In his syndicated column of November 7, 2013,
the brilliant Charles Krauthammer has written of “Rhetoric v. Reality.”
Quoting The
New York Times headline “Obama to campaign to ensure health law’s success,”
Dr. Krauthammer asks, “Campaigning to make something work? How does that work. Presidential sweet talk
persuades the nonfunctional Web portal to function?”
Obviously not.
Psychiatrist Krauthammer’s next sentence—“This
odd belief that rhetoric trumps reality [my
emphasis] leads to strange scenes”—is the theme of his essay. It is reinforced
by the observation that Obama proponents don’t live “in the real world,” and by
Krauthammer’s statement that the president and his minions entertain a “bizarre
belief in the unlimited power of the speech.”
Putting aside that Dr.
Kauthammer seems to be careful not to diagnose Obama and his followers as
delusional, there is a more fundamental—and frightening—explanation of the
president’s behavior, not just regarding Obamacare but more broadly much of
what else he has done and not done.
President
of the United States Barack Obama suffers from the ultimately fatal disease of Primacy
of Consciousness.
For Barack Obama, the
tree does not fall in the forest if he’s not there to see and hear it.
If he wants to believe,
for whatever reason, Americans can keep their insurance and physicians, then
they can—even if in the real world they can’t.
If he denies having said
they could, he didn’t say that—even if in the real world he did.
There are too many other
such examples, and in suffering from Primacy of Consciousness Obama necessarily
rejects Primacy of Existence—or, one could say, he rejects reality.
The late Ayn Rand
expressed the crucial distinction between the two and their centrality to
living in the real world rather than in an amorphous never-never land:
The basic metaphysical
issues that lies at the root of any system of philosophy [is] the primacy of existence or the primacy of
consciousness.
The primacy of existence
(of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists
independent of consciousness (of any consciousness),
that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary
is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and
that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward. The rejection of these
axioms represents a reversal: the primacy of consciousness—the notion that the
universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a
consciousness (either human or divine or both). The epistemological corollary
is the notion that man gains knowledge of reality by looking inward (either at
his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior
consciousness).
The source of this reversal
is the inability or unwillingness fully
to grasp the difference between one’s inner state and the outer world[1]
(i.e., between the perceiver and the the perceived (thus blending consciousness
and existence into one indeterminate package-deal). This crucial distinction is
not given to man automatically; it has to be learned. It is implicit in any
awareness, but it has to be grasped conceptually and held as an absolute.[2]
Despite Obama’s
unwillingness or inability to recognize what has happened before his eyes, the
private health insurance market has
crashed in the real-world forest.
