Rafi Simonton on The Chris Hedges Report

"Logic, rationality, and reasonableness" were the traits of 19th-early 20th C. Ivy and Oxbridge scholars certain about the natural hierarchy of race, class, and gender. A viewpoint currently being revived. Also argued for starting with a 1992 American Enterprise Institute lecture, later a 2011 book //The Clash of Civilizations// by Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. Where nothing but western Euro and colonist descendants are really civilized; all the rest primitive, violent, and a threat to the best. If the goal is destruction of enemies as efficiently as possible, then employing the majority of scientists to develop megaton nuclear bombs and bioweapons is reasonable. If you object on the grounds of morality, that's belief based on feelings. The oft cited Golden Rule isn't logically persuasive to those who don't have to worry about being done unto. It was said in Europe the Enlightenment died in the trenches of WWI. Add the economic and political abandonment of us, the working class majority. We who saw what the Best and Brightest (Halberstam) did in Vietnam. An attitude all too visible in the present Dem elite's claim of "meritocracy" and denigration of us as "a basket of deplorables." So no, we don't trust anyone who thinks they know best. Those all too willing to talk at us instead of with us. Read Iain McGilchrist's 2021 //The Matter with Things (Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World)//. And especially John Ralston Saul's 1992 //Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West)//. Thus //Hayek's Bastards (Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right)//2025 by Quinn Slobodian, who also wrote //Crack-Up Capitalism (Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy)//. There is far more to life than mere reason, as artists and mystics know by experience.