AIt’s been a while since we checked in on Newsmax columnist Alexandra York, known for her complaints about things not being as white and Western as she is and dealing with the uncouth rabble she encounters on her travels. She used her Sept. 10 column to fret about the purported “demise” of “Western civilization,” starting with the usual suspects:
Forget “millionaires,” it’s a new crop of billionaire elites who are fast-gaining global control today. Private individuals, crony-corporate CEOs, large public companies, nonprofits, NGOs, the UN, outright governmental bribes, politicians on “kick-backs”. . .
The list is long and growing.
How are they dictating and controlling?
Those with eyes to see and ears to hear know about the mainstream media’s lies that have replaced journalistic reportage, the schools on all levels that indoctrinate rather than educate, politicians open to bribes, power, and/or celebrity who pass unconstitutional laws, social media that censors critics and supports would-be controllers, parents who deliver their children to government-controlled institutions, paid-for or election-financed district attorneys and judges who twist and turn the courts into unrecognizable pretzels of “lawfare” aided by jurists who judge according to political preference rather than objective facts.
York quickly moved on to blaming pretty much everyone who isn’t her:
So who is missing in this list of those to blame for the fast-growing assault on liberty, law, and the lives of hundreds of millions of people being shackled to the will of the few who wield . . . money?
It’s “the hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people” who bear the bulk of the blame.
Why?
Because the people suffering from the assault on their own liberty are contributing to their own demise by bowing to the pressures or believing the lies of the monied, or by bowing to the pressures and believing the lies of those who are bought by the monied, or those actually partaking in the loot themselves.
Partaking in the loot is reprehensible yet understandable as a motive, but the rest of those who willingly bend under the yolk or believe the falsehoods? What is their motive?
Well, it’s not an active motive but more of a passive surrender.
And why is that?
It’s because they do not think.
And why do they not think?
Because thinking requires the use of reason, a human being’s unique-among-animals survival tool.
[…]The majority of people today — precisely because they are nottaught to think for themselves, hence not able to judge goodideas from bad ideas — live on a pragmatic practical method of survival. They learn the essentials: shop, cook, and eat food for physical survival, acquire skills to pay money for housing, clothing, etc., and drive a vehicle to get from here to there. But they don’t learn abstract thinking — integrating observational percepts into mental concepts and concepts into a value system of principles—so they are clueless when it comes to rationally and logically assessing—judging–the validity of what they hear or see from others, including from those power-luster who would ensnare them into the net of submission in order to sate their own insatiable hunger for power.
Feelings — fear, desire for acceptance, greed for the unearned, fake self-aggrandizement, lazy observations — take the place of critical mind work. Promises of security — survival needs — from others take the place of personal responsibility.
“Bread and circuses” provide distraction from thought.
Electronic devices become addictions to trivia.
Meeting the financial “nut” for elementary living replaces ambition.
Mental inactivity replaces innovative creativity. Conformity replaces achieved value system. Compliance replaces happiness.
Dreams replace reality.
Lies replace truth.
The list is long and growing as is the list of controlling elites.
Unless the “woke” and weak wake-up to reality soon, the sun of enlightenment values—liberty, individualism, independence, realism . . . reason! — will finally set permanently.
Then, the darkness of authoritarianism wielded not by priests or potentates this time but by an equally powerful monied elite will again cover all of western civilization, and there will be no light in the coming era because doom will take the place of dawn.
York, no doubt, considers herself among that thinking and reasonable elite, apparently oblivious to the fact that she too is being manipulated by the “elies” she purports to despise.
York’s Dec. 2 column starts off with an admirable goal:
In today’s ultra-political-emotion-driven world, parents have even more challenges than in the past. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear must know that the public (and most private) schools are halls of indoctrination rather than classrooms for education.
What used to be called the three basic “Rs,” Reading, WRiting, and ARithmetic — the skills that teach inductive and deductive reason, the main tool of survival for humans — are given short shrift at best; thus, along with home nurturing in these departments, parents would do well to add art education to their children’s extra-curricular education.
Learning to play an instrument teaches kids discipline and is unmatched for helping to guide cognitive and psychological development because it speaks directly to the sentient consciousness.
But here too she displays her elitist tendencies:
The earlier the better, but this doesn’t mean an electric guitar to screech “Rock.”
This is for serious mind training so it means classical music, which requires mental as well as physical skill.
The instrument chosen to channel this kind of music’s technical and emotional flow is not important, whether it be a piano, a clarinet, a violin, or voice, or (to be clear) a classical guitar which is entirely different in construction, tone, technique, and purpose than a look-alike “pop” guitar.
What’s important is learning to play a demanding instrument.
[…]Classical music is too mentally commanding to permit the wanton flailing and wailing incited by most pop music today, thus it forces young people to control their emotional output.
Also, because music deals with broad abstractions (triumph, defeat, love, loss) it allows a young person to personalize universals of the human condition, to feel on a grand scale both the hope and the hurt that necessarily accompany an individual life fully lived.
Who says pop and rock music can’t achieve these same goals? Only York, apparently.