How Philosophy Overcomes Propaganda
Norman D. Livergood
"See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
George W. Bush
In this essay, we'll explore how the embodiment of the Perennial Tradition 1 called philosophy overcomes indoctrination, brainwashing, and conditioning. Every advanced teacher within the Perennial Tradition has provided insight into how false communication--propaganda, lies, deception, and mind-control-- can be defeated.
Of all the varied embodiments of the Perennial Tradition--the Hermetic Writings, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jewish Wisdom Tradition, the Pythagorean System, Esoteric Christianity, Neo-Platonism, Sufism, European Gothic Cathedrals, the Cambridge Platonists, the 18th Century Enlightenment-- Plato's writings constitute the most potent, comprehensive, and detailed exposition of the Perennial Tradition still extant. It is through study of Plato's works that we will explore the domain of communication. [...]
Plato's writings help us to understand that the chasm between us and arcane reality is not entirely bridgeable by ordinary sensation. Naive realism assumes that we see, hear, feel, touch, or taste this reality and thereby know its true and complete essence. This view fails to take into cognizance the many "filters" between us and the enigmatic reality.
Part of what each of Plato's dialogues reveals is how widespread ignorance of reality actually is, how extensive and common the delusion is that we understand reality because we sense something we call "the external world" and act on it in ways which seem to prove our complete grasp of its essence. We fail to recognize the myriad distorting elements between us and reality, assuming that our naive grasp of the external world brings complete comprehension.
Plato's dialogues only make sense to persons who have committed themselves to the search for wisdom (philosophy), because they've recognized that there are vast continents of ignorance within their psyche which they need to illuminate. Only if they have an intense desire to understand the veiled aspects of reality will Plato's philosophy have any appeal for them. [...]
"This morning my good friend and confidant . . . alerted me to your document on Plato's philosophical struggle against tyranny. Like everyone else I am suffering from the insanity of the present system and the way you presented the theme of the struggle for truth helps me better understand the overall situation and my little place in the food chain."
"Thank you for your excellent article----it now explains the reason why Plato's Republic is quiety being pulled from library shelves. God forbid, we the masses, should be taught virture and goodness. That is not in keeping with the takeover of our Republic and the moral decay which is happening, every day, from this evil cabal, in the form of 'entertainment.'" [...]
At a time when millions of Americans fail to see the evil of the criminal cabal and its Bush II puppet junta, rediscovery of the insights of the Platonic philosophy--enabling us to overcome propaganda and brainwashing--is of crucial importance: our personal and social lives depend on it.
In an era of mass propaganda, deception, and murder--of American soldiers and Afghans and Iraqis--what might appear mere "philosophical" issues, such as truth and dialectic, can now be seen to be critical powers of discernment we must develop if we're to survive. [...]
We begin the dialectical process by relating these issues to present difficulties. We can legitimately call George W. Bush's statement in his State of the Union speech a LIE when he said: "There are weapons of mass destru ction in Iraq." There were no weapons of mass destruction--as determined by American weapons inspectors themselves. So Bush lied.
The issues can become clouded only if we allow the Bush junta propagandists to operate without challenge. We must set the terms of discourse, not allowing the Bush indoctrinators to define the issues or the concepts. The terms we're investigating possess commonly acknowledged meanings:
1. To lie: 5
* to express an innacurate or false statement
* to convey an untruth
* to make an untrue statement which may or may not be believed by the speaker
2. A lie:
* an untrue or innacurate statment that may or may not be believed true by the speaker
* something that misleads or deceives
* something intended or serving to convey a falsehood
3. Truth: 6
* conformity to fact or actuality
* reality, actuality
* that which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence
Karl Rove and his legion of falsifiers and deceivers (throughout the mainstream media outlets, all owned by right-wing extremists) make such statements as these:
* "A statement is not a lie if it was caused by incomplete or false
information.
* "I don't believe Bush lied."
* "Bush mispoke--but he didn't lie."
* "Bush didn't intend to deceive, so what he said wasn't a lie."
The purpose of all these Bush junta obfuscations is to redefine a lie as the truth. The statement Bush II made in his State of the Union address was untrue: there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Bush lied. It doesn't matter if there were--or weren't--innacurate or false intelligence reports about the WMDs; Bush's statement was still a lie.
It is of no significance what Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity feel about whether or not Bush lied; their feelings don't change the fact that Bush lied. Lying doesn't necessarily involved the intent to deceive; if a statement served to convey a falsehood it is a lie. We can't know what Dubya's intentions were, since those are subjective (and he doesn't have the moral fibre to admit them), but from his track record the most compelling hypothesis would be that he knew he was lying and intended to deceive the American people into an unnecessary, murderous war.
Any person interested in being honest has the responsibility of determining if what he says is true. If you don't know whether something is true or false, then you indicate that you don't know and make it clear that you're merely putting forward a likely hypothesis (as in the paragraph above). That is not what Dubya did. He deliberately and expressly made a statement which was false. [...]
In the twenty-first century, we must make certain to set the field of inquiry and controvert the criminal cabal's deliberate prevarications and dissimulations:
* Bush is a great leader
* Bush started the Iraq war to bring democracy to the Iraqi people
* Americans must sacrifice their freedom for security
* The criminal cabal had no complicity in 9/11
* Spending over $1 trillion on the Iraq war is good for America
* Social Security is in genuine difficulty and Bush has only good intentions in trying to solve the problems
* Bush did not lie about weapons of mass destruction
The present enemies of truth and justice believe they can call a lie a truth; an aggressive, senseless, unnecessary war a struggle against terrorism; an illiterate moron a great leader; and the destruction of America through fascism, deficit spending and militarism, sound policies. They believe they can call anything whatever they want to and the American people will accept it. [...]
When trying to dialogue with persons in the present era, we must limit our efforts to persons committed to honesty and truth, asking the same question Socrates did in the Cratylus:
"Is there anything which you call speaking the truth and speaking falsehood--is there true speech and false speech?"
Dialogue is only possible with those persons who genuinely believe there is objective Truth--beyond personal belief, feeling, or desire. [...]
At present, it would be impossible to dialogue with Bush junta members or any of their fellow-travelers (media propagandists and brain-dead, reactionary citizens), since they simply have no commitment to truth whatsoever. They will tell any lie and commit any atrocity which leads to their goals: power and wealth. Even if one were the host of a radio or TV interview program, trying to dialogue with a person such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Condoleeza Rice, or Karl Rove would be a total waste of time. Their entire output would be nothing but sophistry and propaganda: lies, obfuscations, and posturings.
A person like Hermogenes can believe that truth can be expressed in words without knowing how to express truth in words. But if a person doesn't believe there is a reality named "truth," then there is no purpose in engaging in dialectic--searching for truth--when they don't believe there is truth.
Some people say they believe there is truth, when what they really believe is that each person's beliefs express an individual, subjective truth. This is the denial of the reality of Truth, which is invariable, not subjective, possessing a fixed reality of its own, as Socrates explains.
"It is clear that things have some fixed reality of their own, not in relation to us nor caused by us; they do not vary, swaying one way and another in accordance with our fancy, but exist of themselves in relation to their own reality imposed by nature." [386e] [...]
Entities and actions have a fixed nature and are not subjective in the sense of having a reality relative to a person's beliefs. A name is, Socrates explains, an instrument for separating one kind of reality from another, a horse from a human, for example. Each name refers to a fixed reality. Even if we change a name referring to a specific reality, the reality is the same.
If a propagandist such as Dubya, with the clear intention of deceiving, gives the false name of democracy to the forms of government in America and Iraq, he's still referring to the same, objective realities: American plutocracy (the rule of the wealthy) and Iraqi puppet government. False and deceptive names are used by indoctrinators to try to fool heedless people into believing they're referring to a reality (true democracy: a government for the people) when they're not. [...]
The search for truth is a serious matter, and Socrates is engaged in an earnest investigation into questions of critical importance--then and now. It's possible for a society to become so relativistic and intellectually bewildered that people lose the ability to comprehend reality. War is seen as peace. Tyranny is seen as sound government. An illiterate, degenerate President is seen as a great leader. Ignorance becomes suicidal. Intentional unawareness becomes lethal. [...]
Part of what Socrates is investigating is the phenomenon of our possessing a knowledge of reality in our very being. Entities have a definite, unique composition; one thing is not another thing. We know, primordially, when we are in our right mind, whether a name correctly or incorrectly refers to a particular reality. Mind control, propaganda, and social conditioning can so corrupt the human mind that it does not function correctly; then lies are taken for truth, our destroyers are taken for beneficent leaders. But even when programmed by an oppressive regime, humans retain some connection to their primordial awareness of reality.
The American mind is very far gone: people suffer from generalized possession 9 and hysteria 10-- the loss of the ability to use our senses and our minds. But there is still a preexistent, ineradicable power of understanding in even the most subverted personality that can be awakened.
There has to be this primordial ability to understand reality because we recognize when a name correctly or incorrectly refers to a particular entity. If we required a name in order to recognize a reality, then we would never have been able to know realities and know when names are correct. [...]
As we examine instances of government, for example--America, Britain, fifth century BCE Athens, the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania--we find that none of them contains the total reality which we primordially know to be Good Government.
Intuitively, we recognize that Good Government does not involve a leader lying to the people, a regime supporting only the rich and impoverishing the poor. With each investigation of a particular government, we find a specific aspect of the reality--Good Government--we apprehend in our inner being. Thus there must a complete totality, a wholeness--Good Government--to which the particulars point and which they embody partially. There must be Forms of which Plato spoke. Unless there were Forms, we could not name, since naming presupposes the existence of unchanging natures by reference to which names are meaningful and correct.
We recognize that the form, Good Government, is embodied partially in each of these particular instances of government. What we experience are partial and ever-changing embodiments of Good Government only. But this very actuality implies a changeless, eduring reality embodied in all the instances and containing the perfection of the Idea or Form. [...]
When we use the words "Good Government" in speaking to people, they intuitively know what those words mean. That implies, as we've seen, that they have a primordial knowledge of the reality of Good Government. If humans didn't possess a preexistent awareness of realities--including Forms-- then we could not communicate, since human communication presupposes meaning. [...]
With Socrates' enlightened use of dialectic the dangers of everyday discourse are countered. In common verbal interchange a word such as "Democracy" can cease to serve its natural function of pointing to a reality we all know. The word "Democracy" is uttered by Bush continually, but is no longer used to make manifest a specific nature. It is simply tossed back and forth between people who have a vague feeling that it means something posit ive but have no genuine grasp of the reality to which it refers. Bush propagandists deliberately misidentify the word "Democracy" so that it ceases to serve the function of referring to genuine Democracy.
Even a reality such as "right speech" is known by people intuitively. So someone who uses words in any way he pleases is not speaking correctly. A person must speak according to the way in which things are correctly spoken of, in the way that words refer to a specific reality that we know.
We must regain the understanding, taught by Perennialist sages throughout the ages, that there is a magic in language which contributes to human evolution. Language in some way creates the very world in which we live. Words and concepts point to realities beyond the sensory world and assist us in making contact with a higher dimension.
Intangible Ideas, in Plato's conception--supersensible realities beyond human thought--are appropriated through words, as birds in our hands, and released by the act of discernment, setting the birds free. These Ideas reside in the words independent of the books or the sounds in which the words are encased.
Humans today are rapidly losing the intellectual ability to realize or be concerned that their very lives are threatened by the loss of the ability to use language to understand and communicate. As Thomas Jefferson made clear, "no people can be both ignorant and free." [...]
Contemporary Bush junta propagandists do not even feel the need to disguise their deliberate lies and deceptions. In a recent speech to a captive audience (people screened to ensure Republican sympathies), Bush indicated that his job was "catapulting the propaganda" about Social Security. The Bush junta now broadcasts propaganda disguised as "news stories," witholds vital information from members of Congress, and lies with impunity at every turn.
Even though many Americans have been taken in by this propaganda, we can be sure--as Plato's dialogues demonstrate--that there is still some primordial understanding of enduring realities in all humans. A heartening example of this awareness is now manifesting in the increasing number of Americans who are seeing Bush's war on Iraq as a war crime perpetrated for oil, American corporate profits, and the restructuring of the Middle East. Their awakening to this reality means that the Bush military is now having immense difficulty in recruiting men and women as cannon fodder for their senseless wars of aggression.
The awareness of the essence of Good Government is also reawakening in Americans in increasing numbers. Ultimately, this preexisstent knowledge of reality will make it clear to Americans that the criminal cabal that has seized their government is working against the best interests of U.S. citizens. In our arsenal against the current tyranny, one of our most potent weapons is a penetrating understanding of the wisdom embodied in Plato's dialogues.
"See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
George W. Bush
In this essay, we'll explore how the embodiment of the Perennial Tradition 1 called philosophy overcomes indoctrination, brainwashing, and conditioning. Every advanced teacher within the Perennial Tradition has provided insight into how false communication--propaganda, lies, deception, and mind-control-- can be defeated.
Of all the varied embodiments of the Perennial Tradition--the Hermetic Writings, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jewish Wisdom Tradition, the Pythagorean System, Esoteric Christianity, Neo-Platonism, Sufism, European Gothic Cathedrals, the Cambridge Platonists, the 18th Century Enlightenment-- Plato's writings constitute the most potent, comprehensive, and detailed exposition of the Perennial Tradition still extant. It is through study of Plato's works that we will explore the domain of communication. [...]
Plato's writings help us to understand that the chasm between us and arcane reality is not entirely bridgeable by ordinary sensation. Naive realism assumes that we see, hear, feel, touch, or taste this reality and thereby know its true and complete essence. This view fails to take into cognizance the many "filters" between us and the enigmatic reality.
Part of what each of Plato's dialogues reveals is how widespread ignorance of reality actually is, how extensive and common the delusion is that we understand reality because we sense something we call "the external world" and act on it in ways which seem to prove our complete grasp of its essence. We fail to recognize the myriad distorting elements between us and reality, assuming that our naive grasp of the external world brings complete comprehension.
Plato's dialogues only make sense to persons who have committed themselves to the search for wisdom (philosophy), because they've recognized that there are vast continents of ignorance within their psyche which they need to illuminate. Only if they have an intense desire to understand the veiled aspects of reality will Plato's philosophy have any appeal for them. [...]
"This morning my good friend and confidant . . . alerted me to your document on Plato's philosophical struggle against tyranny. Like everyone else I am suffering from the insanity of the present system and the way you presented the theme of the struggle for truth helps me better understand the overall situation and my little place in the food chain."
"Thank you for your excellent article----it now explains the reason why Plato's Republic is quiety being pulled from library shelves. God forbid, we the masses, should be taught virture and goodness. That is not in keeping with the takeover of our Republic and the moral decay which is happening, every day, from this evil cabal, in the form of 'entertainment.'" [...]
At a time when millions of Americans fail to see the evil of the criminal cabal and its Bush II puppet junta, rediscovery of the insights of the Platonic philosophy--enabling us to overcome propaganda and brainwashing--is of crucial importance: our personal and social lives depend on it.
In an era of mass propaganda, deception, and murder--of American soldiers and Afghans and Iraqis--what might appear mere "philosophical" issues, such as truth and dialectic, can now be seen to be critical powers of discernment we must develop if we're to survive. [...]
We begin the dialectical process by relating these issues to present difficulties. We can legitimately call George W. Bush's statement in his State of the Union speech a LIE when he said: "There are weapons of mass destru ction in Iraq." There were no weapons of mass destruction--as determined by American weapons inspectors themselves. So Bush lied.
The issues can become clouded only if we allow the Bush junta propagandists to operate without challenge. We must set the terms of discourse, not allowing the Bush indoctrinators to define the issues or the concepts. The terms we're investigating possess commonly acknowledged meanings:
1. To lie: 5
* to express an innacurate or false statement
* to convey an untruth
* to make an untrue statement which may or may not be believed by the speaker
2. A lie:
* an untrue or innacurate statment that may or may not be believed true by the speaker
* something that misleads or deceives
* something intended or serving to convey a falsehood
3. Truth: 6
* conformity to fact or actuality
* reality, actuality
* that which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence
Karl Rove and his legion of falsifiers and deceivers (throughout the mainstream media outlets, all owned by right-wing extremists) make such statements as these:
* "A statement is not a lie if it was caused by incomplete or false
information.
* "I don't believe Bush lied."
* "Bush mispoke--but he didn't lie."
* "Bush didn't intend to deceive, so what he said wasn't a lie."
The purpose of all these Bush junta obfuscations is to redefine a lie as the truth. The statement Bush II made in his State of the Union address was untrue: there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Bush lied. It doesn't matter if there were--or weren't--innacurate or false intelligence reports about the WMDs; Bush's statement was still a lie.
It is of no significance what Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity feel about whether or not Bush lied; their feelings don't change the fact that Bush lied. Lying doesn't necessarily involved the intent to deceive; if a statement served to convey a falsehood it is a lie. We can't know what Dubya's intentions were, since those are subjective (and he doesn't have the moral fibre to admit them), but from his track record the most compelling hypothesis would be that he knew he was lying and intended to deceive the American people into an unnecessary, murderous war.
Any person interested in being honest has the responsibility of determining if what he says is true. If you don't know whether something is true or false, then you indicate that you don't know and make it clear that you're merely putting forward a likely hypothesis (as in the paragraph above). That is not what Dubya did. He deliberately and expressly made a statement which was false. [...]
In the twenty-first century, we must make certain to set the field of inquiry and controvert the criminal cabal's deliberate prevarications and dissimulations:
* Bush is a great leader
* Bush started the Iraq war to bring democracy to the Iraqi people
* Americans must sacrifice their freedom for security
* The criminal cabal had no complicity in 9/11
* Spending over $1 trillion on the Iraq war is good for America
* Social Security is in genuine difficulty and Bush has only good intentions in trying to solve the problems
* Bush did not lie about weapons of mass destruction
The present enemies of truth and justice believe they can call a lie a truth; an aggressive, senseless, unnecessary war a struggle against terrorism; an illiterate moron a great leader; and the destruction of America through fascism, deficit spending and militarism, sound policies. They believe they can call anything whatever they want to and the American people will accept it. [...]
When trying to dialogue with persons in the present era, we must limit our efforts to persons committed to honesty and truth, asking the same question Socrates did in the Cratylus:
"Is there anything which you call speaking the truth and speaking falsehood--is there true speech and false speech?"
Dialogue is only possible with those persons who genuinely believe there is objective Truth--beyond personal belief, feeling, or desire. [...]
At present, it would be impossible to dialogue with Bush junta members or any of their fellow-travelers (media propagandists and brain-dead, reactionary citizens), since they simply have no commitment to truth whatsoever. They will tell any lie and commit any atrocity which leads to their goals: power and wealth. Even if one were the host of a radio or TV interview program, trying to dialogue with a person such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Condoleeza Rice, or Karl Rove would be a total waste of time. Their entire output would be nothing but sophistry and propaganda: lies, obfuscations, and posturings.
A person like Hermogenes can believe that truth can be expressed in words without knowing how to express truth in words. But if a person doesn't believe there is a reality named "truth," then there is no purpose in engaging in dialectic--searching for truth--when they don't believe there is truth.
Some people say they believe there is truth, when what they really believe is that each person's beliefs express an individual, subjective truth. This is the denial of the reality of Truth, which is invariable, not subjective, possessing a fixed reality of its own, as Socrates explains.
"It is clear that things have some fixed reality of their own, not in relation to us nor caused by us; they do not vary, swaying one way and another in accordance with our fancy, but exist of themselves in relation to their own reality imposed by nature." [386e] [...]
Entities and actions have a fixed nature and are not subjective in the sense of having a reality relative to a person's beliefs. A name is, Socrates explains, an instrument for separating one kind of reality from another, a horse from a human, for example. Each name refers to a fixed reality. Even if we change a name referring to a specific reality, the reality is the same.
If a propagandist such as Dubya, with the clear intention of deceiving, gives the false name of democracy to the forms of government in America and Iraq, he's still referring to the same, objective realities: American plutocracy (the rule of the wealthy) and Iraqi puppet government. False and deceptive names are used by indoctrinators to try to fool heedless people into believing they're referring to a reality (true democracy: a government for the people) when they're not. [...]
The search for truth is a serious matter, and Socrates is engaged in an earnest investigation into questions of critical importance--then and now. It's possible for a society to become so relativistic and intellectually bewildered that people lose the ability to comprehend reality. War is seen as peace. Tyranny is seen as sound government. An illiterate, degenerate President is seen as a great leader. Ignorance becomes suicidal. Intentional unawareness becomes lethal. [...]
Part of what Socrates is investigating is the phenomenon of our possessing a knowledge of reality in our very being. Entities have a definite, unique composition; one thing is not another thing. We know, primordially, when we are in our right mind, whether a name correctly or incorrectly refers to a particular reality. Mind control, propaganda, and social conditioning can so corrupt the human mind that it does not function correctly; then lies are taken for truth, our destroyers are taken for beneficent leaders. But even when programmed by an oppressive regime, humans retain some connection to their primordial awareness of reality.
The American mind is very far gone: people suffer from generalized possession 9 and hysteria 10-- the loss of the ability to use our senses and our minds. But there is still a preexistent, ineradicable power of understanding in even the most subverted personality that can be awakened.
There has to be this primordial ability to understand reality because we recognize when a name correctly or incorrectly refers to a particular entity. If we required a name in order to recognize a reality, then we would never have been able to know realities and know when names are correct. [...]
As we examine instances of government, for example--America, Britain, fifth century BCE Athens, the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania--we find that none of them contains the total reality which we primordially know to be Good Government.
Intuitively, we recognize that Good Government does not involve a leader lying to the people, a regime supporting only the rich and impoverishing the poor. With each investigation of a particular government, we find a specific aspect of the reality--Good Government--we apprehend in our inner being. Thus there must a complete totality, a wholeness--Good Government--to which the particulars point and which they embody partially. There must be Forms of which Plato spoke. Unless there were Forms, we could not name, since naming presupposes the existence of unchanging natures by reference to which names are meaningful and correct.
We recognize that the form, Good Government, is embodied partially in each of these particular instances of government. What we experience are partial and ever-changing embodiments of Good Government only. But this very actuality implies a changeless, eduring reality embodied in all the instances and containing the perfection of the Idea or Form. [...]
When we use the words "Good Government" in speaking to people, they intuitively know what those words mean. That implies, as we've seen, that they have a primordial knowledge of the reality of Good Government. If humans didn't possess a preexistent awareness of realities--including Forms-- then we could not communicate, since human communication presupposes meaning. [...]
With Socrates' enlightened use of dialectic the dangers of everyday discourse are countered. In common verbal interchange a word such as "Democracy" can cease to serve its natural function of pointing to a reality we all know. The word "Democracy" is uttered by Bush continually, but is no longer used to make manifest a specific nature. It is simply tossed back and forth between people who have a vague feeling that it means something posit ive but have no genuine grasp of the reality to which it refers. Bush propagandists deliberately misidentify the word "Democracy" so that it ceases to serve the function of referring to genuine Democracy.
Even a reality such as "right speech" is known by people intuitively. So someone who uses words in any way he pleases is not speaking correctly. A person must speak according to the way in which things are correctly spoken of, in the way that words refer to a specific reality that we know.
We must regain the understanding, taught by Perennialist sages throughout the ages, that there is a magic in language which contributes to human evolution. Language in some way creates the very world in which we live. Words and concepts point to realities beyond the sensory world and assist us in making contact with a higher dimension.
Intangible Ideas, in Plato's conception--supersensible realities beyond human thought--are appropriated through words, as birds in our hands, and released by the act of discernment, setting the birds free. These Ideas reside in the words independent of the books or the sounds in which the words are encased.
Humans today are rapidly losing the intellectual ability to realize or be concerned that their very lives are threatened by the loss of the ability to use language to understand and communicate. As Thomas Jefferson made clear, "no people can be both ignorant and free." [...]
Contemporary Bush junta propagandists do not even feel the need to disguise their deliberate lies and deceptions. In a recent speech to a captive audience (people screened to ensure Republican sympathies), Bush indicated that his job was "catapulting the propaganda" about Social Security. The Bush junta now broadcasts propaganda disguised as "news stories," witholds vital information from members of Congress, and lies with impunity at every turn.
Even though many Americans have been taken in by this propaganda, we can be sure--as Plato's dialogues demonstrate--that there is still some primordial understanding of enduring realities in all humans. A heartening example of this awareness is now manifesting in the increasing number of Americans who are seeing Bush's war on Iraq as a war crime perpetrated for oil, American corporate profits, and the restructuring of the Middle East. Their awakening to this reality means that the Bush military is now having immense difficulty in recruiting men and women as cannon fodder for their senseless wars of aggression.
The awareness of the essence of Good Government is also reawakening in Americans in increasing numbers. Ultimately, this preexisstent knowledge of reality will make it clear to Americans that the criminal cabal that has seized their government is working against the best interests of U.S. citizens. In our arsenal against the current tyranny, one of our most potent weapons is a penetrating understanding of the wisdom embodied in Plato's dialogues.
posted by Traveller at
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