My Intended Audience
The Arena of Ideas is not a safe space.
It sizzles snow flakes and devours cupcakes.
People might try to cancel Arena participants but they cannot cancel the Arena because we are ALL in the Arena of Ideas, every minute of every day.
People cannot escape the Arena because people–humans–are singularly driven by ideas and the only choice for survival is to have the best ideas. Those who cling to bad ideas are inexorably driven towards destruction – sometimes in slow motion sometimes with speed, but the end of bad ideas is always the same.
The challenge then –for all people–is finding the best ideas. There is no “my truth” and “your truth.” There is only the truth and we have only two choices: evade the truth or enter the Arena of Ideas like a warrior as if your life depends on it. Because it does.
When you enter the Arena you will find three types of people.
The Feeble Minded.
These are mostly harmless of simple folk. Those people who do not have the requisite awareness to be intentional about their existence as a result they are irrelevant in the tides of human thought. They are tossed and blown by every ideological wind, set adrift on the water but they will never shape the tide.
The Unfocused Passive Pseudo Thinker.
They are aware of their ideas, or maybe better said, they are aware that they have ideas, to which the cling with a desperation and woe to anyone who dares challenge them. They talk a big game but pull the veneer back and underneath lurks a basket full of bromides, memes, and folksy tales organized in a hazy, foggy, indistinct intellectual existence. Further discussion threatens their divine right to stagnate. Their reasons are “just because,” and when asked to defend their ideas they are insulted and appeal to the authority du jour.
This group does not shape the tides of human thought but they act as anchors embedding truly disastrous ideas into the cultural zeitgeist. They stumble and strut about the Arena. Their passivity and intellectual obstinance places them at the forefront of tyrannical social, political, and religious movements. The Pseudo Thinkers must be summarily dispatched and then never thought of again.
The Disenfranchised Cynical Intellectual.
They know ideas matter, that there is a cause and effect between ideas and outcome but they have been told their whole life that thinking is useless and ideas are only practical in the moment. The drumbeat of University indoctrination first sapped them of self motivation and self appointment and finally drove them into their own world; a place of psychic torment, unable to reconcile their deepest values with ideological futility.
This group of intellectuals is the driving force of every culture. They are the vehicle of collapse or the engine of growth. They are the ones who take ideas seriously and therefore act in accord with their deepest values.
This group was sold into slavery by western cultures “intellectual” leaders. They understand the game was rigged and that is why they are cynical.
Disenfranchised Cynical Intellectuals, Western Cultures “Intellectual” leadership has failed you because they led you into the Skepticism cul-de-sac. Skepticism is a formal term that you will learn more about as you venture through Spiritual Tyranny.
For now let me say this: Your psychic pain and ideological suffering is by design. Let me invite you to lay down your cynicism, hold your skepticism of all things reason in check and get ready to work for it is to you, and you alone that I care to speak.
