>
> On May 16, 2008, at 6:25 AM, Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
> > But they can't
> > even engage the idea that the U.S. is a terrorist nation. Until
> > they can
> > hear this, until they can unlearn their nationalist education they
> > are lost
> > to the kind of politics that can help to turn the U.S. around.
>
> You think you can undo foundational myths with rational argument?
> Good luck.
To answer your question: No.
But I think you only partially read what I wrote. If you notice I mentioned what Socrates called "turning around". The idea of turning a person around, in the "popular" imagination is mostly represented by Plato's myth of the cave. But I think this was Plato's ex post explanation of Socrates. Socrates seems to have argued that only "lived-experience" can convince a person to "hear" an argument she has been "armored" against. Socrates uses the Greek term for "turning around" often in the dialogues and also in extra Platonic reporting on his life.
Sorry to become philosophical. But in a sense until a person is turned around by a lived-experience -- a strike, a struggle for education, contact with worlds and people outside of her known world -- rational argument is all we have.
My argument with the left Obamaites who should know better is that they believe that the lived experience of a charismatic campaign is somehow equal to a struggle like "Freedom Summer" which was truly transforming. I have often heard this analogy to civil rights movement experience from people who argue that the Obama electoral drive is some kind of "movement." It's ridiculous, as I think you agree. If anything this kind of involvement in electoral politics is a way to integrate into the elite-auxiliary to the ruling class. It is the opposite of being turned around; its a reinforcement of indoctrination. So primarily I think it is useless to argue with the Obama apparatchiks, but it isn't useless to argue with a young person who is excited with politics for the first-time and sees Obama as a new thing.
In the end it always takes more than argument, rational or otherwise. I thought you knew I knew that. But sometimes arguments can plant the seeds. I know it did with some of my friends from high school.
Doug wrote: "I wonder how often Jerry Monaco has tried to divorce people from their delusions. If he's tried a lot I bet his success rate is pretty low."
Well, "there is no success like failure, and failure is no success at all." We always fail. That is the thing about life. It is a chronicle of not succeeding. If we succeeded more than we failed it wouldn't be life, it would be mysticism, or something out of a account of the gods. I used to think that success was some kind of goal but my life in chess and poetry taught me that you never succeed even when you win. The value of chess and poetry is that the failures are their for reviewing, for those who are honest enough to review; they are buried in unplayed variations and other counterfactuals. This is the whole reason why I brought up Bourdeiu's distinction between the "sayable" and the "hearable". Unfortunately when the counterfactuals are not even "sayable" you can misrecognize failure as some kind of great success -- thus comes "the end of history" and other delights.
Jerry
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