The purpose of the Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight series is to educate and prove convincingly that the economic way has always worked whenever and wherever it has been allowed. Personal liberty is responsible for the prosperous human condition we enjoy today, and it’s an extremely rare occurrence in human history. We are dedicated here to spreading the wealth through self-creation, not confiscation.
To do this, we must focus on concretes, meaning the philosophical root causes of human flourishing and its alternative, collectivism. Human life on planet earth originated about 400,000 years ago, yet it was only about 400 years ago that individual rights were discovered. This achievement is impossible without reason and the printing press, and is unsustainable without America. It is with gratitude that we honor The Philosophers; here is an excerpt –
Like the marvelous achievements of The Inventors, philosophy is largely unappreciated. For most people, their philosophy is a random collection of slogans that have been acquired from popular culture. It is not grounded in rational core principles. The first tenet of our Manifesto alludes to the philosophical core these individuals profess – reason, purpose and pride.
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Fortunately, there is a movement in academia to integrate the core principles of politics, philosophy and economics – the PPE movement. For years these subjects had been siloed into separate disciplines. This is unfortunate because the integration of core philosophical principles into abstract concepts is essential for human flourishing. In fact, the lack of rational core principles and the inability to integrate them into abstract ideas is the root cause of all political, economic, and social problems.
For example, America has been producing a high incidence of young dope users and fatherless children. This is a philosophical problem, and the social repercussions are manifest. One root cause is the progressive American schools inspired by John Dewey; his educational philosophy was short on content and long on social interaction. His creed was straight out of Rousseau’s Social Contract: “personal interests must be subordinated to the general will.” For that to work, compulsory schools were essential to reconstruct society, and to enforce a fully formed public opinion for its designated citizens, experts, and politicians.
Dewey believed that “There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.” This destructive philosophy tells us that there is no intrinsic value in knowledge, that our life’s value is a function of our self-sacrifice, and that we need government experts to survive. This negates aspiring to a life of reason, purpose and pride, and this is no accident. The nihilistic underpinnings of our postmodern world can be attributed to the likes of philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. To quote Ayn Rand in 1971’s Return of the Primitive:
Intellectually, the activists of the New Left are the most docile conformists. They have accepted as dogma that the merging of one’s self with a tribe or a community is the noblest way to live. Far from being rebels, they embody the philosophic trend of the past 200 years: the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis, which has dominated Western philosophy from Kant to Hegel to James.
And this rejection of The Enlightenment and The Age of Reason is not limited to 19th century European philosophers. On May 14, 1911, future US President Woodrow Wilson addressed the Jefferson Club in Los Angeles and declared:
The business of every true Jeffersonian is to translate the terms of those abstract portions of the Declaration of Independence into the language and the problems of his own day. If you want to understand the real Declaration, do not repeat the preface. We are not doing this thing in the spirit of insurgents but in the spirit of free men, men who have the true interests of humanity at heart.
So what is Wilson saying here? First, cancel the abstract concepts of natural law and declare martial law. Next, dismiss the gifted political philosophers of America’s founding as mere insurgents. And lastly, declare that freedom must be earned through self-sacrifice. To progressive political science professor Wilson, freedom means submission – individualism and the consent of the governed are quaint and obsolete abstractions. Wilson is pathetically declaring himself a Jeffersonian by denying Jefferson the mantle of expert in human nature, the one who predicted the likes of Wilson with his preface in the Declaration.
In essence, the collectivist philosophy of the progressive left avoids reality. It denies that the great American experiment is the most magnificent petri dish for individual self-creation in all of human history. Today’s political elites, humanities departments, public education unions and legacy media can’t have that, it would render them irrelevant. Our goal is to expedite their irrelevance.
Our first philosopher resurrected Aristotle’s reason to bolster Christianity’s equality. The second one discovered universal human rights. Next, we highlight the authors of the world’s greatest edifice to reason, equality, and freedom. And last, the author who romanticized the human ideal, predicted today’s decivilization, exposed its philosophical root cause, and most importantly, the antidote.
Think of this as you listen to the self-styled political philosophers, the ones who have declared themselves candidates for the US Presidency, and ask, are their philosophical core principles integrated and compatible with self-creation or are they incoherent and promote self-abnegation?
