt that they were following a cult, they insisted, for themselves and their book sales, that LCDM was not a cult, but a science. Proof? They were scientists…

… while plate tectonic or the AMOC or blood circulation are well established sciences, real sciences.

The relationship between philosophical methods and science can be spectacular. Quantum Theory is huge, very precise… and at the same time obviously false, (in QFT mode), as its computation of vacuum energy is off by 10^120… and drastically incomplete… The Quantum is a good example of science as perfect knowledge and towering ignorance… Depending where you look exactly in the theory…

No advancement of science, no advancement of philosophy, no advancement of philosophy, no advancement of science… I think creatively, therefore I am looking all over…

We own this world, for better or worse. Here it is, part of it captured in a picture. This is where all this love of wisdom and knowledge led us to… Owning, colonizing, and now managing…

Patrice Ayme

4/24/2024

Philosophy Is The Love Of Wisdom, But What Is Love And What Is Wisdom?

PHILOSOPHY: BRAIN ROOTED IN SELF-INTERESTED GREATER SMARTS:

Love is fundamentally gearing the mind towards appreciating and helping others, fellow souls, infants, births of intelligence and consciousness, the species, life…. And wisdom also means the same, in the end, the promotion of life. Thus philosophy can be viewed as the square of love, and the square of intelligence. In practice, deep down inside, love and intelligence are pretty much the same: they promote life. And life is happiness! I point this out, because most Twentieth Century philosophies with great impact have been in denial (Heideggerism/Nazism), or unappreciative (existentialism/absurdism), or exploitative (capitalism/Marxism) of life… Thus most dominant philosophies of the Twentieth Century have been fundamentally anti-philosophical, because fundamentally antagonistic, or alien, to love and wisdom. 

Indeed, searching for wisdom started with bacteria searching for sweets, billions of years ago. That was the birth of intelligence; it took billions of years thereafter to evolve brains. Wisdom is thus about finding how nature works and finding strategies to make it work in a more self-serving way, at the cost of increased logical complexity fighting the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Wisdom searches for how to become smarter at promoting life.

This search for ever more elaborated strategies is engineered by ever more sophisticated mental networks. What wisdom is originally for in particular excludes at its roots philosophies like Heidegger’s or Nazism, which defined being and time with a count down to death: such ideologies don’t promote life, but its exact opposite, death. Bacteria’s earliest form of intelligence searched for sweets, not death. Actually it also searches to avoid death.

Similarly, when Nietzsche claimed intelligence is all about concentrating the will in loving fate, amor fati, the eternal return of the same, this suffering soul, half blind and soon to go insane, misses the point that intelligence appeared to find sweets, and improve life. Now, of course, Nietzsche had to embrace fate, considering his dreadful diseases. Otherwise he would have had to embrace opium (if he could afford it) and death. Amor fati is often a good strategy

Intelligence didn’t appear for more of the same, but better strategies of the similar drive to make life tastier. Life is not an eternal return of the same, but an evolution towards ever smarter self-sustainability, and ever increased complexity (as Lamarck pointed out in 1800 CE).

Bacteria never imagined themselves as little Sisyphuses, always doing the same thing for no improvement, and no enjoyment. More sugar was an improvement, a very sustainable improvement, as it could be repeated all the time, activating reward circuitry indefinitively. Camus didn’t need to order bacteria to be happy. Nor do bacteria need Camus to go away from poison.

The roots of wisdom are very pragmatic, and intelligence makes models of nature to outsmart it by creating newer and in a sense better nature. 

Wisdom’s roots may not be noble: it is smart to acknowledge this… but the towering heights of complexity and subtlety they sustain are. And as those complications blow in the winds of contingency they reach beyond themselves where no nature was there before.

California Western Monarchs, migrating butterflies, in love… and how much wisdom do you need to migrate?

Patrice Ayme

WANT BETTER PHYSICS? GET BETTER PHILOSOPHY

Philosophical progress, the art and desire of guessing new utmost significance, guided our progress in understanding physics for the last three million years, and always will, indeed. 

We can’t experiment before we guess what experiments to conduct, according to the obscure light of a half-baked theory (in other words, philosophy). 

So why has the philosophical training of physicists become so abysmal in the last century? The symmetrical question is why most of those called philosophers have had no training in physics and math? Plato would have scoffed that those were not philosophers. 

Neglecting the importance of the philosophical method in physics, for the last two generations may have been caused by the militarization of physics: obeying and pleasing those who order military spending requires yes men, shutting up and calculating, not deep thinkers [1]. History is full of examples of period of stasis, or even massive backsliding, of the understanding of nature, due to the hostility of the establishment to further understanding. This is why the Greeks’ progress in “Physis” stagnated after the establishment of Greek (so-called “Hellenistic regimes”) and Roman dictatorships. Soon after the Macedonian dictatorship grabbed Greece, Euclid wrote his elements… completely forgetting the non Euclidean geometry established a century before! (And it stayed forgotten for 21 centuries!) one wonders which other parts of Greek science got also immediately forgotten: these were times when thinkers would be killed on sight (Demostenes actually argued with the guy dispatched by the Macedonians to kill him: they knew each other; the assassin at the head of his squad pointed out to the philosopher he had to earn a living, and him not Demosthenes would have no effect, as somebody else would do the deed. Best to go with a friend!) 

Greatest physicist ever? Du Chatelet discovered… ENERGY, no less! Not just infrared (which she also discovered)! She was also a first class philosopher, and of course, a feminist. Dying from childbirth at 41, she left extensive writings.

Once the will, desire, and methodology of deep thinking has been forgotten, it takes a long time to get it restarted: Europe tried half a dozen attempts at a sustainable Renaissance, over a millennium [2]. What had happened? Books and scholars got deliberately eliminated for 250 years: starting  in 363 CE, religious fanatics systematically burned libraries and tortured to death intellectuals (see Hypatia’s tragic assassination directed by Christian “saint” Cyril).

Spending in physics is good… if nothing else, new technologies can be developed, especially involving high energies. But it shouldn’t focus on only a few avenues of inquiry. However, “High Energy” physics is a revealing term: do we live in a “High Energy” world? No. So why don’t we also focus on “Low Energy” fundamentals? 

Sociological considerations of career advancement show it is safer within the herd, and the herd thinks alike. This is why university physicists form a herd.

“Cathedral schools” were mandated 13 centuries ago, and then turned into universities. However, when one looks at quantum jumps in understanding, one realizes that most such jumps happened outside of the career mainstream. The greatest thinkers tend to not follow the most prestigious path at the time! Obviously on the path less traveled are the diamonds found. Master thinkers such as Abelard, Buridan, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Descartes, Fermat, Leibniz, Papin, Du Chatelet, Lavoisier, Lamarck, Cuvier, Faraday, Darwin, even Poincare, De Broglie… are examples of master thinkers who didn’t have conventional careers [3].

There are too many of the most towering intellects standing straight out of all society and academia, for it to be an accident, or a coincidence [4]. And the reason is very simple: it’s easier to be an intellectual hero, and jump out of the box, if you are mostly out of the box of obsolete logic already.  

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Military science has been hard core high energy physics, ever since the French army ordered research on tanks, under the Ancien Regime (now viewed as the first “cars”, but, truly, tanks…18 C). New high explosives saved the French at Valmy. Within a few weeks the first production combat lasers will start protecting some US air bases…

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[2] Clovis immediately made a reinterpretation of Christianism into something milder, tolerant, compatible with other faiths (~ 500 CE). Within a century, Frankish bishops were teaching secularly, ignoring lethal threats from Rome. In the Eight Century, a law was passed making schooling and its teaching by religious establishments mandatory. In the Eleventh Century, full Renaissance in north-west France brought a violent territorial expansion (England, Sicily, Italy, etc…), a booming economy, the Duke questioning the geocentric system and his protege Berengar assimilating god to reason… 

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[3] Abelard, Buridan, Leonardo da Vinci, Tycho, Kepler, Descartes, Fermat, Boulliaut/Bulaldius, Leibniz, Papin, Du Chatelet, Lavoisier, Lamarck, Cuvier, Galois, Faraday, Darwin, even Poincare, De Broglie…

1. 1. At twenty-two, Abelard set up a school of his own, although opponents barred him from teaching in Paris. Eventually without previous training or special study, triumphed in theological debates, and stepped into a chair at Notre—Dame. The rest of his life was a “calamity” (his word) reminiscent of the adventures of all too many an intellectual of Antiquity, and others in my little list: he got emasculated and nearly killed in an attack… Abelard fought Saint Bernard, Christianism most important person,  nearly to death, and, though an abbot was excommunicated… twice. 
   2. Buridan chose not the faculty of theology but the much lower one of arts. 
   3. Leonardo da Vinci was a serious physicist… Yet took to painting and direct regalian support…
   4. Kepler was Tycho’s assistant. Tycho lived off a grant from the Germanic Roman emperor. Kepler spent a lot of energy preventing the execution of his mother as a witch.
   5. Descartes, discoverer of Algebraic Geometry (“equations”), and calculus, an army captain, was on the run, and was not dumb enough to return to France where the Catholic fanatics ruled.
   6. Fermat, co-discoverer of calculus, was a lawyer and MP.
   7. Boulliaut/Bulaldius was a French priest. He got the idea of the 1/dd law of gravitation… As Newton pointed out.
   8. Leibniz was all over the place, even an ambassador. Nobody knows where he is buried.
   9. Papin made the first working steam engine, and the first steam boat (which worked very well). He had to flee France (being a Protestant), then he ran in trouble in England as locals stole his invention, and after legal action, fled to Germany (where he interacted with Leibniz… Same Leibniz of infinitesimals, who made preliminary work on energy which Du Chatelet extended. 

• Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet was top nobility, and hot to trot. She had no academic career, but converted her castle into a lab on her own dinero… Lavoisier did something similar, but the Revolutionary Tribunal found he had used taxpayer money to do this (so what? He should have had an exemption and got an award instead of being shortened…)

• Buffon, Lamarck, Cuvier were research professors at the Museum of Natural History, where they established evolutionary science, but they were not university professors… Darwin, who pointed out natural selection by itself was enough to cause evolution, without the arsenal of contingence deployed by Lamarck and Cuvier two generations earlier, was not a professor at all, but an independent scholar.

• Galois, an absolute revolutionary. He invented groups, and  demonstrated some equations couldn’t be solved. He got in big trouble for his republican politics, under a dictator, and was killed age 20 (!) spending his last night writing down Galois theory.

• Faraday, not a university professor, and little schooled in mathematics, was directly funded by the king.

• Poincare followed an unusual, secondary career path, until he shattered mathematics and physics (he established Relativity, including E = mcc), De Broglie, a prince, studied Medieval history, before pivoting and decreeing Quantum Waves, inventing Quantum uncertainty and the “Schrodinger” equation on the way… (Germanophiles did the rest by attributing his discoveries to… Germanophones; however he got the Nobel within 4 years of the ebauch of his thesis). He was never a professor, but I met him in person… Fellow minds…  

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[4] Just restricting oneself to Paris, the largest city in Western Europe for most of the last 15 centuries, one could get evaluations of the number of professional intellectuals. Those who really brought progress, were very few, and they have in common that, even though sometimes they were part of the establishment, they were also continually at war, because their advanced ideas alternatively seduced and infuriated the powers that be. But 99.9% of intellectuals, most of the time, didn’t cause a ripple…

Physics Needs Strong Philosophy More Than Ever: Scandal of the 5%!

And it has to do with the rule of the 1%! 

Philosophy is often dominated by weaklings. Sometimes, centuries of weaklings. Let’s avert our eyes from the Nazi Heidegger: fools love Heidegger, because fools love Nazi style of thinking. So does those who favor the rule of the few, because Nazi style thinking has to do with fascist thinking, thinking according to a few ideas and a few men (“Jesus”, Constantine, Saint Augustine, Muhammad, etc.)

Perhaps the most prominent example mixing barbarity, philosophy and stupidity is the Christianized Middle Ages: Epicurus wrote 300 books. All were meticulously destroyed by Christians. Only three letters of Epicurus survived… What was Epicurus writing about, why did Christians hated him so much? Atomic theory. The Greeks considered it highly probable, they thought they had experimental proof. They also had mechanical computers and very advanced elements of mathematics and physics which the Christians also eradicated. It requires some effort to go back to barbarity!

The Christians hated atomic theory, which denied the whole transmutation of bread and wine into body and blood of Christ: Christians “thinkers” wrote millions of pages on the divine transmutation, using Plato and Aristotle’s fishy onanistic theories of the universe. (For Plato that there was a realm of pure “forms”, nothing real, and for Aristotle that there were ten categories, including “essence”; Middle Age philosophers used those heavily… ironically my own SQPR re-institute Dark Matter as essence: my DM interacts with matter some, by causing “spontaneous collapse”… but let’s not deviate from the subject at hand…)

The first thing a decadent civilization does, is to spite philosophy, spite the lovers of wisdom: decadence springs from brute force, not wisdom.

Real, deepest physicists were, and are all philosophers:

Inventing new ideas enables to discover the intricate logic of the world. Invention starts with being a friend of wisdom: why is it that I think, what is it that they think they know and take for granted, and why? Is there a more precise, better informed way?

Anti-philosophy of pop scientists is partly a consequence of the success thus domination of the “shut up & calculate” school. Top physicist Feynman, despised the philosophers he knew. But he, himself, was a philosopher, and it showed up even in what he considered a valid reasoning to be (Feynman had a peculiar way of reasoning; same with Einstein, De Broglie, etc.) Feynman’s son became a philosopher. Physics describes no more than 5% world, it needs strong philosophy!

The other reason why pop philosophers and pop scientists are also anti-philosophy? Because their masters, those who pay them and advance their careers, are themselves in the employ of plutocrats and their organizations, who hate wisdom… as it would be lethal to them, and their organizations…

And physics needs stronger, more subtle logic!

It has always been clear to me that, on a cosmic scale, Quantum Theory makes no sense: basically physics as we affect to know it, is local. However, Quantum Theory speaks as it the world was global. This leads to a contradiction, which has surfaced in the prestigious journal Nature for all to see: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06749-8

“Nature News 18 SEPTEMBER 2018
Reimagining of Schrödinger’s cat breaks quantum mechanics — and stumps physicists
In a multi-‘cat’ experiment, the textbook interpretation of quantum theory seems to lead to contradictory pictures of reality, physicists claim.”

Logic is ever more subtle. Consider the following cartoon from “Philosophy Matters“, a consortium of US academic philosophers (which at some point told me my smarts made me insufferably obnoxious, or words to this effect):

Cute, first order correct, but subtly wrong!

Actually, if people are already dead, they can’t die anymore. People who don’t breathe could be already dead, thus can’t die. Because one doesn’t die again. Hence the second cartoon should read: people who stop breathing, die. Context: not everything, but most of the thing!

The same goes for partisanship: people love the frenzy of the herd they belong to, and the simplistic logic it leads to.

Actually Trump has ordered the FBI to make a full inquiry. But an investigation, except for the grossest things (crime against humanity), can’t be made correctly 36 years later… Defense is automatically at a disadvantage against false memories. (BTW, Republican Senator Flake, a blonde, after been cornered in an elevator by irate women, called for the FBI inquiry, saying he would vote against Kavanaugh otherwise.)

Cute cartoon. Indeed, Justice has got to be a blonde with pink skin: always was, always will. However cute, not the whole truth, which is much more tragic. Namely it’s far from being only the so-called “Republicans” who smother justice. “Partisanship” is not the solution. The entire legislative system needs a re-think. Towards direct democracy.

“Donald J. Trump‏
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump
NBC News incorrectly reported (as usual) that I was limiting the FBI investigation of Judge Kavanaugh, and witnesses, only to certain people. Actually, I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion. Please correct your reporting!”

Right. Let’s seriously investigate the fashion, and age old tradition, in the USA, of getting drunk, especially among young people, damaging their brains, and using alcoholism to get away with the basest behaviors, and habits. This goes both for the accuser and the accused here! (By the way, frazzled by his elder brother dying of alcoholism, Donald Trump does not do drugs, including alcohol.)

One can’t have the better, and progressive civilization needed for planetary survival, when too many brains of the leadership are damaged by drugs. It’s not just a question that their performances are inferior to have they could be, or should be. The mood that drug addiction gives a sense to life brings forth the tendency, the overall mentality, that the mind should be overwhelmed by out-of-this-world modes of operations, which enable the brain to forget reality as it is. And what are the greatest out-of-this-world neurohormonal regimes? All these having to do with violence, fight or flight, and will to power.

OK, those can be correct to use, but only if one knows what one is playing around, and in the full knowledge of the associated causations. And what of those 5%? They relate to the proverbial 1% who own the world. Both are able to do so because common people are tolerant of theories which explain very little, and are impossible to understand: why is gigantic economic equality necessary, how can it be deemed to be compatible with democracy? Well, look at physics: there a theory is called Theory Of Everything, and it explains not even 5%. Similarly modern economics sustains mostly 1% and is just as impossible to understand. They are made to each other, sustain the same mood of mystification!

In the Middle Ages, persons with lots of character, knew all too well that many of the official (Christian) theories were wrong: Beranger de Tour, a church authority, held that reason was god, and thus that the church should obey to reason. The pope was not amused, councils were organized to castigate Berenger, excommunicate him and deprive him of authority. But Berenger held his ground, in spite of the fact heresy could bring the death penalty, until the natural end of his life, in no small part because he was discreetly supported by the ultra powerful Duke of Normandy, a superman in more ways than one.

William the Conqueror was known to hold that the Earth turned around the sun, and mention it during banquets. Heliocentrism, even with the empirical science of the time, was pretty obvious (the small thing, the Earth should turn around the big thing, the Sun, plus, obviously, the Sun didn’t turn around the Moon, thus the Earth-Moon system; the ancient Greeks knew how to measure those distances, using shadows…) William was not afraid to mention it: once, in combat, he vanquished 15 knights. Alone. Mental courage and physical courage are two faces of the same coin.

We need stronger philosophy, the medicine of civilization. Failure of enough of a meta-critical mentality allowed the rule of ideologies which brought us the 1%, thanks to modern economics, and the 5%, thanks to the “shut up and calculate” ideology in physics. “Shut up and calculate” is exactly the ideology defended by Barack Obama in his pseudo-autobiographies, in the service of what he called “navigation” (or how to get to the top). 

Just as genes can go across species, moods can go across fields of mental activity. The overall mood of Ionian and Greater Greece and Athens before they got broken by the Peloponnesian War, was one of inquiry, that means, maximum criticism. After that, and while, and because the great fascist regimes of Rome, Carthage and Macedonia grew in power, the spirit of inquiry shrank: Greek mathematics forgot about NON-Euclidean geometry, and concentrated upon Euclidean geometry, which is much more fascist (it has stronger axioms… restricting mental freedom). Amazingly, although Pytheas of Marseilles had computed (accurately!) the size of the Earth, 23 centuries ago, after the great fascism of Macedonia and then Christianized Rome, arose, the very possibility of spherical geometry became a scientific impossibility, so intellectually fascist the minds became, for 2,000 years…

The Aztecs were defeated because, instead of being legalistic like Qin China. they were into mass cannibalism, and Cortes’ 450 men found hundreds of thousands of local allies who were strongly motivated by their desire to escape barbecues. When the Qin empire collapsed, the Han took over, and repeated Qin mentality in detail, this time to last centuries as a giant empire. And much of Qin mentality survives to this day. (All too much, come to think of it… And yes, amazingly, this essay will be read in China’s People Republic… Qin famously practiced censorship of bad philosophy, ordering the destruction of the “100 schools” (it failed), but spared what was viewed as scientifically, legally and historically significant…)

Each civilization has one mood, it pervades all. It evolves in time, not always for the best.

Patrice Ayme

What Use Philosophy?

Only Philosophy will teach the children well:

STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics), or STEAM (adding “Arts” to the preceding) are the latest (well justified) fashion in teaching children in the USA (inspired by China and Singapore). The method is spreading (and I contributed to push it). However, a subject has been forgotten, the most important: philosophy (and, in particular, the history upon which it rests!)

Like science, philosophy is a sum over histories. But it isn’t just that. Like science, philosophy is a method. Like science, the engine of philosophy is unbiased common sense. Yet, a more general method. Like science, philosophy uses facts, and is itself, among other things, a set of facts (not forgetting that ideas and emotions are, themselves, facts). Yet, philosophy doesn’t just use scientific facts (that is, facts beyond any suspicion). Like science, philosophy is a method of enquiry to guess further facts. Like science, philosophy establishes systems of thought. Like science, philosophy can use a single fact to put in doubt a system of thought, and build another. Unlike science though, philosophy can guess facts, and propose (or even establish) systems of thought on those guesses.

Hence philosophy, the philosophical method, common sense applied to whatever, is the key to major advances in science. Major advances in science call upon, and necessitate, guessing the imaginable. They call upon the philosophical method. No philosophical method, no major advances in science possible. Indeed, any major advance in science is built on new facts, and to go fetch those new facts require desire, hope, imagination, systems of potentialities, fancy financing on fumes, curiosity about what could be, etc.

Our bodies love to dance, in part because we love music, part of our dialogue with the universe. Learning to learn, or just to tolerate others’ music is not just pleasant, it’s enriching, a form of wealth which honors the spirit, source of all and any goodness, besides being our very essence!

Buridan’s momentum, force, inertia, relativity of motion and heliocentrism in the Fourteenth Century provide a  nice example of philosophy & science entangled:

Indeed Buridan (circa 1340 CE) guessed that Aristotle’s false physics depended upon neglecting air resistance and friction in general. Absent those errors, what was left was the theory of inertia, a particular case of impetus theory. Buridan noted that we can only ever observe relative motions. We cannot really know absolute motions. So if, for example, we happened to be in a boat going along a coastline, we really don’t know whether the boat we are in is moving or if the coastline is moving alongside us. Nicole Oresme pushed further the physics unmoved on a movable ship argument (replicated by Galileo 250 years later).

A consequence was that a heliocentric system, with planets orbiting the sun indefinitely (and the Earth rotating on itself) was a possibility. Buridan then slyly said that such a system couldn’t be distinguished experimentally from the one in “Scripture”, so we may as well believe the latter. It was an invitation to develop other observations.

Amazingly, both (rector) Buridan and (elected bishop in 1377 CE!) Oresme, having removed all reasons against heliocentrism, and having argued that it was more economical a system of thought, then said it couldn’t be decided, pointed out that this failure showed the limits of reason, and thus that reason couldn’t be used against (their) faith: “What I have said here, by way of diversion of intellectual exercise can in this manner serve as a valuable means of refuting and checking those who would like to impugn our faith by argument.”

“Argument” (reason) is a very powerful, says Oresme, but not powerful enough to determine whether the Earth moves or not. Similarly, if “argument” cannot answer a physical question about the world, we have to be very careful about arguing about faith. Oresme has therefore used rational arguments about physics, involving relativity of motion, to show rational argument can come short, in physics, and thus metaphysics (“faith”).

This is a magnificent example of how entangled science, philosophy and… faith, are.

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Trying to teach science alone is trying to teach the chicken, how it moves, without its head (philosophy):

Philosophy goes much further than science and its scientific method, as the philosophical method, which uses whatever, enables to establish systems of thought using whatever, including emotions, songs and poetry (the great Twelfth Century philosopher was relatively as famous as the Beatles for his songwriting; even more than Buridan and Oresme, Abelard was in total war with the Catholic Church, namely Saint Bernard; he got emasculated and excommunicated for it…) In particular, philosophy establishes wisdoms of life: why and how to live. Can’t live without it. It may as well be taught, lest all young end up as Jihadists, snowflakes, or culture deprived nerds.

Here is a bit of the love of more advanced wisdom. More advanced philosophy enables to listen to music others, less mentally advanced types, can’t hear. Therein a happiness others are deprived from. However, establishing new thinking inside one’s brain is expensive, not just expansive, and involves suffering. Thus, some whine, Nietzsche prefered suffering to happiness. (Not really true: Nietzsche observed that lions are happy, and  imagined them happy not to be mice… Bertrand Russell, like all good hypocrites, practicing the opposite of what they preach, disingenuously called Nietzsche not compassionate… While siding with the despicable Kaiser in World War One… while Nietzsche correctly vomited the preceding Kaiser already)

Here is a relevant philosophical perspective Buddha himself blithely ignored: IF ONE PREFERS SUFFERING TO HAPPINESS, HOW CAN THINGS GET WORSE? Verily, suffering and happiness are entangled: happiness is best experienced, like the best tsunami, with the contrasting experience, of a lowering of expectations…

Philosophy at its best. Science can’t do that.  

Science can study suffering, science can’t say why one should study suffering, and what to do with it. Only philosophy can do that, thus only philosophy can order science to get going.

We, humans, have been scientists, for millions of years, but so are we, because we love to be wise. That’s how we are. Neglecting the love of wisdom is neglecting us. It is easy to see how greedy potentates will want to neglect us. Let them not have it. In ancient Rome, philosophy failed first, followed by the failure of democracy, then intelligence. Teach philosophy to children, and, if you don’t, ultimately science and technology themselves will falter, as they did in Rome, barbarity will win, as civilization won’t be sustainable anymore. 

To finish how we started here, the most important subject to teach, with heart and mind, is the most encompassing philosophical attitude. How to do this with children? By teaching them the history of civilizations (notice the plural). Killing two birds with one stone. The rise of violent Muslim Fundamentalism in Europe, in particular France, is directly attributable to an astounding lack of knowledge of history among not just the young, but also self-described “intellectuals” (multiple shootings and wounded in France again today, March 23, 2918, in attacks claimed by Daesch, the so-called Islamist State… no problem we shall just live in a state of siege, adorned by shootings in the streets, schools, supermarkets…)

Generally when taught, in only in one hour, the rough circumstances of Muhammad’s ascent to the position of Mecca’s dictator, a discernible mental shift among young Muslims is discernible. It’s just astounding that this telling part of history is not taught anywhere in French schools (all the more as France is a direct political, cultural and legal descendant of the Roman State, half of which got violently invaded, and ruined… by the immediate successors (“Caliphs“) of Muhammad…

China, Europe, India, are the major scientific, and technological powers of civilization. It is no coincidence that they are also the philosophical superpowers.

Human is the philosophical animal. And science, facts known for sure, a consequence. Art also: try to make symbols that will last 50,000 years… without any science.

You want life and the pursuit of happiness? Let society pursue philosophy first!

Patrice Aymé

 

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Science and Philosophy: two aspects of the same thing. Why they are separated.

Separating philosophy from science is like separating breathing in, from breathing out.

Philosophy is how one guesses, science is how one makes sure.

To this “Jan Sand” retorted: ‘Science is how one attempts to make sure.’

Well, no. Attempting is no science. Hope enables one to live, but it’s not life. “One makes sure” comes with a context, the context enabling to express the problem and the answer attached to it.

Science is both a method, and a field of knowledge. Both are relative to the context at hand. The method consists in using only elements of reality one is sure of.

In their context, for example, classical optics, mechanics, electromagnetism and thermodynamics are all appropriate and correct. Yet, they don’t work next to a Black Hole: a Black Hole is the wrong context for them.

The first interstellar asteroid is a shard, probably a metallic one. It was observed to cover the Earth-Moon distance in less than three hours. With the nes telescopes being built, it is the first of many.

Consider the first Interstellar Asteroid, or, more probably, comet, was observed passing by the sun, on a highly hyperbolic trajectory. Speed: 139,000 kilometer per hour. Color: the deep red of the severely irradiated material (an orange like picture was obtained). No water or other volatile element (or so it seemed… although since it accelerated after passing the Sun, as small comets tend to do, it was probably outgazing…). Albedo (reflectivity) could vary between one and ten. Making an absolute hypothesis of what the albedo is, its size would one hundred meters across, a kilometer long. Found first by an Hawaiian telescope, its name is 1I ‘Oumuamua (Reach out first first; “1I for First Interstellar”)

This is all science, because many telescope, including Europe’s VLT (Very Large Telescope) in Chile, observed the object, and science dating more than 4 centuries has made telescope highly reliable (although cardinals initially demurred).

Rubbing sticks vigorously just so will enable to bring in such high temperature, as to start a fire: that’s science. (The fundamental science of humanity, 1.3 million years old.)

But not all “attempts” at “making sure” turn out to be science. Philosophy is what organizes these attempts.

For “superstrings”, it was felt that, instead of supposing point-particles, one could suppose strings, and some problems would disappear. Other problems would disappear if one supposed a symmetry between fermions and bosons. Thus “superstrings” came to be.

Superstrings is certainly a sort of logic, but not science. In particular, it makes no peculiar predictions, aside from the hypotheses it started with!

Similarly, Euclidean geometry pushed all the way, is unending logic, not science (because it has nothing to do with reality, it says nothing relevant to reality, once pushed far enough).

Most famously, epicycle theory was a sort-of logic, with some truths mixed in, but not science: it turned out to be 100% false (although the Fourier analysis hidden therein gave it some respectability, because parts of a lie can be true).

I have my own proposal for Sub Quantum Reality (“SQPR”). It is an attempt. It is astoundingly smart. It does make predictions, and explains some significant phenomena, for example Dark Matter, Dark Energy. So it looks good. However, it is not science.

Why?

Because my theory makes extraordinary claims giving a completely different picture of physics, extremely far from the facts and moods which give meaning to both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

So SQPR would need extraordinary proofs.

One could be simply that all other explanations for Dark Matter fail, and only SQPR is left standing.

A more direct proof would be that SQPR predicts a measurable difference in energy distribution during the famous 2-slit experiment from the prediction Albert Einstein explicitly made. If it turned out to be true that my prediction is correct on this, pretty much all of existing physics becomes false, or, let’s say more precisely, it becomes a very good approximation to a deeper theory.

And then SQPR would become a science (if all other testable predictions turn out to be in accord with it).

Elements of science have to be certain, within a particular context, or “universe” (in the logic sense of “universe”) which, itself, is part of the real world.

For example Quantum Field Theory makes probabilistic predictions which can boil down in very precise numbers which can be measured. Quantum Computers will also make probabilistic predictions (about the real world, even the world of numbers).

In the latter case, it’s just a guess. In other words, philosophy.

Those who claim science does not depend upon philosophy, just as those who claim philosophy does not depend upon science are, at best, trivially correct: they have got to be looking at small subfields of these activities, cleaning the corners.  

In the grand scheme of things, science and philosophy are roughly the same activity: twisting logic any which way, to get testable consequences. Thus discovering new logics on the way, not just new facts

***

One may ask: why did philosophy and science get separated?

Because our masters, the plutocrats want to keep on ruling. That means they don’t want us to understand what they are doing. Thus, smarts are their enemy. Hence people have to be kept in little mental boxes, so stupid, just so.

This is nothing new. When Rome was at its apogee, very learned Greek slaves educated the youth of the elite. As they were slaves, they knew their place. This helps to explain why Rome stagnated intellectually, and thus was unable to solves its pressing strategic, technological, economic, health and ecological problems. Stupidly educated youth makes stupid, and obedient adults.  

Specialization is a way for plutocrats to keep on ruling. After all, to run a civilization, one needs special capabilities. The ultimate specialization is to pretend that certain knowledge, that is science, is independent from guessing new sure knowledge, that is, philosophy.

Actually the latter is intrinsically bad, since, if it was thoroughly applied, it would allow We The People to understand how plutocracy works. Thus philosophy was strongly encouraged to degenerate, by being cut from knowledge, be it sure, or historical, etc.

If society wants to survive, it will have to forge ahead in the way of understanding. Failing to comprehend or to implement this, has led many civilizations or states  to collapse (Maya, Sumer, Egypt, Abbasid Caliphate, Jin dynasty, Western Xia, the Dali Kingdom , Southern Song, Aztecs,.etc.).

Thus sustainable plutocracy is a balancing act between understanding and obedience. This time, though, understanding has to be maximized, be it only to solve the climate crisis (there are many other crises). Thus plutocracy has foster understanding (quite a bit as Jeff Bezos is doing with Amazon, hence his success)..

We may be unable to get rid of plutocracy, because We The Sheep People out there are so supine. The next best thing, which is also the necessary thing, is that it is in the interest of everybody to let philosophy roll, and thus get reacquainted with science. And reciprocally.

Patrice Ayme

Science, Fruit, Tool and Motivation of Philosophy

Can philosophy exist on its own? The cognitively challenged think so. See the somewhat dim-witted “Philosophy Tool Kit” in Aeon, by what else, a professional philosopher, somebody taught precisely to teach that “Thinking like a philosopher need not be a strange and arcane art, if you get started with these tricks of the trade… At a time when we are bombarded more than ever with specious claims and spurious inferences, clear thinking provides a much-needed safeguard that we should all strive towards. Philosophers place a premium on certain tools for regimenting our thinking, especially logic and probability theory.”

In other words, like everything else, for the dim-witted, philosophy is a trade. Being wise, the Promethean essence of human spirit, is brought down to recipes. Apparently to “regiment” our thinking we have to acknowledge that “trade“. Everything is a “trade“. And why do we “regiment”? Well, according to all too many people paid to propagandize the official version of philosophy, we are in an army, apparently, “regimented” in the triumphing army of trade. Wisdom is a military trade. (The afore quoted “philosopher” comes from Australia, a place which made lots of money with coal and iron sold to China.)

Well… Trade is not the essence of humanity, wisdom is. And wisdom rests on science, knowing what is true. Not what a trade our disciplined regiments are.

(The author in Aeon self-defines as an “analytic philosopher”. “Analytic philosophy” is a branch of philosophy so stupidly arrogant that it thinks nobody else is analytical. Analysis actually means “deconstruction”, something ironic as “analytic philosophers” tend to despise Derrida… Bertrand Russel is often viewed as the father of analytic philosophy, although he thought it was not an activity worth having…)

I don’t esteem Plato very much, but on this one he got it right. Modern philosophers tend to not know modern geometry, because they are lazy dogs.. They prefer to ponder the meaning of “the”…

Accordingly, Plato thought that the first trick, the first tool, the first requirement, of philosophy was to learn “geometry” (which was NON-Euclidean geometry at the time, thus not that simple!). Please remember that Plato was notoriously friendly to tyrants. However, even him did not think philosophy was a regimented trade!

Another interest is that, by being exposed to science and mathematics, the spirit and culture of inquiry, fundamental to the love of wisdom, can be encouraged. Such is the fundamental toolkit of the philosopher.

***

Most so-called philosophers praise themselves for superior thinking. However human species have unceasingly deliberately perfected what superior thinking is, and provides with, for millions of years. Superior thinking is not a static achievement, a book one can learn by rote. Superior thinking is what humanity does unceasingly more of.

Philo-Sophy, Loving Wisdom, is an abbreviation for the excellence which is truly meant. (Just as an electron is an abbreviation for what is truly meant; Dirac’s meaning of the electron as an abbreviation was different from that of his immediate predecessors.)

Everybody loves wisdom, even cats. Especially cats. But wisdom as cats tend to have it, is different from wisdom, as Homo Sapiens tend to have it.

What’s ought to be truly meant by “philosopher” is someone who loves superior wisdom more than any other love, and has actually achieved that superiority. Cats are not philosophers, because, given a chance, they would rather eat the bearer of superior wisdom (namely Homo Sapiens).

The notions of “philosopher” and the “philosophical method” are distinct. A genuine philosopher will practice the philosophical method, which consists into using whatever it takes to advance wisdom, even poetry and the vaguest analogies. And what is wisdom? Superior understanding of what makes the universe tick.

Thus a towering philosopher will have to be a scientist, mathematician and logician, as Plato felt, and as towering geniuses of the Middle Ages such as Abelard and Buridan were (Buridan proved Aristotle physics wrong, introducing the heliocentric system, most of “Newton’s” laws… and successfully tackled the problem of self-referential statements, circa 1350 CE, amidst plague and war).

***

The average persons feel that exhibiting tribal appurtenance is the highest form of wisdom, that make them no better than baboons (be they jihadist, attached to Islam, or physicists, anxious to exhibit their quirky love for the local sport team). That does not qualify them as philosophers, because our ancestral baboon equivalents have been doing this for 50 million years, there is nothing superior about it.

***

Part of wisdom is not to stay a prisoner of the vehicle used to convey it, be it a person, a language, a theory, a sentence or a word. The question is not what wisdom is, but what wisdom means: analyze not the words, but what they are supposed to mean. What the interlocutor meant, and that interlocutor could be nature itself.

***

Any logic L, and thus, in particular any wisdom W, is relative to a context. Giving a context to that context is going meta. Going meta is not in general unique, and it is always possible, and even easy: pick up an axiom, say A of L, and consider the meta logic made of the union of L and what you get by adjoining non-A to L. This is the scheme to get non-Euclidean geometry, or non-standard arithmetic, or non-standard analysis, or complex analysis from real analysis, or even finite fields.

***

Nature is a sadistic god. Why not? We know nature is a sadistic god, because we have wisdom. Hyenas don’t have that luxury, condemning what feeds them. Hyenas have to eat the genitals of the uncooperative buffalo first, as hyena heuristics show  that they are delicious, and their absorption diminishes the vigor of the prey. Occasionally, though, a lioness will have the wisdom to protect a young prey animal, as a pet.

Even lions know nature is a sadistic god. But only us can go industrial, building a better god. Hint: it’s not to be obtained by just focusing on the word “the”, and equally puny tricks (cockroaches know tricks too; they don’t belong to superior wisdom, because, however correct, they are too puny).

Human wisdom enables to provide us with the tools to build a less sadistic version of nature. Sadism where we want it. Not where “it” wants it…

Patrice Ayme’

 

Blame Obama’s Nihilism For Syria’s Destruction

Pontificating Pseudo-Leftists Destroyed The Better Values, Including Care and Rationality, By Claiming They Were Not Worth Fighting For, Nothing Was. From This Obscene Nihilism, Of Slimy Souls, We Will All Suffer All Too Practically.

The Economist has woken up, from its Trump Derangement Syndrome, to the reality of the catastrophic moral abyss known as the Obama administration. Subtitle of The Economist: The war in Syria: The lessons from Aleppo’s tragic fate. WHEN INTERESTS TRIUMPH OVER VALUES TERRIBLE THINGS CAN HAPPEN. (Dec 17th 2016.)

The interest of whom, dear The Economist? Not just Putin’s, Assad, and the plutocratic circles in London which professionally love the Assad family’s billions. One speaks here also of the interests of prima donna Michelle Obama and the US Democratic Party elite presently still in power, and the interest of those who feed them all, the globalocracy and the worldwide plutocracy, especially the one of financial type. That interest goes beyond profiteering from those who support massacres. It goes as far as destroying the values which make civilization possible. Let me explain.

Aleppo Barrel Bombing By Assad Regime Summer 2015. What the Joint Franco-American Intervention Was Supposed To Stop

The joint French Republic USA attack on Assad after Assad killed thousands of civilians in gas attacks, would have taken out the entire Syrian Air Force, including helicopters dropping barrel bombs.

Obama’s last minute loss of nerves, and calling off the attack while French bomber pilots were already strapped in their seats, was a moral failure of Auschwitzian proportions. Of such moral failures was the road to World War Two and Auschwitz, paved. (And it did not take too many of these failures, barely more than a couple, before the insane moods had set-in, and world war was unavoidable.)

Says The Economist: “GROZNY, Dresden, Guernica: some cities have made history by being destroyed. Aleppo, once Syria’s largest metropolis, will soon join their ranks. Its 1,000-year-old Muslim heritage has turned to dust; Russian aircraft have targeted its hospitals and schools; its citizens have been shelled, bombed, starved and gassed (see article). Nobody knows how many of the tens of thousands who remain in the last Sunni Arab enclave will die crammed inside the ruins where they are sheltering. But even if they receive the safe passage they have been promised, their four-year ordeal in Aleppo has blown apart the principle that innocent people should be spared the worst ravages of war. Instead, a nasty, brutish reality has taken hold—and it threatens a more dangerous and unstable world.”

A mood that political leaders and dictators can get away with mass murder for all to see has set-in. This has happened many times in the past:  that change of moods is always necessary before great wars. Just as it did in Germany before 1914 (after massacring hundreds of thousands of Namibian Natives, the Herero and Nama, as if they were rats, or game animals, offering money for their heads, hunting them for sport). Just as it did happen worldwide in the 1930s (Japan attacked China, Italy attacked Ethiopia, US plutocrats and the Nazi dictator attacked the Spanish Republic, and all made like bandits, getting away with anything, including the biggest lies they could imagine, etc.)

Encouraged by these profitable pursuits, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany constituted the “Axis”, in 1936, while US plutocrats helped make the Axis all it could be. The Axis was a series of diplomatic treaties. But, more importantly, the Axis was a sharing of satanic values. Shared satanic values which the leaders of the Axis believed was the best way to success. And for a while, for them, it worked. In the end, it worked only for the Deus Ex Nachina, the USA itself. (However, because that this Machiavellian strategy worked in the past for the USA is no guarantee that it will work in the future. Actually, it won’t because Kim’s nukes will soon be able to reach the USA; in WWII, nobody hostile could even get to the US mainland!)

Italy, Japan, Germany conquered, and, or came to control  huge swathes of territory, through the nastiest, most satanic ways. The success of these Plutonic values led countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the USSR, Thailand, Iraq, etc., to join, de facto and through treaties, the Axis. And of course, this further success encouraged plutocrats to help the Axis (just as Putin’s and Tehran’s success will encourage others to join them… such as Turkey’s Sultan). It all snowballed, until the French Republic, followed by the Commonwealth, declared war. France, though, got overwhelmed through surprise, bad luck, an uncautious head of the army, reason…

And also France came down in a few days in May 1940,  because the French (and British) Air Forces had not enjoyed enough practice. The French Air Force and the RAF took a few weeks to learn the tricks the Nazis had learned and refined in air combat in the preceding four years, say, while bombing Guernica and attacking ground forces, in Spain. If you want peace, prepare for war, by practicing war.  

If you can’t beat them, join them in fighting, you will improve.

The brains of many present world politicos, such as Vladimir Putin, Assad, Xi, Kim have set-in into a more aggressive mindset. Thanks to Obama’s incompetent childishness, and holy-than-thou attitude. Maybe their epigenetics, not just their neurohormones, emotions, feeling, reconstructed memories and  ideas have installed in their heads operating systems which toy with millions killed and displaced as if it were a chess game.

A small, but telling example? China just seized an US military underwater drone, while the civilians manning an US vessel a few hundreds meters away watched in disbelief. The US made a demarche to recover their stolen robot.

Trump’s reaction: “China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters — rips it out of water and takes it to China in unprecedented act,” Mr. Trump wrote in a Twitter message. His original tweet on the subject on Saturday called the seizure an “unpresidented act,” but a replacement message corrected the spelling error. Spelling error? Assuredly, a judicious one.

Many of the best ideas have started as errors. The USA has been “unpresidented” for eight years, indeed.

“We are feeling what not having hope feels like,” Michelle Obama told Winfrey in response to a question about whether President Obama had achieved the “hope and change” he promised while campaigning in 2008. ” The self-absorbed Michelle did not mean Aleppo. She obviously meant she has to give up on that big presidential plane in 4 weeks. Hey, no more vacation in the billionaire’s palaces anymore, with the media moguls? Otherwise her husband’s presidency has been abysmal on all what can be measured: poverty (eight million more!), food stamps (13 million more!), employment rate (not the UNemployment index known as U2!), home ownership, cost of health care, cost of education, etc. The Obama presidency was pretty much a sham, organized by spoiled, ignorant children, but hundreds of thousands have now died because of it, and everything indicates that this is just the beginning:

The Economist says: “Britain’s parliament voted against taking even limited military action. As millions of people fled to Syria’s neighbours, including Lebanon and Jordan, most European countries looked the other way —or put up barriers to keep refugees out.

PARTICULAR BLAME FALLS ON BARACK OBAMA. America’s president has treated Syria as a trap to be avoided. His smug prediction that Russia would be bogged down in a “quagmire” there has proved a historic misjudgment.

Throughout his presidency, Mr Obama has sought to move the world from a system where America often acted alone to defend its values, with a few countries like Britain riding shotgun, to one where the job of protecting international norms fell to all countries—because everyone benefited from the rules.

[Or when naivety becomes criminal, murderous idiocy!]

Aleppo is a measure of how that policy has failed. As America has stepped back, the vacuum has been filled not by responsible countries that support the status quo, but by the likes of Russia and Iran which see the promotion of Western values as an insidious plot to bring about regime change in Moscow and Tehran.”

Entirely correct, The Economist. Barack Obama has proven to be very far from a progressive, or a defender of the better values (as one would expect from somebody financed by Goldman Sachs more than any other entity). Instead, Obama has proven to be a right-wing terminator of people. He let the massacre in Syria happen in slow motion.

Obama also spurned and terminated the better values as something worth defending (and thus Obama served Goldman Sachs and its ilk, lack of better values). Obama taught us all to be moral slime. To avoid “quagmires”, Obama became one himself. Obama should have given war a chance (if John Lennon had been around, he may well have concluded that!) Invertebrates never had a chance. Invertebrates like Obama.

In truth, Obama, like all pseudo-leftists, is a poser without values much beyond greed (such as the ravenous greed for power or Nobel prizes). A nihilist. Western progressive values, or the better values of humanity itself, under the pseudo-leftist doctrine, cannot be imposed, because they are viewed as imperialism itself.

This is why Obama put Putin, rather than the French Republic, in charge of Syria: because Putin, or the theocrats in Tehran, or the plutocrats in Beijing, have values which are just as valuable, Obama implicitly, yet extremely repetitively, said. (The reason for this is that the main financier of Obama’s first campaign was Goldman-Sachs: thus the superior values of Goldman-Sachs were transmitted to Obama in a superior way: greed, self-advancement, navigation, etc. Financial manipulators are dictators behind the stage friendly to those dictators who take the stage)

Politics select for self-obsessed slime. Obama has none of the higher values higher human beings are, whatsoever, but he is good at faking ennui and a loftier stance. A comedian. What is his motivation to do so? Obviously a world without redeeming values fit those who breathe greed perfectly. So Obama, by refusing to defend values, manu militari, is actually making the plutocratic mood progress, thus making those who will pay his bills in a month, richer, more powerful, and more generous.

The plutocratic ideal is fundamentally nihilist: it replaces the better angels of our nature, which humanity absolutely need to exist, with low and vicious aspects, and neurohormones, like greed, power onto others, cruelty, etc.  

And what of the little pseudo-leftists who feel that Obama is the best thing since whole wheat bread, and have been clamoring for more of the same, hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees full of Islamism? Many of them have elected. not to defend values, but on hating those who have them. Because hatred is a strong emotion.

Also, most of the pseudo-leftists are just ignorant, and ignorance is not just comfortable, but easy to acquire.

By refusing to act against hatred, Obama has refused to defend the better angels of our values. Instead he has left open the road to irrationality (inventing excuses for not defending said better values) and hatred itself.

Thus Obama contributed to making a much bigger war more likely. Indeed, Obama has told us that to see half a million people killed in what used to be the richest part of the Roman empire, is no concern of his. Nothing that motivates him. Half a million people dead, dictators, some nuclear armed, reinforced, and Obama congratulates himself for having avoided a “quagmire”.

Obama’s powerless UN ambassador, ironically named Power, complained to Russia that it had no decency. that Power chick does not know that, when one has the power of extermination, decency is irrelevant. She and her boss, Obama, are that ignorant. Obama did not just unpresident himself, he was never really president, just taking orders from his (plutocratic) minders. Doing so, not realizing that only military force imposes and preserves civilization, puts us,and all the better values, at risk of being ruled by the spirit of Pluto, at the hands of plutocrats. And the proof is the powerlessness of Obama’s pious declarations on what constitute decent behaviors, the exact behaviors he violated. Now the jerks are compulsively talking about Russia’s sofware prowess, after letting Putin and Assad ravage Aleppo, and Syria.

Might is not necessarily right, indeed. However, right without might, cannot be. Ever.

Civilization is fundamentally about force. The force of the highest human values reorganizing nature, including human nature, for the better, fighting adversity, and winning.

And to do that, to win, we need not just smarts as Ulysses, but also might, like Heracles.

Slime is cool, indeed, but it could not possibly invent civilization. Only entrepreneur could, and did. That’s why we have hands, big hands. Give us that world which we shall mold, for the better; the empire of humanity, this is what us humans make, and always made. The divine primate. Slime, those who will not defend the values which make us the most human, we have to wash out at sea, before their impotence exterminates us.

Patrice Ayme’

 

WE WANT IT DARKER

Should we fear the opprobium of those who are scared that others may become afraid of our thoughts? This is the latest hilarious twist of “identity politics” in the USA. “Identity politics”, also known as tribalism, in times less twisted by unhinged euphemisms. In other words, should we bow to the worst of the Middle Ages’ theological ways and means? Quite the opposite: it is high time to fight back against intellectual fascism of the basest kind, the kind which claims to defend the sheep, by preaching it to bleat, rather than teaching the sheep to learn to think. Creating thinking means learning to debate, unafraid of all and any possible logic. But for that one has to be in the right mood. So what is the proper mood for more advanced thinking? Here it is, and even “Scripture” agrees with us:

WE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE DANGEROUS MAYBES, WANT IT DARKER. 

Those who are afraid of getting afraid, maybe, perhaps, can now stop reading: they belong to what fails, and will always fail. That includes the lack of reading comprehension, which they delve in. Those robust enough to read the Book, can hang on. Our predecessors wanted it darker, because it was the only way to greater greatness. And greatness, is not just what we are. But greatness is what we need. 

Greatness is not just what we became, and are. It is what we, humanity as it stands today, needed to survive. We evolved into greatness. (Slogan for humanity: ‘make humanity great again!’)

We wanted it darker, otherwise, we would never have gone where those who did not become our ancestors  didn’t. They didn’t get there because they both did not want to, and thus, could not, dash through the dark. And feel the pull of the dark.

When our predecessors wanted to understand what others didn’t even suspect, they have got to have wanted it darker.

There is glory in the human species, only because we wanted it darker. It’s written in the scriptures, and yes, it’s no idle claim. We wrote, because we wanted it darker. Bacteria only search for more sugar. We searched darkness, through more darkness. Darkness is sugar for intelligence aspiring to ultimate greatness.

The Gate May Be Golden, But Surviving Is The Only Manifest Destiny Of A World Around A Star. We Want It Darker, Be It Only Because We Need A Rest From The Light, And Need To Go To The Bottom Of Things.

Some have meekly whined that philosophers (yours truly, Patrice Aymé, much later Slavoj Žižek) went to the Dark Side by demolishing the Democratic party, this horror of the demonic side, hidden in the light of its self-glorification. However, only philosophers who love to understand the Dark Side with undisguised enthusiasm, sanctifying thoroughness, could expose the viciousness of the Democratic Party.

And thus helping to get Trump elected, over the twitching bodies of countless, half-wit, rich, politically connected entertainers, globalocrats, and wealthiest people in the world. (A difference between me and Slavoj Žižek is that The Guardian or the New  York Times interview Slavoj Žižek, whereas they censor all and any of my comments relentlessly; those pseudo-left, plutocratically owned, Main Stream Media have, correctly, perceived that I am  better informed, and thus much more dangerous, than the relatively meek, much more predictable, very official Žižek ; The Guardian is financed by Plutos like the holy  Gates conspirators. The same Plutos have owned, mostly, the New York Times, since the Nineteenth Century…)

Ah, and yes, Trump is supposed to be the Dark Side. Little do these little ones know. What Dark really is. (There is a whole tradition, dating to Rousseau, to refuse to look at the Dark Side, and, instead, of accusing civilization; De Sade excoriated Rousseau for his criminal naivety; in this, and many other related matters pertaining to the Revolution of 1789, De Sade would be proven right. Sade was right about the Revolution, because he was a specialist of the Dark Side, and thus could easily predict how the calculus of Evil would turn out, in consequence of apparently innocuous strategies full of goodness, but, also, full of long-term idiocy!)

The Romans knew well how dark darkness was: right from the start, king Tarquinus Superbus threatened their freedoms. Thereafter, over the centuries, in many wars Rome’s very existence was called into question (Gauls from the Paris area even conquered Rome around 390 CE).

When finally Rome became master of the world, ‘man is a wolf for man‘ (Homo Homini Lupus) had become a motto never to be forgotten. Judeo-Christian ideology then augmented Rome, and spread, far out of the Roman empire, even before the Roman state morphed into the Frankish state.  It is fascinating that Jews and Romans came to the same conclusion. But they were war people, that’s how they survived. And why they merged: made for each other (the Franks were even more war-like, allowing them to gobble everybody happily, in a digestive consensus).

Countless thinkers and philosophers have been tortured to death, through the ages. Just because they wanted it darker, they had to want it darker, and the commons hated them for it. (The superiority of the West mostly originates from just enough original thinking squeaking through to save the progress of civilization.)

The truth always starts dark, and in the dark. The Enlightenment always starts the hard way, in the Dark. It is the first thing they have to do: creative thinkers stop fearing the Dark Side. They have this in common with little children.

Thus, Dark Side tourism is necessary for depth. So what? No Dark Side, no humanity. (Actually this propensity and necessity, this breathing of fear, is why people love horror stories, scary movies, cliffhangers, dangerous sports, bad news, etc.)

Notice that this interest for all things dark, is a much greater vision than the well-known observation that the Dark Side is necessary for goodness to triumph over evil. Carpet bombing with flowers did not deconstruct Nazism, right. Eradication of evil, is no evil. One just want to make sure.

But physical power of evil is not all what there is to destroy. Even worse is the power of evil ideas.  We will destroy evil ideas, we can only destroy them, by bringing the fury of light, on the darkest dark.

Let’s spell it shockingly enough to leave a trace: To put it roughly, changing one’s mind, and the minds of others, is all about destroying brain tissue. One has to wreck the old mind, to build a better one. This is really about the most delicate circuitry being wiped out, and setting up a new one.

Too much light brings blindness, thus darkness. We have seen this in the US election: sixty million Americans, including millions of Obama lovers, wanted to “shake things up”. At any cost. The 60 millions who voted Trump had finally seen through the darkness, because they had not been afraid of the dark: they wanted, they had got ready for darker explanations of what was really going on. One has to love conspiracies, to bring them to light.

Blinded by this undeniable light, many Clinton fanatics went completely berserk, heaping insults on their fellow Americans, in the name, they claimed, of the goodness which defined them. Enraged Clinton supporters are pushed, by the light, into ignominous darkness. Enlightened into a darkness they are ill-trained to handle properly. Why? Because they never visited darkness before, they denied its very existence, at least inside themselves. They denied it, because they did not want it. They did not want to consider it so much, they did not see it grow into themselves and their hearts, or from the policies the “Democratic” Party supported sometimes for more than 40 years (like invading Afghanistan). 

So why do we want it darker? Not just because there is no light without dark. Not just because no ying, no yang.

WE WANT IT DARKER, BECAUSE WE WANT TO TURN ON THE MOOD, THE MOOD WHICH REALITY INFLICTS, SO MUCH WE ARE IT.

Now that I got accused of blatant Nazism, antisemitism, xenophobia, OCD, and exuberant SSitude, by crazed pseudo-progressives, let me add to the torture of my moaning victims, by rolling out a Cohen, (Hebrew: כֹּהֵן, kōhēn, “priest“), to my rescue.

Indeed, the late, great, Leonard Cohen came partly to some of the conclusions in the present essay, in his last work, released a few weeks ago: You Want It Darker. One point Leonard Cohen makes is that the Judeo-Christian scriptures depicted an intrinsically very dark picture of the human condition. Hey, don’t look at us funny: the divine condition itself is strikingly dark, so this is essay is not just a justification of man, but even god! (Yes, I am an “atheist”. Of sorts. In practice, though, and hard-core atheists don’t understand this, god exists, it’s a useful abbreviation). Here is Leonard Cohen latest, and last, title track:

“If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game

If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame

If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame

You want it darker

We kill the flame

Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name

Vilified, crucified, in the human frame

A million candles burning for the help that never came

You want it darker

Hineni, hineni

I’m ready, my lord”

All right, full stop, let me provide readers with a text explanation many are going to need. Hineni, Hineni means: “Here I am, here I am”… in Hebrew.; “Hineni” was supposedly uttered by Moses. And also for Abraham, when god felt like killing his child.

“We Want It Darker” is serious psychobiology, it does not get any more serious. It is evolutionary, it is how we were made: with an irresistible attraction for what is out there in the dark. Curiosity may kill the cat, but curiosity enabled us to set a trap for the cat. By forgetting this, mad bull has lost his way.  

Back to Leonard Cohen, and his song, We Want It Darker:

“There’s a lover in the story

But the story’s still the same

There’s a lullaby for suffering

And a paradox to blame

But it’s written in the scriptures

And it’s not some idle claim

You want it darker

We kill the flame”

“It is written in the scriptures and it’s not some idle claim” You want it darker.” Yes, we want it darker, and please kill the flame. Kill that light from out there, and let’s please concentrate on what we are. What you are, yes.

Watch those ridiculous protesters in the streets, finally waking up to the fact they need to help the president of the USA, with healthy protests. Where were they, eight years ago, when Obama needed their help? To protest against the pro-plutocratic policies which were forced (let’s say) onto Obama? When a lonely and misdirected Obama was sucking at the teat of hedge funds, to better prepare him for his presidency of shoe shining? And nobody protested? (OK, I did, but I am nothing.) Why did the protesters not help Obama to stay honest and true? Why so keen to help keep Trump honest, with their unhinged Dark Side?  

They say with undiscerning grammar: ‘Trump Hate’. But that’s rather ambiguous. Where were they, for all these long years, when Obama was doing nothing? What did they advocate when a dictator started to ravage Syria? Or when billions were sent to health care plutocrats, in the guise of “covering everybody”?

Instead of protesting then, they were blinded, blinded by the light from Obama’s brown skin, and Michelle’s magnificently empty, astounding rhetoric. We want it darker, turn those lights off, and reflect on what has been really going on: a globalocracy on a worldwide satanic rampage. And even the poles are melting.

Leonard Cohen’s We Want It Darker:

“They’re lining up the prisoners

And the guards are taking aim

I struggled with some demons

They were middle class and tame

I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim

You want it darker

Hineni, hineni

I’m ready, my lord”

Here Leonard Cohen alludes to a precise historical facts, or how the Jews stayed supine, while the Nazis roamed. Jewish silence, or even collaboration, made Hitler’s full folly possible, historical evidence shows. Hannah Arendt wrote: “the Zionists could, for a time, at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal cooperation with the Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that ‘dissimilation’, combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a ‘mutually fair solution.’  At the time, many German officials held this opinion…” What happened? Nobody wanted it darker. It was kept pleasant. Germans were told Jews were removed “for their safety“.

Cohen also alludes to the fact that big time murderers get away with it. That’s why the God of the Jews in the Bible gets enraged against King David. God had ordered David to massacre a tribe, and David had refused to do so. Why can’t you kill, when ordered to do so? By superior principle (“God”)? This was an important principle God tried to teach to David (and the Abraham, and to all Judeo-Christians and Jews following the “Scripture”): there are circumstances when you have permission, and even when you ought, to murder and aim.

Evolutionarily, massacring lesser human beings has been much of how humanity progressed (hence the God of the Bible insistence upon it; Mayas, Aztecs, Incas, and 99% of the world’s known religions would agree…)

However, now we know more. Not all of evolution happened that way by a long shot: ethologically driven epigenetics played an important role… for example in the disappearing act of Neanderthals (which vanished inside ourselves, I have suggested, and the most recent science increasingly confirms).

What “scripture” guessed was that the Dark Side was not just an essential characteristic of humanity, but also essential to the human condition. This is found in the Hebrew Bible, and in the older Homer. Actually the general orientation in that sinister way is found in the even more ancient Hindu scriptures and the roots of Zoroastrianism, the root of all Indo-European religions (and by “Indo-European” here I mean the region, not just the languages).

Before the pseudo-scientists start to cackle away in derision for all this mythology, let me point out that those who spent millennia concocting logic with myths did not get it all wrong. The Dark Side phenomenon is essentially evolutionary. “Evolution” is not nice. It just is. It just is God: The One who created us.

If you want it funny, watch all the Clinton fanatics crying ignominiously, all over the world, after the defeat of their demiurge. I went to harass a few with the most courteous presentation of serious data, rolling out graphs, just to see them become even more dishevelled, haggard, disconsolate. Yet, they stopped crying, as they left their dream to enter the nightmare of reality. It’s not just that I like it Dark, but I study stupidity. As it is a part of darkness which needs to be enlightened.

But let’s reconsider what happened to the Jews under Nazism. Hannah Arendt (& others) accused the “Judenraten”, the Jewish Councils, to have helped the Nazis (I discovered this independently by reading original literature; I was pretty surprised by it; I learned of Arendt’s views decades later; she missed some documents I think even more important).

Zoroastrianism viewed the human condition as a struggle to help the God of Light against the God of the Dark Side, thanks to Truth.

Well, in truth, the God of Truth needs Light and Dark to write upon the world, with the world. The world is a book for the mind.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, a Latvian-British Jew, was dismayed after the creation of Israel: ‘They listened to Hitler, they did not listen to us.’ Yes, well, thank you, my Lord.

Berlin could have guessed why he had made a darker interpretation of his own writings. “Moral conflicts are an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life”. “These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are.” he wrote in “The proper study of mankind” For Berlin, this clashing of incommensurate values within, and between, individuals, constitutes the tragedy of human life.

There are all sort of philosophers: some are giants straddling across the stars, like Giordano Bruno. Most of them are smaller fry, like those who brandish the ‘human good’ like the measure of all things. It’s not. They forget that knowledge often precedes goodness.

Israel did not listen to the fry ready to get fried, because, it decided that, to survive, and, even better, to be reborn, it wanted it darker:

The Jews, waiting for Hitler like others for Godot, had forgotten that they had permission to murder and to maim. Israel now knows this. It was in the scripture, all along, and no idle claim. Philosophers of the possible want it darker, ever since their ancestors crawled on land through the mud.

The pseudo-progressives who claimed to “be with her“, are part of a vast movement which want to interdict anything which could make themselves, or someone else, afraid. This includes, naturally enough, all and any critical thinking.  So now Donald Trump will do the thinking.

Meanwhile, the Artificial Intelligence Industry (AII) has depicted itself as goodness incarnate (old slogan of Google: ‘don’t be evil’). They scream, all over:’We Want It Lighter!’. Lighter taxes, certainly: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, have been cheating massively with the taxes they owe, worldwide (this will change with the reign of Trump).

Not only those companies, the most powerful in the world, under Obama, and the richest, are viewed as intrinsically good (thus harboring no interesting darkness), but view themselves as such. Hence the silly-colonization(Silicolonization) of the world, above all laws, has proceeded, in plain sight, and not seen. The globalocracy has persuaded everybody that there is no darkness anywhere having to do with themselves: in particular all and any tribalism (such as Wahhabism), is fine.

They all supported Hillary Clinton, and proclaimed themselves to be ultimate good, light personified. Thanks to control of the Main Stream Media by global plutocrats, all over (the paymasters of Clinton), they wiped their blind supporters in a frenzy. For them, the Dark Side is not interesting, it’s an object of horror. Thus, who they were imprinted to support, Clinton, her Goldman government, her plutocrats, and her globalocrats, were all goodness, and Trump and his supporters, and ideas, all Darkness, something to refuse to consider at all cost.

It’s revealing how the hatred of pseudo-liberal posers has thus no limit: they are all light, them and their celebrities, and their Silicon Valley fascist corporations, and their opponents, ultimate evil. As all and any people in such a mood, their hatred has no limit. It goes all the way to genocide. Hollywood actor Michael Shannon wants all Trump supporters to die: “But if you’re voting for Trump, it’s time for the urn.” Michael Shannon has just a high school education (no college), but is “worth” eight million dollars. (As many of the rich celebrities out there, he then is offered the supplementary power of being taken seriously, advertised widely.)

At this point, some may say:’Oh, but didn’t you want it darker? Is not a would-be genocider like Shannon, right up your alley?” No. Michael Shannon understands so little, he sees monsters all over, where, if he could see through the Darkness of those who own and created him, he would just see only transparent logic. Shannon and his ilk are afraid to learn that all they made their mental circuitry from, all they are, are lies. If they had wanted it Darker, they would have been more suspicious of the bromine of the Main Stream Media. (As indeed happened to many people who voted for Obama, and, still loving Obama as a person, voted for Trump, as they were rightly suspicious of the motives of Obama calling them to vote for Clinton/Goldman Sachs…)

Yes, we want it darker, because we are not afraid to look into the dark. Take Turkey: I am not afraid to consider the darkness, I look at what is happening there now (although I have Turkish friends who loved Erdogan, and now we avoid the subject). I know what is going-on in Turkey means: if I look at the Caliphate in Turkey, I will look deep in the dark, and questions like favoring a coup in Turkey will, eventually, arise.

(Or even expelling Turkey from NATO, and war.) I know Islam is not a religion in all ways wonderful. And I am not afraid to look inside Islam: because I like it dark. If you want to rape a child in Turkey, the ruling AKP Party suggests now that you only have to marry her: a proposed Turkish bill clears men of statutory rape if they marry (18 November 2016). As the BBC puts it:

“A bill which would allow men accused of raping underage girls to be cleared if they marry the girl has been preliminarily backed by Turkish MPs. The bill would pardon men only if they had sex without “force or threat” and if they married the victim. Critics say it legitimises rape and child marriage, and lets off men who are aware of their crime.

[OK, there are 3,000 children from underage unions, in Turkey, each year. Right now, fathers go to jail. Not good.]
Violence against women in Turkey has increased in the past decade – 40% of women report sexual or physical abuse. Statistics also show the murder rate of women increased by 1,400% between 2003 and 2010.”

Evil, the power of Pluto, Pluto-kratos, has grown and ruled ever more, because all too many did not want it darker, and thus, they averted their eyes, wishfully. Because those who do not want to harbor ill-feeling, and see it as it is, dark as it is, cannot think it, as it is.

Whereever it is very dark, it’s good to look carefully. Take the iceshelves around Antarctica. Yes, it’s dark down there in the ocean, below half a mile of ice, 500 miles from the shore. There, in the dark, much is happening: all too much warmth, 100 millions of climate in question. But we have to ask, and we have to look.

If Obama had wanted it darker, he would have the desire to break a few shells, and made an omelette: his presidency would have amounted to something, perhaps even something digestible. Instead, most of its ineffectual, slow and paralysed presidency is going to be vomited all over the south lawn of the White House starting in two months, and one day. Doing anything serious in plain sight, requires serious destruction, in plain sight (annihilating weddings in Yemen by drones does not qualify).  When president Johnson wanted to pass the Civil Rights Act and other “Great Society” laws LBJ turned off the lights, and used the Dark Side (LBJ did not have thoughts which were dark enough about Vietnam, with catastrophic consequences).

Consider terror. Right now, it’s associated to Literal Islam: a bomb here, a shooting there, collapsing buildings, here and there. Small terror relative to the one a dictator getting excited with nuclear tipped ballistic missiles would bring. Thus a deeper problem. Fighting terror is a great idea. Fighting savagery would be an even greater idea. But for that, one has to look first at darkness in the eye.

The will to see only goodness out there, the will to be afraid of fear itself at the cost of reality, is a will to idiocy, and, thus, in the end, a will to full immorality, degeneracy, despondency, annihilation…. (For annihilation, see the Democratic Party.)

The will to refuse to want it darker brings forth impotence, and hatred. And even the threat of extinction. Sea ice finds difficult to form this year, in part because scientists refuse to want it as dark as they should have wished for (and I predicted that Antarctica ice system may significantly collapse in our lifetime, because I wanted my predictions as dark as they needed to be).

Yes, the preceding has to do with epistemology, the logic of knowledge. There is no knowledge acquisition, if we are not drawn, not just to the unknown, but to the dark. The most powerful epistemology is born from the darkest mood.

Pragmatically, people who do not want to look at reality, who orders the only reality they deign to perceive to be rosy, are bound to moral impotency. They’re the ultimate nihilists.

We Want It Darker. We Need It Darker.

Patrice Aymé

Socrates A Poisonous, Unexamined Fascist?

The Pathos Of Truth Seeked & Violated. Unexamined Fascist, Unexamined Prostitute? Both. Why Was That Covered Up, So Long? For The Same Exact Cause Which Made Socrates Famous!

The death of Socrates keeps haunting philosophy. And that, per se, is a sad, yet very revealing tale. The old common wisdom was that Socrates died, as a martyr to truth (as Hypatia, Boetius, Giordano Bruno, and many others certainly were). You want a hero for philosophy? Celebrate Jean Cavaillès. In the presence of Cavaillès, Sartre nearly wetted his pants. We will see that the mood behind Socrates’ actions is significantly different. Socrates was rather on the side of those who killed Cavaillès.

Indeed, a casual look at the basic setup of Socrates’ trial contradicts the theme that Socrates was mostly a martyr for truth. Socrates was simply accused to be the mastermind of the young dictators who ruled Athens after her tremendous defeat, and half annihilation at the hands of Sparta, the tool of Persia. Socrates was also mentor, friend and lover (!) of the young Alcibiades who, deprived of a generalship by Athens, then betrayed her for her lethal enemy, fascist, ultra-racist, Persian financed Sparta.

Agreed, philosophy needs heroes, and has plenty. Here is one:

Jean Cavaillès, Anti-Fascist Martyr. Here Is A Hero For Truth & Philosophy. Socrates Was Nearly The Exact Opposite.

[Jean Cavaillès was tortured and assassinated by the Gestapo in 1943-1944. He is buried in the crypt of the Sorbonne.]

Thus Socrates was a sort of Charlie Manson of serial traitors and killers, whose mental actions led, or accompanied, Athens’ near-death experience in losing a devastating war, and the resulting dictatorship by Socrates’ students. Temples of democracy such as Britain, France, and the USA have gaily executed traitors, or incompetents, for much less than that.

Socrates Used To Look At People As A bull Does. Ugly Inside Out? To Reveal the Truth, Some Will Say Torture Works Even Better

Stanford political science and classics professor, Josiah Ober opines in “The Civic Drama Of Socrates’ Trial” that:  “Conventional wisdom sees Socrates as a martyr for free speech, but he accepted his death sentence for a different cause… In his influential interpretation The Trial of Socrates (1988), the US journalist-turned-classicist I F Stone saw this trial as an embattled democracy defending itself. In Stone’s view, Socrates had helped to justify the junta’s savage programme of oligarchic misrule and was a traitor. More commonly, Socrates is seen as a victim of an opportunistic prosecutor and a wilfully ignorant citizenry. In truth, politics is indispensable to understanding the trial of Socrates, but in a slightly more sophisticated way.”

I love sophistication, philosophy is all about increased sophistication (so is science). Sophistication, translated, is wisdomization: sticking to reality ever better by ever more subtle, complex logic.

The point was not so much that Socrates justified the savage programme, but that he formed the minds who organized said programme, “corrupting the youth”. And he was at it again, even after being amnestied. Professor Ober describes the problem well (although he fails to fathom the enormity of what he describes).

Stanford’s Josiah: “For what people today call ‘the wisdom of crowds’, Socrates had nothing but scorn. Athenian democrats who argued that the many, the group, were collectively more likely to get important matters right than any individual expert earned his antipathy. Whether or not anyone actually was expert in the art of politics, Socrates certainly supposed that there could be such an expert, and that the Athenians were deluded in thinking themselves collectively wise.”

The “experts” would have been naturally his rich, best (“aristos”) boyfriends. Professor Ober is led to the obvious question, but fail to recognize that he does not answer it:

“How did Socrates both scorn the idea of collective wisdom and yet maintain obedience to Athens’ laws, even when he disagreed with how they were interpreted? The rudimentary answer lay in the foundation that Athens (as opposed to, for example, Sparta) provided in its laws and political culture. Athens mandated liberty of public speech and tolerance for a wide range of private behaviour.”

Yes, but public incompetence could lead to trial (as happened to Pericles and many strategoi, generals and admirals). Anyway, that is not an answer. I will give a better answer: Socrates himself had no answer to his drastic self-contradictions, so hise self-delusion fatally committed him to self-destruction. Yet political science professor Ober sees the problem:

“By 399 BCE, however, four years after the end of the tyranny, and with Socrates doing the same things in public that had seemingly inspired the junta’s leaders, the Athenians regarded his speech very differently. In the eyes of the majority of his fellow citizens, Socrates was no longer an eccentric with potential for contributing to public life. He was now either a malevolent public enemy, or deluded and dangerously unable to recognise that his speech predictably produced seriously bad outcomes. And so the way was left open for Meletus to launch his prosecution.”

Right. What professor Ober fails to mention is that only the intervention of mighty Sparta prevented Athens’ annihilation after she surrendered, having lost already half of her population (other cities wanted to do to Athens what Athens did to Melos). Try to imagine this: the city-state half annihilated, democracy destroyed by Socrates’ students, and then? The strongest mood that Socrates had been instilling was to oppose democracy. And he was again at it, after the amnesty he had profited from. What could motivate such a rage?

Unsurprisingly, Socrates was put on trial for “corrupting the youth and impiety”. (The City was to some extent divinized, with Athena as her protecting goddess.)

“With unsettling metaphors and logical demonstrations, he made it clear that he [Socrates] opposed democracy… Xenophon implies that Socrates chose that sort of speech as a method of jury-assisted suicide: he was… tired of life and allowed the Athenians to end it for him.”

This is what I believe. And I go further than Xenophon, by explaining the cause of Socrates’ depression. Socrates may have been tired of his own contradictions.And may have been ravaged by regret. (Regret, I reckon, is a powerful human instinct.)

The Socrates’ worship interpretation is due to Plato. It poses Socrates as martyr to civic duty. But, as it turns out, “civic duty”, for Socrates, seems to be mostly blind obedience to “the Laws”, while viciously criticizing the Direct Democracy which gave birth to them.

That Socrates respected the laws of Athens while despising the Direct Democracy which had passed them is illogical in the extreme. Yes, I know Socrates said he respected “the Laws”, as if they were disembodied gods with a life of their own. But We The People passed said laws, and they lived only because We The People had created them, and We thge People could extinguish them just the same.

The “Laws” were nothing. We The People was everything. Socrates behaved as if he could not understand that.

Insisting that the Laws were everything reveals that the concept of blind obedience was more important to Socrates than arguing about the nature of what one should be obeying to, and why. Blind obedience is also the traditional ultimate value of standard fascism: law and order as supreme.

Blind obedience had been what the junta’s rule was all about. What the rule of Socrates’ young students and lovers had been all about. That’s also what fascism is all about. However, arguing, debating, fighting is how to get to the thorough examination necessary for the “examined life”.   

The contradiction was, and is, blatant. Socrates’ mental system was shorting out. Socrates had been shorting out for half a decade or more: he ambitiously wanted to “examine life”, but he could not even examine the minds of his followers, let alone his own, or why he was hanging around them. Why was he hanging around them? They were rich, he was not, but he lived off their backs and crumbs. And the feeling of power they provided with (after Obama got to power I saw some in his entourage becoming drunk with power).  

Arguably, Socrates was a martyr to fascism, a Jihadist without god. There is nothing remarkable about that. The very instinct of fascism is to give one’s life, just because fanatical combat is the ultimate value, when one gets in the fascist mood. In this case, the fanatical combat was against We The People.

Posing Socrates as a martyr for intellectual freedom is farfetched: fascism, blind obedience, passion for oligarchs are all opposed to the broad mind searching for wisdom requires.

Some will sneer: you accuse Socrates to be a fascist, why not a racist? Well, I will do this too. The golden youth Socrates loved so much and drank with were hereditary so. Socrates believed knowledge was innate (so an ignorant shepherd boy knew all of math: this is the example he rolled out!) If knowledge was innate, one can guess that the “aristos”, the best, were also innately superior. That is the essence of racism.

Logically enough, Socrates disliked science: nothing was truly new under the sun (as all knowledge was innate). So much for examining life.

It is more probable that Socrates was indeed, just a stinging insect buzzing around, stinging the idea of Direct Democracy. In exchange, his rich, young, plutocratic boyfriends would fete and feed him. Such was Socrates’ life, a rather sad state of affair, something that needed to be examined, indeed, by the head doctor.

Socrates may have been clever enough to feel that he was an ethical wreck. His suicidal submission may have been an attempt to redeem himself, or whatever was left of his honor (which he also tried to regain with his insolence to the jury).

Plato would pursue the fight for fascism (“kingship”). Aristotle, by teaching, mentoring, educating, befriending, advising a number of extremely close, family-like friends, the abominable Alexander, Craterus and Antipater, finally fulfilled Socrates’ wet dream: Athenian Direct Democracy was destroyed and replaced by an official plutocracy overlorded by Antipater (supremo dictator, and executor of Aristotle’s will, in more ways than one).

This trio of philosophical malefactors became the heroes 22 centuries of dictatorship (“monarchy”) needed as a justification. A justification where “civic duty” was defined as blind obedience to the “Laws” (whatever they were, even unjust “Laws”). This amplified Socrates’ hatred of Direct Democracy. So the works of the trio were preciously preserved, and elevated to the rank of the admirable.

It is rather a basket of deplorables. We owe them the destruction of Direct Democracy for 23 centuries, and counting.

And what Of Socrates’ regret for being so deplorable? (Which I alleged he had to experience.) A dying Socrates lying on a couch, uncovered his face and uttered— “Crito, I owe the sacrifice of a rooster to Asklepios; will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?”  Asklepios cured disease, and provided with rebirth, symbolized by the singing of the rooster calling the new day. This has been traditionally interpreted (by Nietzsche) as meaning that (Socrates’?) death was a cure for (his?) life. Nietzsche accused Socrates to be culprit of the subsequent degeneracy of civilization (and I do agree with that thesis). Certainly, Socrates, a self-described “gadfly” was deprived of gravitas.

Wisdom needs to dance, but cannot be altogether deprived of gravitas, as it is, after all, the gravest thing.. Maybe Socrates felt this confusedly, besides having regrets for his status of thinking insect. Socrates could have easily escaped, and Crito had an evasion ready. By killing himself Socrates behaved like a serious Japanese Lord opening his belly to show his insides were clean, and its intent good. Well, many a scoundrel has committed seppuku, and hemlock is nothing like cutting the belly.

Human beings are endowed with the instinct of regret, because we are the thinking species. It is crucial that we find the truth, and when we have lived a lie, indulged in error, the best of use are haunted by the past, and revisit it to find what the truth really was. Regrets has many stages, like cancer. The most correct philosophical form of regret is to re-established the truth. The cheap way out is to flee from reality, as Socrates did.

How to explain Socrates’ insolence to the jury? There again, it was a desperate attempt at reaching the sensation of self-righteousness and trying to impart it to the jury (this is often seen  on the Internet, with the glib one-liners and vacuous logic which pass for depth nowadays).

The inexperienced democracy in Athens did not always behave well. Athens behaved terribly with Melos (see link above). But the case of Socrates is different. Ultimately, the train of thoughts and moods promoted by Socrates weakened those who wanted to defend the free republics of Greece against the fascist, exterminationist Macedonian plutocracy. Demosthenes and Athenian Direct Democracy was mortally poisoned by Socrates.

Thus, Socrates execution was not just tit for tat. It was not enough of tit for tat. It was a preventive measure, in defense of Direct Democracy, which failed, because it was too meek.

Democracy does not mean to turn the other cheek, to have the golden beast eat that one too. In ultimate circumstances, democracy has an ultimate weapon too, and that is fascism. This is why the Roman, French and American republics prominently brandish the fasces. Fascism is the ultimate war weapon. But fascism is not the ultimate society. Far from it: political fascism, just a few individuals leading entails intellectual fascism, namely just a few moods and ideas leading. Before one knows it, one is in plutocracy, where not only wealth rules, but so does the cortege of the worst ideas and moods which characterize it.

Socrates often talk the talk, contradicting completely the way he lived (for example he said one should never return an injury, but, as a hoplite, he killed at least four men in combat!)

Socrates spoke so well sometimes, that he can stay a symbol of truth persecuted. But, because it is a lie, replacing him by Hypatia, Boetius, Bruno and, or Cavaillès, and, or, others, is urgent. Indeed, the reality is that Socrates was not just inimical to democracy. The current of thought he floated by was inimical to science, mental progress, and the truth he claimed to be pining for.  And even him may have been so overwhelmed by these astounding contradictions, that, in the end, assisted suicide for his pathetic mental writhing was, indeed, the optimal outcome.

Patrice Ayme’