Part Four: Everything Needs to Start from Scratch

Part Four: Everything needs to start from scratch Gema Sotomayor I agree that critical thinking has declined. I went to college, but I dropped out. While I loved some aspects of college education, I discovered that the critical thinking portion was all but gone.

They just train you to be repetitive monkeys. Emanuel Pastreich My son also dropped out of college. I think it was because it wasn't really college anymore.



And I saw that change as a professor. I watched the decay of the angel, the process by which education became a combination of propaganda and behavioral modification. Gema Sotomayor That all goes to say that everything needs to start from scratch, not just our government, but also our education system.

We need to go back to the stone age and to start all over everything we’ve messed up. Andrew Libson During the Covid time, I discovered that a lot of my comrades, almost all my comrades, whom I assumed would line up to fight big pharma, fight genetic modification, fight all these evils, they suddenly opposed me completely, and went against their own belief systems—in my opinion. But then I found weird people, maybe anarchists this, or right wing that, or yoga this.

And they would come out against Covid even though the rest of their comrades, their yoga comrades, or GMO fighting comrades, all went along with the program. But for some reason these oddballs would not go with the program. I would ask them, “Why didn't you go with the program?” At the beginning, before the show, when I asked you how to introduce you, you used the word “academic.

” You said, “I'm an academic,” and I was like, “Oh, crap! He is one of them.” Because, I confess, it sounds like you are declaring that you are with the program. So, you were an academic, you were a professor, you passed through that same system that I was put through too that was meant to turn you into a sleepwalker, Emanuel Pastreich True.

Andrew Libson In that case, what was it in your own past, or in your upbringing, that kept you from becoming a sleepwalker, from becoming what your colleagues became? Emanuel Pastreich First, I must confess that I was very much an establishment creature. I went to Yale and Harvard. My father went to Yale.

My family was not rich, but were upper middle class, so we were never inconvenienced. First, I had brain surgery in 1999, and although the result turned out reasonably well, there was a period of time which I wasn't sure what would happen, and I thought I might end up crippled or dead. That experience forced me to think more deeply about what I was doing.

And what the real purpose of all that education I received might be. Then, one day I started a conversation with a woman who was working part-time at cafe in Tokyo while I was visiting briefly in August, 1999. She was living on the minimal pay she got working part time.

I asked her what she did during her free time. She told me that she spent the rest of her time as volunteer helping homeless people. I was a bit taken aback.

I thought to myself, here am I, worried about whether I can get tenure or buy a big enough house for my family, and here was this young woman who can barely pay her bills and she's spending her free time as a volunteer helping others. That was in 1999. Then, in December of 2000, the Bush administration was installed, and then the regime seized control of the country in February, 2001—a story about which most people are not ready to talk yet.

As a result of my efforts to speak the truth at that fatal moment, I lost 85% of my associates. Some of them, to this day, will not talk to me. That was the first trial by fire.

The next trial was the COVID-19 regime starting in February, 2020, which is still going on. The two state crimes are structurally similar. The means were somewhat different, but players behind the screen are essentially the same.

And I lost a pile of friends and family again, I lost even more with Covid than I lost with 9/11. Part of the reason may lie in the historical process. Like Michael Hopf wrote, “Hard times create strong men.

Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

” Too much of the good life the last fifty years ruined the intellectuals who should have formed a brave vanguard. Also, the experience of brain surgery made me face the possibility of death or debilitation. That gave me strength.

As the Samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo wrote, if you enter a conflict of life and death, first imagine that you are already dead. Once you think you are already dead, you will find tremendous freedom and bravery comes from that liberation from attachments. I'm going to be 60.

On rare occasions I talk with professors whom I knew from the old days. They talk with each other about their retirement funds, their recent trip to Italy, their children's educations, their grandchildren, or the fabulous Italian food they ate last week. All their discussions are trivial and narcissistic.

There's literally no discussion about what is happening to our society, or how we're going to create a better society. Not everyone in society can be an intellectual, can get the specialized training necessary to understand how the world works. Therefore, that knowledge of the intellectual is not his or her personal property, but demands a commitment to society.

Often that learning was paid for with the tax dollars of working people. We need cooperation between intellectuals and workers—this is central to our project.It is important that the intellectual to be engaged with ordinary citizens anduse his or her specialized knowledge not as a means of advancing personal benefits, or social status, but rather so as to serve society.

We witnessed the tremendous betrayal, the horrid treason, of the intellectuals during 9/11 and Covid. All of those intellectuals, those professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers, mid-level management people, etc. they all sided with the billionaires against the workers, and not with the workers against the billionaires.

And that was a very tragic decision. What they did not know is that from the billionaire’s perspective, the difference between a CEO or a lawyer and a homeless person is the difference between an ant and a cockroach. They did not know they were signing their own death warrants.

Gema Sotomayor People are so immersed in their own little world that they're not seeing what's happening around them and they don't realize how horrible it is for others. For me at least, it was also an external thing that impacted me, that made me kind of be more aware. Emanuel Pastreich Your personal experience of living in Nicaragua made you so much wiser.

You are wealthy, are rich beyond imagination, because you actually know what human nature is and how authoritarian government actually functions. Americans are so impoverished intellectually that they cannot see the truth unfolding before their eyes. We're totally unprepared for what will come after this election on November 5th.

The election is significant because is the inflection point where we go from a sustainable fraud to an unsustainable fraud, where we have different factions, the factions of billionaires, killing and murdering each other, and everyone who gets in the way. We need to be prepared for that. And being prepared for that future is not a matter of getting on the ballot.

We need to transform the idea of politics. Politics has become a dirty word. Politics means taking money for services, a form of prostitution.

Please do not misunderstand me as I have deep respect for people who are forced into sex trade in order to support their families or to survive. We are talking about a sale of one's soul, which is going on all around us. We have to say no to that show.

Andrew Libson I think politics ultimately is not about selling your soul. Real politics is about finding your soul and finding a way of expressing it in words, but also through deeds and actions undertaken with others. I hear people say, “I want to stay away from politics.

” Well, first of all, you can't. In order to change society, we have to embrace a politics that extends to every human and to figure out a way of turning society into something that's human versus the “unsustainable fraud” as you stated. The current fraud is not sustainable, and it's been unsustainable for a long time.

Now it is more obviously unsustainable. Unfortunately, that current situation is causing people to put their heads even deeper in the sand. Emanuel Pastreich Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

” You may not care about the military industrial complex, but it's very interested in you. It wants your assets and your soul. It wants control over you.

You cannot divorce yourself from this larger structure..