Week 14: Intro and Required Responses
Over the last week you have been asked to review the course material with respect to two composition assignments or at least two roughly defined assignment groups. You’ve been given the terms you should be familiar with and asked to review the material which introduced you to them. In this way, you have been given the material with which to construct a “perspective optics,” a set of lenses and relations with which to see our world. It’s a truth about human beings and language that humans can only see what the terms they use disclose to them. Scientific and historical evidence notices this. Recall from the Addendum to the first day’s lecture, the story of the tribe with no word for
blue, and what was said of the word “race.”
(The word “blue” is the last of all the words denoting color to appear in most languages. Scientists located a Pacific Island tribe whose language had no word denoting
blue.
(Homeric Greek also has no word for
blue, but that was nearly three thousand years ago for an Indo-European language like ours.) They went and administered a test to the natives: it consisted of a card, the size of a page, of colored squares in a grid pattern. All of them were green, but one was obviously blue—obvious to
us,
whose language contains the word “blue,” but not to them whose language doesn’t. When asked to point out the square whose color didn’t match the others, the natives were confused and resorted to guessing. That which is denoted by the word “race” does not actually exist. Race is a
fiction—recall that the already given definition of the word “fiction” from two modules ago is
something you have to believe in for it to have any power over you.
The conclusion from the evidence concerning the words “blue” and “race:” “without a word, that which does exist doesn’t and with the word, that which doesn’t exist, does.”)
That I am extensively repeating the Addendum to the First Day’s lecture should give you an indication of the structural integrity of this course; it is the opposite of paratactical—everything is related to everything else. It would be best to reread and reflect on that lecture now and review what I meant by the words,
seeing, thinking, speaking
and
writing
and how they defined the purpose, goals and subject matter of this course. Real
seeing,
as already defined,
consists in “looking at what you are looking through.” You have been given a field of terms acting as a perspective optics for your reality—you have been given a good look at what you are looking through. You are assigned to use that look to write your papers recording what you can see when you look at your
world
(even the word “world” was defined—two modules ago) with those defined terms.
(Required response—cite that definition of “world.”).
You have also been confronted with arguments. Arguments, or at least good ones, are nothing but well-defined words in logical structures which lead to conclusions. The short videos from
Academy of Ideas
were very clearly structured arguments—always preceded by a definition of terms and proceeding with appropriately cited authorities and may serve, as already said, as models for your papers as well as sources for the definitions of terms. You were also presented with deductive reasoning which reaches the conclusions so well stated in the
Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s argument proceeds from one indemonstrable premise and one indisputable fact. The premise is that Nature’s God (not the god of the Bible but a
rational
demiurge) created the Universe which always follows rational laws and the fact that Isaac Newton, a human being created by that God, discovered those laws. (Newton’s Laws still explain everything visible to the naked eye.) Given those two assertions, the conclusions of
the Declaration
are inevitable. That is
deductive
argumentation as it proceeds from the indemonstrable premise, but also
inductive
inference as it proceeds from the indisputable specific fact, working together. Gatto’s authority to make his argument depends on your believing that he can make accurate generalizations from a lifetime of specific experiences as a teacher, in his powers of
inductive
reasoning. That’s a rational belief in his rational abilities…and in his honesty and candor—his
reason
and his
reasonableness, the two criteria of rational discourse, as we observed when we treated the
Declaration of Independence.
You were also presented with my argument, in Module 5, concluding that every course in college level reading comprehension, composition and critical thinking had to have as its focus Propaganda. Go back and inspect that argument and
(required response) cite the text.
Since it is one of the express purposes of the course to get you to look at what you are looking through, and since what you are always looking through (remember William Casey’s remark cited in my speech on Inner Fascism) is Propaganda, and since Propaganda is always a sub-rational appeal which must exclude the authority of any rational appeal and must treat its audience as a sort of collective Pavlovian dog, and since you are its audience molded into the form of that appeal, a collective Pavlovian dog, and since reading comprehension, composition and critical thinking cannot be taught to a collective Pavlovian dog, but can only be taught to a rational individual, what is the inevitable logical consequence concerning a course in Reading Comprehension and Composition? (required response).
These three required responses are due by Wednesday. They require, minimally, the kind of review you should already be in the middle of to prepare for your papers. As such, they should not be difficult to complete by Wednesday. Please turn them in here.
Week 13
Throughout this course, from the very beginning, you have been confronted with the forces which have shaped your world and the world of everyone you know: the social conditioning of the school system and its exploitation by the propaganda industry, which is to say all of the electronic media of your culture the media of your culture—television
programming
(there’s a reason it’s called
programming), the “entertainment” industry, the social media platforms, all of them under the control of the triumvirate of shared interests identified as “fascism,” or, in Eisenhower’s terms, “the military/industrial complex” (originally the military/industrial/ Congressional complex in Eisenhower’s first draft). In the words of Senator Mike Gravel, which I quoted in my speech on Interior fascism, “The military/industrial not only owns our government lock, stock, and barrel; it owns our
culture.” Throughout the course you have been given well-defined terms in well-constructed relations and arguments, both in the lectures and in the videos and in the reading comprehension exercises, which may serve as lenses through which you may see the reality of your world. In your papers you are to use those terms to do so. In the assigned self-re-evaluation you are to use those terms and the repeated statements of the aims and purpose of this course, which encompass every one of my texts from the syllabus to the latest week, to assess yourself, to assess the effects of these forces upon you and your performance in this course. The terms
abulia, anomie, angst, parataxis, the causes of conformity, submission to authority, and “mass formation,” the appeal of propaganda to a sub-rational group consciousness should be well known to you by now. Their meaning comprises your reality. The first paper you have been assigned is to look into the
interior—yours---through these lenses; the next one will be to use them to interpret the exterior through them. To this end, you have been given the images of dystopia—from the very first week’s video—In Shadow—to Orwell’s
1984
to the non-fictional arguments stated. by Ellul in his book and Huxley in his speech. Your second paper is to be about the
exterior—the dystopia of your world. You may do a full reading of all or part of the vision expressed, strictly in symbolic imagery, of
In Shadow, indeed you were asked to begin to do so in your very first assignment. You were given just a few symbols to interpret—now you can interpret whole stretches of that visual treatment of the dystopia we all live in. Once again, this course has given you the terms and concepts to do so. Or you can turn to Orwell and Huxley and Ellul to help you understand the world you live in. It is up to you. You will need to turn in these papers—the only papers required of you-- in final form by the final week, so you had better start working on drafts for them now so that we can both be working on your re-writes.
Also contributing to a vision of dystopia is this week’s video from Truthstream Media,
The Minds of Men.
When you watch it, you may recall the second part of the second video of
The Century of the Self, which dealt with not only the sub-rational but the sub-conscious programming of the human being, also present in Brave New World, and which is being called “psychological warfare,” at the moment.
Video: The Minds of Men
Please watch this movie on the history of MK Ultra
The Minds of Men- Truthstream Media