Obama's Mental Rigidity Is Dangerous
It was Plato who wrote that "the ability to keep two opposite ideas in mind is a sign of the civilized mind."
Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle were all about spirited dialogue. That is why the Greeks of the Golden Age discovered so many basic things that still shape our lives, all in a very short time, five centuries BCE. To discover new things, you have to wonder about different possibilities. Open dialogue is the magic ingredient for science, the arts and humanities, business, finance, and technology.
All power groups try to shut up their competition. Microsoft tries to silence Apple and vice versa, but both of them want to beat out creative startups that could overthrow them. Apple started out as a revolutionary upstart and is now just another Monopoly player. Monopolies try to conquer minds.
The philosopher Plato wrote dialogues, not decrees, to give many voices a chance to be heard. Plato's dialogue "The Symposium" literally means "the drinking party," where half a dozen colorful wine-bibbing characters give their personal opinions about love and sex (Eros). It's a free debate among avid talkers: the medical doctor, the comedy writer, the hungry sex maniac, the mystic, and finally Socrates. The Greeks loved contests (agon) – which is why they liked the Olympic Games. At its creative peak, politics in Athens was one big debating society. It was called "democracy."
In Plato's Symposium, nobody yells "SHUT UP!," which why it is still important and fun to read. Ideas flow freely, and at the end, the tipsy talkers have covered a lot of interesting ideas about love and sex. More than two thousand years later, Sigmund Freud took his basic concepts from Plato's Symposium.
Every creative period is an age of ferment – the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the rise of capitalism, the European Enlightenment, and the American Founders.
Which is where Obama comes in.
Obama is the anti-Plato.
Obama can't stand open dialogue. He begins by making up his mind with rigid determination, and then works to destroy anybody who disagrees. He operates by fear, not dialogue.
This is why his opponents in Chicago were always forced to drop out of the race before election day. It's why he destroyed Hillary six years ago by playing the race card. It's also why Obama has the worst press relations in history, according to the liberal Huffington Post. And it's why Obama hates Bibi Netanyahu, who is trying to save his country from nuclear Armageddon. Obama has promised to scapegoat American Jews if Congress votes against his fantasy "treaty."
Bibi comes from an open debating culture. He has to tolerate all kinds of opposition, not much of it polite. Obama comes from a power culture in Chicago. Just listen to Obama's guru, Rev. Jerry Wright. In Jerry Wright's sermons, no opponent has a respectable opinion. Dissidents are scapegoated and abused, by words if not deeds. (Malcolm X was assassinated by Elijah Muhammed, who set the mold. As for scapegoating, just look at the treatment Justice Clarence Thomas receives at the hands of the New York Times.) Totalitarians are what they are.
Intelligence agencies around the world have been studying Obama videos to see how he reacts to open criticism. You can see the answer on YouTube: Obama reacts with fury, like Vladimir Putin, who might as well be his double. For Obama, there is no such thing as a mutually respectful debate.
The totalitarian mind can't stand disagreement. It's too anxiety-provoking, too much like a close encounter with death.
Mental rigidity is the mark of the totalitarian mind. Imagine a surgeon or a pilot who starts with a rigid plan and can't adjust when the unexpected happens – which it always does. I can't remember a single issue in the last six years where Obama has shown an open mind. Not a single one. Please correct me if I'm wrong. (I can handle it.)
General Dempsey just told the world that he advised Obama to drop his rigid determination to come to an Iran "agreement" at any cost – but Obama wouldn't listen. Obama is mentally fixated on the cult idea that Israel is the real problem in the Middle East – as if Shi'ites and Sunni's hadn't been killing each other for a thousand years before Israel's independence as a modern state in 1948. As if nuclear proliferation to terrorists isn't a thousand times more dangerous.
It's Obama's surrender to the nuke-hungry mullahs that has now caused Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan to join Israel in a defensive alliance. Apparently the Arabs don't really think Israel is a threat. Just the opposite: they are looking for Israel to help them to beat off the scary mullahs. Israel and the Arabs get on the phone every day and have been doing that for years. In the Sinai, where Egypt and Jordan are under attack by the primitive murder cult of ISIS, Israel is actively cooperating with Arab regimes.
The Arabs think Obama is dangerously wrong about the Armageddon cult in Tehran. The Arabs and Persians have lived on the opposite shores of the Gulf for thousands of years. They should know.
As a direct result of Obama's mental rigidity, the United States and the world are now facing a nuke-hungry, suicide-preaching Jim Jones cult in the Gulf.
With America's surrender, the ayatollah has just bought 100 air-refueling planes from Russia, and an equal number of advanced jets from China. There's only one use for that hardware: long-distance power projection. The Iranians want to control the whole Middle East, and they are already well-positioned to strike at the two strategic bottlenecks of the Gulf and the Red Sea. That means control of forty percent of the world's oil supply. Europe will kiss the earth for that oil.
But the mullahs are absolutists, and jihad wants to conquer the globe. They won't stop in the Middle East – which makes Putin's sale of WMD equipment that can easily reach Russia look like Mad Tsar Boris again.
Persian imperialism isn't limited to the Middle East. Iran's proxy terror group Hezb'allah is deeply entrenched in Argentina and other South American countries. Hezb'allah has sent and lost thousands of fighters in Syria at the behest of the mullahs. It controls thousands of deeply buried rockets pointed at Israel. As the trade embargo against Iran is lifted, Iran will have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on its favorite Armageddon toys. It's already happening, and Obama has known about it for a long time. This is not a surprise to the players.
The ayatollah isn't waiting for his nukes. He is playing killer chess against Obama's irresolute checkers. If the Iranians can kill their enemies with knives or stones, they don't need nukes. They are not choosy.
The world has never faced anything like this. Sure, there have been suicide cults in human history, like the divine emperor in WWII Japan or Hitler in the bunker. We saw the Jim Jones cult commit mass suicide in Guyana. But suicide cults have never had the technology to set off Armageddon at an ayatollah's press of a button.
The American left seems to be drawn to Obama because he props up their goofy ideas with his own absolute certainties. In the first campaign, Obama had to be elevated to godlike status, like any other messianic leader. That desperate craving for absolute certainty isn't what this country is about. It's the habit of imperialists and socialists.
Karl Marx was a 19th-century Prussian: rageful, rigid, controlling, power-hungry, bigoted, racist, always ready to pick a fight. The Prussians worshiped Frederick the Great for his tall soldiers and his willingness to sacrifice them in war. This was Marx's vision of the ideal state, following Friedrich Hegel, the Kaiser's official philosopher. Hegel "proved" that imperial Prussia was closer to the perfect state than anything in history. The proof was top-down control of all soldiers, Junckers, women, and children; newspaper censorship; and arrogant contempt for anybody outside Prussia.
Prussia pioneered the goose-stepping soldiers marching to the trenches in World War I, with good citizens standing on the curbs raising their rigidly straight arms and yelling, "Hoch! Hoch!"
Twenty years later that turned into "Heil Hitler!"
Even before WWI, it was Prussian-dominated Germany that pioneered Nazi practices on Africans in German colonies.
Marx borrowed his political fantasy from Hegel and just flipped one word – "materialism" instead of the more spiritual "idealism" of Hegel. Marx predicted a materialistic paradise to come, while Hegel believed in an otherworldly paradise. There is no real difference.
Emotionally, Obama is a totalitarian. His answer to any critic is "SHUT UP!"
...which is why the United States is now being dragged into the most suicidal "non-treaty" ever proposed. Depending on the alignment of the stars or the day of the week, this surrender is either a constitutional treaty or just a memo to the United Nations. If it's Tuesday, this must be a treaty, but maybe not the other days of the week.
We have never seen an American president with Obama's mental rigidity.
Americans used to tolerate a reasonable level of open disagreement. You can see it in debates among the Founders, in the Federalist Papers. Yes, there have been times of rising passions and fanaticism as well. Still, even in the turbulent years before the Civil War, Lincoln and Douglas were able to debate slavery and the Union without coming to blows. The tradition of open debate was still powerful. By comparison to Lincoln-Douglas, our televised presidential debates today are pitiful exercises in demagogy. Lincoln and Douglas weren't limited to sound bites, and they had thought through their positions without the aid of Hollywood or public relations professionals. They talked as if their voters could think.
Twenty-five years ago, the Cold War seemed to demonstrate that democracies with free speech and free markets outperform rigid, top-down economies. Rational people learned that lesson, and today Russia and China are trying various degrees of openness. No Russian or Chinese politicians are talking about bringing back the Workers' Paradise, because ordinary people still remember what it was like.
But in Obama's college career, Marxism as treated with superstitious awe and respect. Nobody seemed to notice that Marx's actual ideas are sophomoric. The idea of class war goes back to the Romans, and all of his vaunted predictions have failed. What's new in Marxism is not true, and what's true isn't new. Marx himself was a dreadful human being, and the movement he spawned killed an authoritatively estimated 100 million people in the 20th century.
Marxism has been rejected wherever it's been tried, except for North Korea and Venezuela, where central planners can't get enough toilet paper to the people – in spite of immense oil wealth.
As for North Korea, where Marx and Lenin are still heroes, even American liberals are shuddering.
The historic failure of Marxist totalitarian regimes never got through the concrete skulls of navel-gazing professors – because fields like Ethnic Studies are intellectual monopolies. Narcissistic cult professors tolerate no dissent. Open dialogue isn't their thing. They do not educate; they just indoctrinate lost and vulnerable young people. Marxist professors already know all the answers. They have nothing new to learn, and they grind out carbon copies of themselves.
Obama is the logical result.
His mental rigidity is dangerous.
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