Publius Returns

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Left Hegelians – Arguing within a Construct

I belong to a Tea Party group. I thought it was the thing to do. Although I still think the movement has merit, I find myself more at odds with their approach with every session I attend. I was a soldier. I thought that was the thing to do as well. But during that sojourn, my eyes began to slowly open.

No, I am not against the military, nor am I against those who work hard to make the government understand that they are displeased with their policies. What I am against is their approach.

At a recent Tea Party meeting, I listened to a rather heated discussion. A young man, who I did not know, began to speak with a great deal of passion. He had obviously armed himself well with an understanding of the Constitution and could recite it verbatim, applying its verses to the problems of today. I was impressed with his passion, his articulation, and the notes he had beside him. Another gentleman loudly chimed in with much the same rhetoric. The young man seemed obsessed with the idea that the Tea Party was about taxes. Is it not? The other fellow led the discussion to a few more topics that were upsetting him beyond just taxes. I agreed with both.

As well, I had received an email recently from another Tea Party group calling themselves Contract with America. They had solicited statements from several other Tea Party groups and individuals about policies they wanted changed. They had settled on 22 such statements with the idea of sending them to those in the administration and those running for seats in government. They were patently the same statements being asked by everyone in the Tea Party movement. We want this and this and that. All were directed at the government to change things that they deemed unconstitutional or were hurting their individual situation. For the most part I found them shallow and some of them rather absurd. But they were working hard, their points well taken, and they were passionate about their concerns, as are we all.

Other groups are cornering the candidates and grilling them with questions: What do you believe about pro-life, et al? How will you attack that if you are elected? The young man I spoke of earlier was very vocal about that approach.

The Construct of Context

I have a really big problem with all of that. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let us take a paper plate and lay it on the table. Let us further suppose that the plate represents Germany’s Third Reich. At the plate’s center are those who believe in the ideology of Hitler. Like any group of humans, they disagree about how things are being done to accomplish the goals of their ideology. It matters not the morality of it. One could be heard to lament, “I think we should put 10 people in the ovens.” To which another responds, “No, it would be more efficient to throw in 20.” The first retorts, “But the ovens are not rated for 20 people at once.”

Surrounding the center of the plate are the German people. Many don’t know what to make of Hitler’s ideology, don’t understand it in any case, but are captivated by what it promises. Others don’t believe it at all and some, unbeknownst to them, will face the ovens.

Let me put the example in a different way. The American mentality did not agree with the Reich, and eventually went to war over it. The Americans stood on a different ideological plate than the Reich. German soldiers fought hand to hand against American soldiers. Imagine again that the theater of war was a third plate. On the Reich’s plate, arguments continued over how best to accomplish its ideology. On the American’s plate the same thing was occurring. All during this, the combatants battled each other on a plate not occupied by either the Reich or the Americans. But they did so in the context of the construct under which they both had idealized their roles. We did the same in Vietnam where I slogged through a wasteland of someone else’s construct.

What this illustrates is that each nation works within the context of its construct. The ideology of the Reich was a construct of Aryan superiority and the eventual take over of Europe. The ideology of the Americans was diametrically opposed to this, but stood by for years because no one wanted war. But it could not be avoided. The combatants were directed by each construct to battle the other. And each did so in the context of their own construct.

And that is exactly what the Tea Party movement is doing. It is trying to achieve its goals by doing battle within the context of a construct. “I want lower taxes!” Why? Obviously because they see taxes being too high. But the Tea Party does battle within the context of a regime the workings of which they do not understand. And they fight symptoms instead of the underlying cause of those symptoms. A hundred years ago, we did not understand cancer, but we knew it caused pain. We treated the pain with morphine. Today, we also treat the pain, but as well we treat the cause we now understand. The Tea Party movement does not understand the underlying cause of their pain and so do battle with symptoms. And they do it within the parameters set by their politicians. Good luck on that!

I listened to the questions of the impassioned Tea Party groups to their prospective representatives that were hoping to gain seats in the senate. The questions were well within the context of the construct that our present administration wants. Doing battle on one front leaves the other exposed. The administration, the government, wants it that way. They want us to work within the context of their construct, just as Hitler wanted the people of Germany to work within theirs … and they did.

People are unlikely to expand that construct to include the cause, the underlying source of the problem. Instead of asking their representative candidate how they will approach the 16th Amendment, why don’t they ask a question like:

“Sir, would you please contrast the work of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Hegel versus that of our Founding Fathers versus that of today’s administration.”

A simpler question might be, “Sir, would you explore America’s core values and tell us why political correctness is an assault on them.”

An even more visible question would be, “Sir, can you tell me why Americans have turned to tattoos, obesity, and diabetes while the products they used to make are now being produced in Asia.”

Those who could not answer or who had no idea what you were talking about would be those caught up so deeply in the well constructed construct of socialism that they too could only work within the context provided for them. They would undoubtedly have no understanding of the source of our problems.

It is not enough to scream bloody murder about tax increases. It is incumbent upon Americans to expand and change the construct within which our government(s) works to expose the underlying cause and the assault on American core values. The context of our policies is all that people see in front of them, and they try their best to work within it.

But it only tries to place band aids on symptoms.

The young man wanted to know how the politician would serve his immediate needs. He wanted to know how the politician was going to fix things. The discussion was contextual and seated within the construct of a new social engineering neither seems to understand.

The problem lies in the fact that a large segment of our society wants to reconstruct America. It has given us a new construct, one which we don’t understand. To continue to do battle on the turf given us is to play into their hands. As in Germany, during and after the rise to power of the Nazis, the nation worked within a soiled, sour, evil construct.

We have talked about the rise of the new left during the 60’s, the Alinsky community organizers, the progressives, and the moral relativists. We have not talked about their genesis.

One can reach as far back as Plato, Aristotle, or the Old Testament, but the era that describes, more than any other the state of our administration today begins with Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Immanuel Kant.

Hegel was German. Kant was from Konigsberb, Prussia. Kant’s work came to life in approximately 1760. Hegel’s influence spanned an era beginning about 60 years later.

Upon Hegel’s death, the Young Hegelians split between the Right and Left Hegelians. It is the Left Hegelians that heralded the likes of Carl Marx and his ilk.

The remnants of the Enlightenment and America's capitalistic system were to be undercut by the philosophy of German intellectuals. The philosophies of Kant and Hegel launched a frontal attack on the concept of an independent individual, an independent reality and the Law of Identity. Further, to reality being unknowable or non-existent they both advanced that the consciousness, man's mind, was not capable of perceiving reality, thus man initialized his own construct. Kant and Hegel closed the door of philosophy to reason. Contrary to Aristotle and Aquinas, Kant and Hegel asserted that the mind was the creator of reality not the perceiver of reality. This thinking lay at the heart of German "idealism" and easily later led to the philosophy of pragmatism. At the core of these new philosophies was that there are no principles, because there are no facts. Reality was fluid, to be manipulated by the primacy of consciousness. Reality, as perceived by man's mind, is a distortion. Kant and then Hegel were determined to save the morality of self-sacrifice, from reason. If man was incompetent to think or know reality, it only remained to determine who would control man and who would collect man's "self-sacrifices."
This philosophy gave the philosophical basis to the most revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Hegelian system of political thought was totally alien to Western civilization. Hegel proposed that the State is also God. That the only duty of the citizen was to serve God by serving the State. The State is reason and the citizen can only find "freedom" by worship and obedience to the State, of course, controlled by an "elite.

It is this philosophy that has American political thought in its grip. While taxes, fiscal responsibility, et al are symptoms of that attack, they are not the underlying cause. It is that upon which our efforts should point.

It is not easy to understand the rise of the left, the relativists, or the social progressives to power without some knowledge of its genesis. Once at the bottom of its core value set, we can change it. And in doing so begin to change those policies that are so abhorrent to us.

The Tea Party movement is not that attack. It is, in fact, stuck in its own naïveté.

It is for this reason that, although I applaud their energy, their passion, and understand their frustration, I wish to withdraw from their present way of approaching the problem.