Tuesday, June 10, 2014 (Yes, it's a reprint, but in light of Mr. Obama's delusional gabfest two nights ago, I could not resist reprinting this essay from six months ago).
Primacy of Consciousness at West Point
By Henry Mark Holzer
In the May 29, 2014 online edition of Commentary Magazine Peter Wehner (senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center)wrote
an article entitled “Obama’s Fantasy World.” It not only deconstructs
Obama’s recent speech to the United States Military Academy’s graduating
class (and is worth reading for that reason alone), but at the end
touches on a diagnosis of the president I made in this blog on November
8, 2013 entitled “Obama and Consciousness.”
Both Mr. Wehner’s article and my essay are reprinted below.
In his speech at West Point yesterday, President Obama attempted to lay out his vision for America and the world in the years to come.
The
address was notable for several things, beginning with what is by now
Mr. Obama’s almost comical use of straw men, with the president creating
one imaginary critic and sham argument after another. (Max Boot
recounts them here; the Washington Post does so here.)
What was also apparent in this speech was another Obama trait:
prickliness and pettiness, in this case using a military academy
commencement ceremony to mock his critics. “Those who argue … that
America is in decline, or has seen its global leadership slip away – are
either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics,” the
president asserted. (More about that claim later.)
The West
Point address also revealed an extraordinary category error by America’s
commander in chief. Mr. Obama seems to think “winding down” a war is
synonymous with success. They can actually be antonyms, as in Obama’s
handling of Iraq and Afghanistan. President Obama wants his legacy to be
that he ended two wars. It may well be that his legacy is that he lost
two wars.
In his
speech Mr. Obama could not defend his actual record, which is (perhaps
with the exception of Burma) ruinous. So he opted for a “vision” speech.
But the problem here is that the president didn’t lay out a vision so
much as invoked a myth. He doesn’t seem to realize that false claims,
repeated ad nauseam, don’t become more true. And what are the
(related) false claims the president kept reciting like an incantation?
Let the president speak for himself:
America
has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world…. the United
States is and remains the one indispensable nation… The question we
face, the question each of you will face, is not whether America will
lead, but how we will lead… Here’s my bottom line: America must always
lead on the world stage.
But of course during the Obama Era the United States has not led, and intentionally so. As an Obama adviser told the New Yorker’s Ryan
Lizza in 2011, the closest thing to a doctrine animating the Obama
foreign policy is “leading from behind.” Here is the relevant paragraph
from the Lizza story:
Nonetheless,
Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his
advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from
behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic
Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now
seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than
America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the
relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and
that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our
interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as
well as military strength. “It’s so at odds with the John Wayne
expectation for what America is in the world,” the adviser said. “But
it’s necessary for shepherding us through this phase.”
So there
you have it. The Obama administration, by its own admission, believes
the relative power of the U.S. is declining. There’s no word yet on when
Mr. Obama will indict himself for either misreading history or engaging
in partisan politics.
America in
decline has been the operating premise of the Obama administration from
Day One; “leading from behind” is how they have sought to manage that
decline. But the president, having been hammered for being both weak and
inept, is now personally leading a PR campaign to twist things around.
He wants you to believe that leading from behind is really leading from
ahead. And if you are Barack Obama, post-modernist, facts are
subordinated to “narrative.” Truth is not an objective account of the
way things are; it is what proves most helpful in interpreting events.
(See “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your
health-care plan, period.”) Which means the president thinks he can make
things up–that he can reinvent reality–as he goes along. What he’s finding out is he can’t. In the end, reality catches up with all of us. Even Barack Obama. (Holzer’s emphasis.)
In these
two concluding sentences Mr. Wehner has touched on a profoundly
important point, one which exposes the fundamental flaw in the
philosophy/psychology that drives the President of the United States.
Here is my earlier essay:
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 [Holzer's
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 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.
Indeed, in the five-plus years of Obama’s presidency many trees have fallen in the forest but he has chosen not to hear any of them.
Indeed, in the five-plus years of Obama’s presidency many trees have fallen in the forest but he has chosen not to hear any of them.
* * * * * * * * * *
By any measure, after his performance before Congress and the world two nights ago, he still doesn't hear the falling trees.
___________
[1] Holzer's emphasis.
[2] “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” Philosophy: Who Needs It? (1982), 29.
