Truth Claims & Platonic Apologetics
 

If someone was making a case for human psychological determinism and didn’t take into account the history of creative ideas, (where they come from, if everyone or even most could have them, their effect on culture and civilization and their outcome on individuals who strived for originality), but instead fathered an unseen dimension where all ideas reside, thus giving them no credit as original inventions in us but only as entities in the unseen spiritual world, then we would judge that thinker as all for God and none for us, maybe even a hater of human nature. This is what we mean by massive structural negation in a system of thought. By proposing freedom for mankind, Plato was in fact introducing a new form of slavery. He was an evil genius who disdained life the way it was and turned philosophy toward mysticism.

If a patriotic apologist was making the claim that the American state has long stood for liberty in the world without regards to the issues of either its history of institutional slavery, its state-sponsored genocide of the First Peoples, the harboring of Nazi War Criminals after World War II or it’s overthrow of duly elected governments in the second and third worlds, especially in the Americas during the Cold War, then the historical theory being espoused (i.e. America and liberty go hand in hand), would be an abject failure based on an error from experience. The known historical facts contradict the assertion. America is often a democratic fascist state. Its conservative apologists excuse the state’s sins – such as human right violations and the use of torture on POW during the War on Terror fiasco – as part of its manifest destiny.

Here’s another structural negation: In a concerted negative thesis on the subconscious of man, the “Great Rationalist,” Sigmund Freud presented his case rationally for the conclusion that man is essentially irrational. The universal intent of the Ego, Id and Superego, human sexuality as substratum of the personality and The Dream Theory itself, lead to no other conclusion except that man is at the whim of forces he has no control over. Freud took the rational scientific co-relationship of hysteria and sex-abuse – his patients suffering from hysteria at the time he wrote and published his seduction theory, The Aetiology of Hysteria, were, in some form or another, sexually abused – and then after its unanimous rejection by colleagues, suppressed the theory as an act of intellectual cowardice.

Here’s an error from experience: Marx asserted that humans weren’t free but that their epoch was the product of the sum of the social relations of production, i.e., culture in economic terms. He produced an overall scientific theory discredited by the failure of its predictions, especially that capitalism would increase human misery in the advanced nations to the point of revolution, where then, technical evolution would bring about wonderful socialist developments. The falseness of the theory of surplus labor value, i.e, the capitalists steal labor in the guise of profit, has also proved difficult. He maintained that surplus value is the general groundwork of the entire capitalist system, ignoring supply, demand, distribution, profit by non-productive ends and much else.

Well, there’s Plato, America, Freud and Marx, but if you’re really talking myth, then there’s Jesus and Mohammed. If you’re a Christian, you have to live with this depressing fact: no existential credible evidence exists that such a historical figure ever walked this earth. He, like so many sun-gods was born in December of a virgin birth, a lone mystic wanderer who was killed by the old guard when he challenged current wisdom and was resurrected in the spring. In works such as Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, this very phenomena of a virgin birth in December, a death by crucifixion by the established power and a resurrection in the spring is exceedingly common among many ancient and native cultures.

If you are on the other side of monolithic intolerance, then here’s what you have to live with: the Koran is one of the most militant hateful and irrational documents ever put to pen by an individual. Mohammed’s hatred for the infidel is worse than Marx’s for the bourgeois.

Here’s something about truth claims and apologetics: If Freud says it’s about sex, he’s right, but in a way he could never imagine, indeed, it’s about sex-abuse. If Marx said it was all about surplus labor value, he could never have thought modern middle-class labor would become the basis of the modern global economy. If the Prophet produced a hate-filled firebrand about ‘Us and Them’ he could never have hoped that Nazi-type zealots would commandeer his labor and literally kill his enemies. Platonic and Neo-Platonic effects on the world-stage, especially through Christianity and Marxism have been a historical disaster, one causing the Dark Ages, the other the monumental figures of democide of the last century. Turns out there were way more middle-class people to eliminate than Marx predicted, far more Jews and witches than the Christians counted on, billions of more infidels than Mohammed could dream and way more philosopher kings applying for the job as dictator than Plato could have ever guessed.