Hate Mail

In mentioning the traditional, typical framing of "religion vs. liberty" practiced in most of the media, academia and in pop culture today, I didn't mean to imply that for the majority of the people who frame their discourse and thinking with it that it was any deeper than that clear self-contradicted BBC report on the Supreme Court's abortion decision this week.  I think for most of the people who use that frame it is a superficial and facile substitute for real thinking and dealing with the substance of an issue.  It has been a framing that is anything but a real and deep way of addressing issues.  It's not different in that from the framing of the pro-Brexit side or the Trump side that our problem come from some "foreigners" getting privileges handed to them that are kept from them.  Or that if only terrorists didn't keep using powerful military style automatic and other weapons that having the country awash in guns would be no problem at all.  There really is a lot in common between Voltaire and the French Encyclopedists and the NRA.  When either of them say "liberty" you'd better watch your ass.

That kind of superficial thinking is endemic and it is a problem, not especially or even most dangerously among those without a college degree or a high school diploma, but with every level of our allegedly educated class, from your lower-mid-brow scribblers right up to the robed, secular clergy of our federal courts who can say, essentially, the same thing as the most vulgar idiot on the street in the language of the judicial arcana that they learn to spout.  Their kind of bullshiteese is learned at Ivy League law schools and the equivalent.

The problem is one, far more, of a rejection of the exigencies of honest thought and speech than they are ignorance, stupidity or, in so many cases, a considered and determined desire to do evil.  In a lot of cases it is that they learned their lessons in framing so well that they aren't even aware that that's what they are doing, themselves.  Even the most intelligent of elites often merely rearrange their prejudices instead of really thinking about what they're babbling or scribbling about.  I do think the demotion of the truth among them and the normalized convenient lie is the central issue of their superficiality.  No one of their own class is likely to point out their lapses to them, it's the mother tongue of their profession.