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Charlie Kirk and Socrates
Charlie Kirk is proving to be much stronger
than in life. This has always been the case with martyrs.
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BY BERT OLIVIER
View original article at
Brownstone.org.
On the Promethean
Action website Susan Kokinda has addressed the difference between the
globalists driving the attempt to demolish the extant world, on the one hand,
and those who are defending a value system which enshrines reason in the best
sense of the word, on the other. This specific video discussion is tellingly
entitled ‘Why they hated Kirk and Socrates,’
and represents a scorching critique of those who valorise the ‘open society’ á
la George Soros, and those who
subscribe to the conception of reason underpinning the work of the ancient
Greek philosopher, Plato. To understand
what is at stake, and its relevance for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a bit of a
detour is necessary.
Anyone familiar with the
notion of ‘the open society,’ which is primarily associated with George Soros’s
supposed – but arguably spurious –
‘philanthropic’ endeavours worldwide, may know that
the phrase was not Soros’s invention, but derives from the work of
Austrian-British emigré philosopher, Karl Popper, whose book, The Open Society and its Enemies,
launched a vicious attack on Plato’s philosophy as (mainly) articulated in his
famous Republic. In
passing I should note that another British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, famously
remarked that the whole of Western philosophy is a ‘series of footnotes to
Plato’ – an observation which suggests the opposite evaluation of the Greek
philosopher’s philosophical significance than that of Popper.
In the last segment of her
video address, Kokinda contrasts Popper with Plato and his teacher, Socrates. She elaborates
on Popper’s hatred of Plato and the influence that this loathing had on the
British, particularly those who have shaped what one might call British
‘foreign policy’ – that is, the British agencies which Promethean Action
believes have been driving the onslaught against the Western world and
particularly against President Donald Trump. Why? Because, as Kokinda and her
colleague, Barbara Boyd remind one, Trump is systematically restoring American
sovereignty and liberating it from the stranglehold that Britain – what they
call the ‘British Empire’ – has had on the United States for at least eight decades.
Where does Popper feature
in this? He conveniently gave his British hosts the excuse to target every
embodiment of ‘reason’ in the Platonic sense, namely the belief that there are
unassailable universal or universalisable principles, which human beings have
access to, and moreover, according to which they can live if they so choose. It
is ironic, to say the least, that Popper detested Plato – probably because of
the latter’s contention that a certain class of citizens, the philosophers,
should rule a republic, and that the other two classes (the soldiers and the
merchants) should be subservient to their rule. In other words, it was a
‘republican’ vision that cast citizens in three classes according to their
talents or excellence (arête), which Popper evidently found
intolerable.
Nevertheless, Plato’s Republic,
like his other dialogues, gives testimony to Plato’s willingness to debate the
merits of his idea of the ‘ideal society.’ The other irony is that Popper’s
philosophy of science, known as ‘falsificationism’ – the view that a statement
is only scientific if it can, in principle, be ‘falsified;’ that is, ‘tested’ –
actually makes a lot of ‘rational’ sense (in relation to experience). And yet,
he trashed Plato’s trust in reason.
Kokinda also reminds one –
and this is highly pertinent to what happened to Charlie Kirk – that Plato’s
teacher was Socrates. Why is this the case? Consider the following: To be a true
philosopher puts one in a difficult, sometimes dangerous position, as when you speak truth to power.
This is because it is usually not something that one chooses to be. It
does not even matter whether you have studied philosophy at college or not. Either
one is a person who pursues knowledge and truth regardless of the familial or
institutional obstacles in one’s way, or you yield to these, and rely
on fashionable or conventional answers to important questions.
In other words, I am not
referring to academic philosophers, who choose philosophy as a profession. Some
of these may also be philosophers in the true sense, but most of them
end up being what Arthur Schopenhauer notoriously
called ‘bread thinkers’ – individuals who do philosophy in service to those in
power; that is, apologists for the status quo, or what Robert Pirsig irreverently
dubbed ‘philosophologists’ in his second iconoclastic novel, Lila – An
Inquiry Into Morals (1992: 376-377):
He liked that word
‘philosophology.’ It was just right. It had a nice dull, cumbersome,
superfluous appearance that exactly fitted its subject matter, and he’d been
using it for some time now. Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to
music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary
criticism is to creative writing. It’s a derivative, secondary field, a
sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by
analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior…
You can imagine the
ridiculousness of an art historian taking his students to museums, having them
write a thesis on some historical or technical aspect of what they see there,
and after a few years of this giving them degrees that say they are accomplished
artists. They’ve never held a brush or a mallet and chisel in their hands. All
they know is art history.
Yet, ridiculous as
it sounds, this is exactly what happens in the philosophology that calls itself
philosophy. Students aren’t expected to philosophize. Their instructors would
hardly know what to say if they did. They’d probably compare the student’s
writing to Mill or Kant or somebody like that, find the student’s work grossly
inferior, and tell him to abandon it.
Unlike a philosophologist,
a philosopher is primarily interested in truth, and addressing it in public can
be dangerous, hence it requires courage – the kind of courage that both
Socrates and Charlie Kirk had. Anyone who has the courage for such
daring thinking and acting – particularly today – should be under no illusion:
it would certainly carry tremendous risk, because it would challenge the
greatest power complex the world has ever seen – the one we call the globalist
cabal today.
Having mentioned philosophy
and courage in the same breath immediately shines a light on Socrates, who
showed immense courage in the face of Athenian power. From him one learns that
true philosophers do not honour the ‘gods of the polis’
unconditionally. The philosopher’s task, by which she or he is recognised, is
to question the things valued by the city; that is, philosophers
question convention.
Socrates’s ‘mistake,’ from
the perspective of the powerful elite in Athens, was that he – like Charlie
Kirk long after him – taught the city’s youth to question the conventional
wisdom held up by its ‘leaders’ as the unquestionable truth. Hence, they
charged him with the ‘crime’ of leading the youth astray by introducing them to
foreign ‘gods,’ the latter being what Socrates referred to as his ‘daimon,’
or what we would call ‘conscience.’
In Plato’s Apology
(Plato – Complete Works,
Trans. Grube, G.M.A., J.M. Hackett Publishing Company 1997: 23), referring to
the charges brought against him, Socrates says to the members of the Athenian
jury: “It goes something like this: Socrates is guilty of corrupting the young
and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new
spiritual things.” He then examines the charges systematically and easily
demonstrates that he does believe in “spirits,” which an accuser claims to be
“gods” (Plato 1997: 26). Socrates further claims that, having shown that the
charges against him are baseless, he realises that his undoing will have
nothing to do with this, but with the fact that he is “very unpopular with many
people” who “envy” him (p. 26).
The gist of his defence (apologia)
– which, as we know, did nothing to endear him to the jury – comes where he
points out (Plato 1997: 27) that the charges against him would have been
legitimate if he had abandoned his soldierly duty in the battles where he had
fought, “for fear of death or anything else”…“when the god ordered me, as I
thought and believed, to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and
others…” But fearing death, he further argues, rests upon the erroneous belief
of thinking “one knows what one does not know.” As for himself, he knows that
he knows nothing of the things of the “underworld” (including death), and
he opines that it is perhaps in this respect that he “is wiser than anyone in
anything” (p. 27).
Having clearly – and no
doubt to the vexation of his audience – demonstrated his own intellectual and
moral superiority compared to his accusers, it was to be expected that the
jury would exercise its power over Socrates by finding him guilty and
sentencing him to death, as they did. But why cite this as an illustration of courage
– specifically moral courage? Because Socrates was willing to die for
his conscience-oriented belief in something more valuable than
Athenian valorisation, ostensibly, of its Olympian polis religion, but in truth
really of paying obeisance to conventional Athenian practices of kowtowing to
the rich and powerful (and probably corrupt).
This is the lesson we
should learn – and which Charlie Kirk had already discovered, probably without
assistance from Socrates, although he may have known the details of Socrates’s
life and death – in the present global situation of an immensely powerful
so-called ‘elite’ forcing the world population to toe the line of their
decisions regarding everything from ‘pandemic’ lockdowns, ‘vaccinations,’ and
soon (they hope) of obeying ‘climate lockdowns.’ Particularly (in Kirk’s case),
it was the widespread, ideologically reinforced belief that it was impossible
to bridge the divide between ‘Democrats’ (who are anything but ‘democrats’) and
‘Republicans’ (many of whom are RINOS), and that one would be wasting one’s
time attempting to cross this chasm by debating with one’s adversaries, that
motivated Kirk to challenge this veritable dogma.
Moreover, and
significantly, Charlie’s organisation – Turning Point USA – positioned itself
affirmatively in relation to the conservative, Christian youth of America, but
not only conservative young people. Charlie, like Socrates before him,
had the guts to address his Democrat-supporting youth adversaries in open
debate as well, with the motto: ‘Prove me wrong!’ In a nutshell, he was not
afraid to be a truth-teller in the face of enormous opposition from people on
the other side of what seemed like an impenetrable ideological barrier.
When he died, he was
practising the truth-telling he was known for. This is what the young American parrhesiastes
(truth-teller) had in common with a long-dead ancient Greek philosopher called
Socrates. And – to refer back to Susan Kokinda of Promethean Action
once more, who said this before I did – this is what Charlie’s enemies hated
about him: he was not afraid to speak the truth. Or, perhaps more accurately,
he was afraid – as he apparently
confessed before that fatal day – but despite his fear, he carried on with what
he believed was his mission, to awaken American youth (or Americans generally)
to the need to conduct open, rational debate about their differences, instead
of slinging insults at one another (and we know where most of these insults
came from).
In short, it appears that,
as several commentators have observed – and as we know from history – in death,
Charlie Kirk is proving to be much stronger than in life. This has always been
the case with martyrs, or individuals who have died for a cause that they
espoused in the face of enormous opposition, from Socrates to Jesus Christ.
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Charlie Kirk and Socrates
On the Promethean Action website Susan Kokinda has addressed the difference between the globalists driving the attempt to demolish the extant world, on the one hand, and those who are defending a value system which enshrines reason in the best sense of the word, on the other. This specific video discussion is tellingly entitled ‘Why they hated Kirk and Socrates,’ and represents a scorching critique of those who valorise the ‘open society’ á la George Soros, and those who subscribe to the conception of reason underpinning the work of the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. To understand what is at stake, and its relevance for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a bit of a detour is necessary.
Anyone familiar with the notion of ‘the open society,’ which is primarily associated with George Soros’s supposed – but arguably spurious – ‘philanthropic’ endeavours worldwide, may know that the phrase was not Soros’s invention, but derives from the work of Austrian-British emigré philosopher, Karl Popper, whose book, The Open Society and its Enemies, launched a vicious attack on Plato’s philosophy as (mainly) articulated in his famous Republic. In passing I should note that another British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, famously remarked that the whole of Western philosophy is a ‘series of footnotes to Plato’ – an observation which suggests the opposite evaluation of the Greek philosopher’s philosophical significance than that of Popper.
In the last segment of her video address, Kokinda contrasts Popper with Plato and his teacher, Socrates. She elaborates on Popper’s hatred of Plato and the influence that this loathing had on the British, particularly those who have shaped what one might call British ‘foreign policy’ – that is, the British agencies which Promethean Action believes have been driving the onslaught against the Western world and particularly against President Donald Trump. Why? Because, as Kokinda and her colleague, Barbara Boyd remind one, Trump is systematically restoring American sovereignty and liberating it from the stranglehold that Britain – what they call the ‘British Empire’ – has had on the United States for at least eight decades.
Where does Popper feature in this? He conveniently gave his British hosts the excuse to target every embodiment of ‘reason’ in the Platonic sense, namely the belief that there are unassailable universal or universalisable principles, which human beings have access to, and moreover, according to which they can live if they so choose. It is ironic, to say the least, that Popper detested Plato – probably because of the latter’s contention that a certain class of citizens, the philosophers, should rule a republic, and that the other two classes (the soldiers and the merchants) should be subservient to their rule. In other words, it was a ‘republican’ vision that cast citizens in three classes according to their talents or excellence (arête), which Popper evidently found intolerable.
Nevertheless, Plato’s Republic, like his other dialogues, gives testimony to Plato’s willingness to debate the merits of his idea of the ‘ideal society.’ The other irony is that Popper’s philosophy of science, known as ‘falsificationism’ – the view that a statement is only scientific if it can, in principle, be ‘falsified;’ that is, ‘tested’ – actually makes a lot of ‘rational’ sense (in relation to experience). And yet, he trashed Plato’s trust in reason.
Kokinda also reminds one – and this is highly pertinent to what happened to Charlie Kirk – that Plato’s teacher was Socrates. Why is this the case? Consider the following: To be a true philosopher puts one in a difficult, sometimes dangerous position, as when you speak truth to power. This is because it is usually not something that one chooses to be. It does not even matter whether you have studied philosophy at college or not. Either one is a person who pursues knowledge and truth regardless of the familial or institutional obstacles in one’s way, or you yield to these, and rely on fashionable or conventional answers to important questions.
In other words, I am not referring to academic philosophers, who choose philosophy as a profession. Some of these may also be philosophers in the true sense, but most of them end up being what Arthur Schopenhauer notoriously called ‘bread thinkers’ – individuals who do philosophy in service to those in power; that is, apologists for the status quo, or what Robert Pirsig irreverently dubbed ‘philosophologists’ in his second iconoclastic novel, Lila – An Inquiry Into Morals (1992: 376-377):
He liked that word ‘philosophology.’ It was just right. It had a nice dull, cumbersome, superfluous appearance that exactly fitted its subject matter, and he’d been using it for some time now. Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing. It’s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior…
You can imagine the ridiculousness of an art historian taking his students to museums, having them write a thesis on some historical or technical aspect of what they see there, and after a few years of this giving them degrees that say they are accomplished artists. They’ve never held a brush or a mallet and chisel in their hands. All they know is art history.
Yet, ridiculous as it sounds, this is exactly what happens in the philosophology that calls itself philosophy. Students aren’t expected to philosophize. Their instructors would hardly know what to say if they did. They’d probably compare the student’s writing to Mill or Kant or somebody like that, find the student’s work grossly inferior, and tell him to abandon it.
Unlike a philosophologist, a philosopher is primarily interested in truth, and addressing it in public can be dangerous, hence it requires courage – the kind of courage that both Socrates and Charlie Kirk had. Anyone who has the courage for such daring thinking and acting – particularly today – should be under no illusion: it would certainly carry tremendous risk, because it would challenge the greatest power complex the world has ever seen – the one we call the globalist cabal today.
Having mentioned philosophy and courage in the same breath immediately shines a light on Socrates, who showed immense courage in the face of Athenian power. From him one learns that true philosophers do not honour the ‘gods of the polis’ unconditionally. The philosopher’s task, by which she or he is recognised, is to question the things valued by the city; that is, philosophers question convention.
Socrates’s ‘mistake,’ from the perspective of the powerful elite in Athens, was that he – like Charlie Kirk long after him – taught the city’s youth to question the conventional wisdom held up by its ‘leaders’ as the unquestionable truth. Hence, they charged him with the ‘crime’ of leading the youth astray by introducing them to foreign ‘gods,’ the latter being what Socrates referred to as his ‘daimon,’ or what we would call ‘conscience.’
In Plato’s Apology (Plato – Complete Works, Trans. Grube, G.M.A., J.M. Hackett Publishing Company 1997: 23), referring to the charges brought against him, Socrates says to the members of the Athenian jury: “It goes something like this: Socrates is guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things.” He then examines the charges systematically and easily demonstrates that he does believe in “spirits,” which an accuser claims to be “gods” (Plato 1997: 26). Socrates further claims that, having shown that the charges against him are baseless, he realises that his undoing will have nothing to do with this, but with the fact that he is “very unpopular with many people” who “envy” him (p. 26).
The gist of his defence (apologia) – which, as we know, did nothing to endear him to the jury – comes where he points out (Plato 1997: 27) that the charges against him would have been legitimate if he had abandoned his soldierly duty in the battles where he had fought, “for fear of death or anything else”…“when the god ordered me, as I thought and believed, to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others…” But fearing death, he further argues, rests upon the erroneous belief of thinking “one knows what one does not know.” As for himself, he knows that he knows nothing of the things of the “underworld” (including death), and he opines that it is perhaps in this respect that he “is wiser than anyone in anything” (p. 27).
Having clearly – and no doubt to the vexation of his audience – demonstrated his own intellectual and moral superiority compared to his accusers, it was to be expected that the jury would exercise its power over Socrates by finding him guilty and sentencing him to death, as they did. But why cite this as an illustration of courage – specifically moral courage? Because Socrates was willing to die for his conscience-oriented belief in something more valuable than Athenian valorisation, ostensibly, of its Olympian polis religion, but in truth really of paying obeisance to conventional Athenian practices of kowtowing to the rich and powerful (and probably corrupt).
This is the lesson we should learn – and which Charlie Kirk had already discovered, probably without assistance from Socrates, although he may have known the details of Socrates’s life and death – in the present global situation of an immensely powerful so-called ‘elite’ forcing the world population to toe the line of their decisions regarding everything from ‘pandemic’ lockdowns, ‘vaccinations,’ and soon (they hope) of obeying ‘climate lockdowns.’ Particularly (in Kirk’s case), it was the widespread, ideologically reinforced belief that it was impossible to bridge the divide between ‘Democrats’ (who are anything but ‘democrats’) and ‘Republicans’ (many of whom are RINOS), and that one would be wasting one’s time attempting to cross this chasm by debating with one’s adversaries, that motivated Kirk to challenge this veritable dogma.
Moreover, and significantly, Charlie’s organisation – Turning Point USA – positioned itself affirmatively in relation to the conservative, Christian youth of America, but not only conservative young people. Charlie, like Socrates before him, had the guts to address his Democrat-supporting youth adversaries in open debate as well, with the motto: ‘Prove me wrong!’ In a nutshell, he was not afraid to be a truth-teller in the face of enormous opposition from people on the other side of what seemed like an impenetrable ideological barrier.
When he died, he was practising the truth-telling he was known for. This is what the young American parrhesiastes (truth-teller) had in common with a long-dead ancient Greek philosopher called Socrates. And – to refer back to Susan Kokinda of Promethean Action once more, who said this before I did – this is what Charlie’s enemies hated about him: he was not afraid to speak the truth. Or, perhaps more accurately, he was afraid – as he apparently confessed before that fatal day – but despite his fear, he carried on with what he believed was his mission, to awaken American youth (or Americans generally) to the need to conduct open, rational debate about their differences, instead of slinging insults at one another (and we know where most of these insults came from).
In short, it appears that, as several commentators have observed – and as we know from history – in death, Charlie Kirk is proving to be much stronger than in life. This has always been the case with martyrs, or individuals who have died for a cause that they espoused in the face of enormous opposition, from Socrates to Jesus Christ.
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