Enviro-totalitarians Plato's Successors

Jim Crum writes

I happened to hear the NPR program on the "Climategate" or "Climaquiddick"- the scandal no one wants to mention in the old media. For them it is hardly an issue, an event only worth a brief mention as they barrel down the abyss by trying to fix an unproven planetary issue by taxing us into the stone age. It was very bizarre to listen to the report and it became quite clear that the denial tag is firmly in the court of those promoting global warming and all of its taxing and wealth redistribution programs.

If "consensus" has been reached by using falsified data, purposely distorting programming, and suppressing opposing views, then what type of consensus is that? If those with questions then find that the source data has been lost or dumped, what does that say about the scientific method being followed? It means that this endeavor has regressed from science to dogma.

It's my job to pay, their job to think. I am a moron who just works for a living to support these intellectual giants who set policy and national agenda.

Since HUGE money is involved, perhaps this is just Climatological Alchemy.

JJC.


My response

In Open Society and Its Enemies I-Plato Karl Popper shows that Plato advocated a strict totalitarian society divided among the "guardians" who had wisdom and could think, a warrior class who would enforce the guardians' views, and the workers, everyone else. Roughly, says Popper, these were equivalent to a shepherd (the guardian class), a sheep dog, the warrior class, and the sheep, the general public. Plato was reacting specifically to the change, progress, and individualism that had evolved under Athenian democracy. Plato was contemptuous of democracy and individual choice. To Plato, justice meant that the sheep should stay in their place. Plato's vision has served as a model for successive generations of totalitarians. In America, authoritarian socialists, following Plato, have used a scheme whereby they call themselves moderate or mainstream, advertise their brand of totalitarianism as "social democracy", and establish political correctness, clamp down on alternative speech, and train themselves to think in unison, guided by the Ochs Sulzbergers, their Wall Street friends, the guardian class, and, in universities.

The Democratic Party's vision of society is totalitarian but differs from Plato's in that he saw academics as comprising the guardian class, whereas the Ochs Sulzbergers and Wall Street, a business elite, comprise the guardian class in the Democratic Party's scheme. Academics and the Democratic Party media are part of the warrior class. Incidentally, much like today's Democrats, Plato strongly argued that weapons should only be in the hands of the warrior class.

The current enviro-totalitarians are one more in a long line of followers of Plato's reactionary vision of society as a single organism. Plato was interested in arresting change. His theory of forms is that an unchanging ideal is real, the changing phenomena of the sensual world are inferior, degraded versions of an unchanging reality that the forms constitute.

His prescription was to reinstate the world as it had existed in primitive times. This is the vision of the enviro-totalitarians. It is a totalitarian, reactionary and elitist position.