Obsolete phrase: “independence of mind”
by Jon Rappoport
August 22, 2017
Like a car with high fins and long protruding tail lights, the phrase “independence of mind” has gone out of style, especially at colleges and universities where it ought to be the most profound ideal. The thugs have taken over.
As recently as 2008, a professor of Jurisprudence at King’s College London, Timothy Macklem, described the phrase in this fashion:
“Independence of Mind [explores] the ways in which the fundamental freedoms help us to achieve something even more profound, by enabling us to arrive at beliefs, convictions and voices of our own, so that we truly come to think, believe, and speak for ourselves in the rich and various ways that the freedoms then protect. Privacy grants us the distance and refuge from others necessary to develop views of our own; freedom of speech calls on us to imagine ways of expressing ourselves that are both true to the views we have developed and innovative in their own right; freedom of conscience enables each of us to create a distinctive rational personality in which to embed the convictions that we wish to treat as non-negotiable…”
If the professor taught at one of many American “liberal colleges” today, a mere nine years after he wrote that description, he would be pilloried and subjected to prolonged attacks from students and even other faculty.
That’s the pace of change these days.
I started NoMoreFakeNews.com in 2001. Independence of mind was a given for me. As the years passed, I saw the need for promoting it and defending it. I still do. More than ever.
What drives the human spirit isn’t sameness from individual to individual. It’s difference. It’s uniqueness. The people who know that and embody it are the lights that burn and keep burning. They’re inextinguishable.
The betrayal of independence of mind is fantastical in the culture. It raises a stink to the heavens. It oozes fanaticism.
Many of the little academic intellects who support that betrayal and play its tunes are Marxists in disguise, who seek revenge on humanity for their own failures and shortcomings, by putting populations under the totalitarian gun of political correctness. This is “progressivism.”
Without knowing it, I grew up on the legacy of Emerson and Thoreau and Walt Whitman. These giants of literature and philosophy had breathed the air of independence and knew what it meant in their blood and brains and souls and minds. They heralded an age that came and then went, buried in a growing landfill of collectivism.
The myth that the onrushing political Left was composed of millions of awake and aware individuals was eventually exposed as a gigantic lie.
There is a choice: the glory of the individual or the glory of the mob?
Whoever takes his own independent ideas and prizes them has something the mob can never fathom.
What does censorship mean to a person who has nothing that could be censored? Why would he be concerned about shutting up other people, since he has nothing of his own to express that might be censored?
What does “having an idea” mean to a person who has never considered making a distinction between what he thinks and what others, to whom he attaches himself, think?
In the description of independence of mind I quoted above, what would the following phrase mean to a person who is always surrounded with allies who mimic each other’s thoughts: “Privacy grants us the distance and refuge from others necessary to develop views of our own.”
Privacy? What is that? What is it for? Who needs it? Why would anyone seek it?
Therefore, what harm could come from spying on others?
Who stands up for something on his own when he has nothing to stand up for on his own?
In the delirium of the collective, it is always overcast and dim, and the occasional joys come from acts of destruction against the vague “other.”
The first sacrifice by the true believer is the sacrifice of self. From that, everything else follows with dead certainty.
No matter what the state of the culture, independence of mind is a virtue of the highest order.
It is there for anyone who wants to achieve it.
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
This essay resonates with my inner being. Thank you.
By the time I entered high school, I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to live my life the way I wanted to, I had to go on my own. They were lonely years that drove me to reading philosophy for new ideas. I couldn’t find one that made sense until I found Ayn Rand. In hindsight, I came to see that philosophy is crowded with authoritarian ideas. Many are so poorly thought out, they only confuse. Most likely that’s why academia canonized them.
Based on my early experience, I came to the conclusion that very few can endure the isolation of thinking on their own. The default way humans think is to adopt herd belief systems for the basic reason that they cannot stand isolation. It is perhaps the greatest of human fears.
It explains to my satisfaction why believers cannot be reasoned with no matter how strong the logic and evidence. The moment they start to question and doubt, those feelings of isolation creep in. It’s a void they cannot cross.
Thank you again Jon for getting at the heart of things. Independence of mind really is a virtue of the highest order, and something to protect and encourage now more than ever.
Reblogged this on jmilamdeal and commented:
Our independence is being intentionally taken away and is no longer taught in schools. Those teachers are schooling kids in being a part of the collective.
How sad and miserable it must be to be a pre-programmed drone only thinking and doing what the hive expects.
Let’s all clap on command and make a hashtag to save the world after we have a group hug and vigorous kumbaya session at the candlelight vigil.
Did you denounce Russian haxxors and Nazis today comrade?
Feelings über alles.
Just finished my degree at the age of 61. You are correct. Before entering the university the desire to “inquire” for most students has already been extinguished. To prove that, and I will not elaborate, children sign up for a course of study designed to create the Entreprenuer. ah hem.
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Jon, when are you going to write a novel. It would be a blockbuster.
The standard method by which both linguists and their associated brethren and sisters of “cognitive science” attempt to objectively assess the rise and fall of any given idea involves the application of a simple counting method across time, wherein the word or phrase in question is tracked across the expanse of the periodical literature so as to formally quantify its rise and fall in usage over time.
In this regard we certainly could hope for a broader survey of various categories of the literature for the rise and fall of the specific piece of rhetorical arcana in question–“independence of mind”–and in that way one may hope to more rigorously and statistically chart the rise and fall of collective awareness surrounding a given idea.
Likewise and in my own opinion of equal interest and along the same theme one sees the complete demise as well of the related phrase that in a not too distant past represented the most golden of personal and civic compliments: that of the “principled individual”.
But then again this notion of individualism as anything other than a vulgar expression of consumerism in the context of abject materialism also constitutes a complete point of omission within our contemporary cognitive map.
The idea of this thing called an “idea”, or the mere suggestion of the absolute existence of that which can only be categorized as entirely intangible–such as set theory, platonic solids and numbers–have become anathema to the present day “mind”.
And while most everybody expresses a strong sense of confidence in their sensory capacity to correctly “perceive” the pressing contingencies within the spheres of their existence–of fast moving cars or the failures of their personal financial quest for “freedom” and so on–the very notion that one can “take into mind” a deeper truth such as an “organizing principle”, or a grand and robust system of theory that represents key aspects of actual reality etc. is anathema to the present day disposition of self that dominates among the “educated classes”.
While I’ve not personally performed the search, either via Lexus-Nexus or any other data base capable of generating a basic temporal graph, I’m quite certain that from the time of our own civil war to the present era the use of the word and verb “to apperceive”–as in “to take into mind” as pertains to the intangible domain–has long ago been completely supplanted and displaced by that of the verb “to perceive” which by its very definition only accepts as its “direct objects’ those things concrete and of the material world.
Our internal blindness thereby provided a possible easy index to track, the pathology promises to be our own undoing. As part of the Great Work by the Master Architect himself, it’s locus of causation and thus the argument that also seeks to cast blame should therefore direct the collective wrath toward the almighty “Iron Heel” of Jack London fame, or The Iron Fist” of G. Either way, the phrase “Gillette, the best a man can get” ought to be taken at face value. So very fishy as to be presumed Gill-Tee as charged, it was His mighty handy-work that has transformed the spectacle of American individualism into a farce.
If you think this thesis offends your intellectual sensibilities, then imagine how I feel. Personally. Best wishes toying with the Cow-Folk. Moooooooo…….N. Gillett 08/22/17
Reblogged this on | truthaholics