[In Plato’s Euthydemus] we are taken back to a time when … reasoning was largely verbal. A pun or a double meaning might decide a serious discussion. Socrates [there] confronts [the Sophist] Euthydemus and his brother who are so called eristics or “fighters with words” … [I]n their fight with Socrates … this sort of verbal trickery occurs constantly and becomes extremely tiresome. … Plato is … ridiculing all that sort of talk, but he is also concerned to [show] how difficult it is to put an idea into words. [Plato] had to devise his own [logical] language, the language all philosophy would henceforth use, at a time when it was … the fashion to use words without regard to [a coherent] sense.
Huntington and Cairns, Forward to Plato’s Euthydemus
We’re in a situation where we have widespread organizational capture in service to a [“woke”] moral orthodoxy, … critical social justice [etc.]., a set of propositions one must assert to be educated [where] the goal of the educator is to develop the student’s “critical consciousness”, the tools whereby [students] can find oppression everywhere, racial oppression, sexual oppression, [etc.]. … When an educational institution is held hostage to an ideology … you don’t hear the other side of the issue. And when you don’t learn the other side of the issue you … inflate your confidence well beyond … the evidence … [Educators] are giving [student’s] this critical consciousness so that they can identify and remediate oppression but [we’re not] helping them value what’s true [and] not giving them the alternatives. [But] your epistemology [method for determining the truth] should precede everything else. How you know what you know is always the first question. [After] you figure that out, you can [follow] Socrates to figure out how we should live our lives. … [but US students] have not been Socratically trained … to defend their ideas. … [T]he vast majority of US college kids … do not know the other side of the issue. They’ve never even heard it. … [O]nce you stop valuing truth, you’re like the horse that runs off in all directions. … [You’re] hostage to external forces [all boldface added].
Former Portland State Philosophy Professor Peter Boghossian, 2/8/24
[F]or intelligent people, “the proper measure of listening to such arguments is a whole life.”
Plato, Republic (450b)
If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking but yourself?
Famous 20th century Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein in Culture and Value, 1998
On Sept. 10, 2025, a young man, apparently Tyler Robinson, who had dropped out of college after one semester, looked down the telescope on a high-powered rifle at a man, Charlie Kirk, who he had never met and who would have extended a handshake, a smile and an opportunity of conversation, to him if they had met, and fired a bullet through Charlie’s throat, killing him instantly. Robinson’s apparent reason for doing this is that he believed that Charlie was full of “hate” because Charlie held different beliefs to his own most dear beliefs, apparently about “trans” issues. It has been reported that Robinson has a “trans” romantic partner. It takes only a moment’s reflection, however, to realize that since we all hold dear belief’s quite different to other people’s dear beliefs, that if everybody behaved in Robinson’s murderous fashion, the entire country would be in a constant state of civil war eventuating in a plethora of dead bodies from all sides of the issues, across the land. Unfortunately, it does not appear that Robinson suffers from the capacity for self-reflection.
Further, Robinson is not alone in this kind of confused violent behavior. Several years ago, a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to kills some Republicans at a congressional softball game. Some nutcase attacked Rand Paul in his yard, injuring him quite badly. Although the remnants of the “news” media claimed the attack was not politically motivated Paul stated that the attacker had earlier threatened Donald Trump and was “a vocal hater of the GOP”. Trump himself has been the victim of several assassination attempts that have been celebrated by a plethora of leftists. Shocking, not shocking: Democrat Party rhetoric got more violent after the Trump assassination attempt! There is nothing like bloodlust to excite a leftist! There have been a plethora of fire bombings on Elon Musk’s Teslas as he has moved closer to Trump. ICE facilities that enforce this thing called “the Law” passed by both Republicans and Democrats are regularly attacked. A kook fired on ICE officers in Dallas but only managed to kill and injure some detainees. It has just been revealed that Jay Jones, Democrat candidate for Virginia AG, has privately texted that he would shoot Republican House Speaker Todd Gilbert over Adolf Hitler and also said that Gilbert and his wife should have to watch his “fascist” children die. Top Democrats have condemned the abhorrent language but have not, of course, called for Jay to drop out of the race. They are Democrats after all! They don’t need to take responsibility for anything. “The demented Left continues to celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk and polls after Kirk’s assassination show that a much higher percentage of “liberals” than conservatives believe political violence is sometimes justified. The examples the Left conjures up to show that political violence is equally favored by the Right are so silly they actually refute their case.
Since these murderous attitudes and actions have not always existed to this degree in politics, it is necessary to ask what it is in our current culture that has caused them to arise. Part of the general answer is brought out by Peter Boghossian in his conversation with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster. Note that Boghossian, no conservative, voted for Andrew Yang in 2020 Democrat Party nomination process for the presidency.
Boghossian’s conclusion, after endless discussions with students on US college campuses, is that since our educational institutions have been “captured” by the Left, US students are indoctrinated by a (woke) “moral orthodoxy” involving “critical social justice”, etc. These institutions regard it as their job to inculcate this woke “critical consciousness” in the students but do not help them to value (or discover) what is actually true. The search for truth is sacrificed on the altar of “critical theory” and “social justice”. Boghossian explains, however, that the search for truth has to be epistemologically prior to the search for justice for the simple reason that if one does not have an “epistemology”, a method for discovering the truth, one cannot know that one’s conception of justice is not, in reality injustice. Putting this more bluntly, if one doesn’t have truth, one has nothing at all. Hence, our current students have nothing, which is why, at one point in the discussion, Boghossian points out that many of them refuse even to enter into discussions about their beloved fairy tales. Indeed, much “social justice” is, in fact, injustice.
To take one particularly poignant example, Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk because he believed that Kirk was a “hater”. However, until one discovers the truth about a whole range of very difficult issues, which is, putting it mildly, not easy, and in fact requires a whole life, like Socrates’ life, of sacrifice and dedicated self-examination, one cannot know whether what one perceives as hate might not, in fact, be love.
However, there is a second component to Boghossian’s analysis that is, perhaps, even more important. That is, since our students are now no longer taught to value reason and truth, they must be given some other method for deciding what views to accept. In the same discussion, Boghossian explains what he has found talking to US students,
What I have learned is that people will take [a certain stand on an issue] not based on the evidence they have but upon a moral reason. … People [choose] their tribe [beliefs] based upon [an alleged] “moral” reason. … [This shows that] the educational system has failed people [because educational institutions have become ideology mills to replicate the dominant alleged “moral” ideology].
That is, a shallow search for goodness, defined in the terms of the dominant establishment ideology, is substituted for the search for truth. E.g., when asked whether a man can become a woman, students generally do not even feel a need to consult the actual evidence (not even ask what’s true). Rather, having been told that “trans-people” are oppressed, students will answer in the affirmative that of course a male can become a woman. It is, therefore, very easy to become good these days. One just parrots the dominant leftist establishment on campus. This can become very useful. For example, if one starts to worry that one is not good because one does drugs or cheats on tests, there is a very simple recipe for becoming good again. One goes out into the quad and says, for all to hear, that one believes men can become women, or that Israel is practicing genocide or that Trump is a dictator and, presto, one is good again! Putting this another way, the alleged goodness of the typical US student, because they are compassionate towards to Palestinians or the polar bears, is really not about the Palestinians or polar bears at all. It is all about themselves. It is about reinforcing their sense of personal goodness by going along with the establishment crowd. The trans people, the polar bears or Palestinians are actually just props for an easy narcissistic slight-of-hand.
Our modern education has, therefore, become a kind of trickery. Students are “educated” to construct a picture of themselves as moral compassionate persons by taking the easy route, by going along with the prevailing establishment (woke leftist) orthodoxy, rather that by engaging in the laborious, and necessarily prior, task of determining what is true. The truth is prior because if one does not have truth, one has nothing! The “woke” have nothing.
Our educational institutions have, therefore, descended to the pre-Socratic stage in human history, and have brought much of the culture with them, in which tiresome verbal tricker and narcissistic virtue-signaling, enable “educators” and students to trick themselves into spouting destructive self-indulgent nonsense. Although Boghossian does not, apparently, share my conservative politics, that matters not a whit. For there is nothing more important in the current culture than his program of returning our “educational” institutions to their original true vocation of eschewing the sophistical word games in order to teach students how to reason properly in order to solve the real and deep problems of human life.
Unfortunately, the rot began in our “educational” institutions and our country will not be made healthy again until we return to educational institutions that actually condescend to educate rather than indoctrinate. This will not be easy. As Boghossian points out, US students have sophistical defenses against the call to engage in rational discussion, specifically that they have been indoctrinated to believe that “intrinsic in [rational] dialogue itself is some hierarchical white dominance.” Being rational is being too “white.” That ad hominem fallacy is their excuse for not being able to win a free and fair rational argument. One would think that is too stupid, even for these people, but, unfortunately, it is not.
Since US students have never even heard the other side of the issues, and therefore literally cannot comprehend how someone could disagree with their juvenile sophistries, that means those people must be perverse and hateful. And that is how some confused child comes to feel justified in putting a bullet into Charlie Kirk’s neck, killing him in front of a crowd of students who freely came there in a spirit of openness to talk to Charlie.
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