From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 02:10:14 MDT
hal@finney.org wrote:
>
> With effective policies and ideas, you don't need propaganda. People
> will come to see the value in them using their own powers of reason
> and perception. The West neglects philosophy because its ideas work,
> and it doesn't need fancy rhetoric to fool people.
>
Philosophy is not about fooling people. Philosophy provides the
grounding for the ideas and for our very understanding of what
"it works" means. The founders of the US understood this. Most
of them were well steeped in philosophy. Since then we deny the
importance of philosophy and lose more of our freedom and more
of the understanding of what is important and how we got here
every year.
> Propaganda is the last resort of a failed ideology. Better to let the
> facts speak for themselves.
Facts never speak for themselves. They must be processed in
order to speak at all. They are processed through philosophical
filters whether that philosophy has been explicitly created and
mantained or has been largely imbibed from the environment.
- samantha
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