Liberty Liberally - Vol II Issue IV - April 2022

From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle

Liberty, Liberally Volume II - Issue IV

April 2022

Alaska

By Joshua Fryfogle When we have spoken of ‘equality’ in decades past, we’ve really shortened a phrase to a single word. The word ‘equality’ is used as shorthand for the phrase, ‘equality under the law’.

Equality under the law is a phrase that refers to a legal system that affords the same rights and responsibilities to everyone, regardless of any immutable characteristics.

Still, we’ve shortened that concept down to a phrase, and that phrase down to a single word, leading to some common confusion.

Equality under the law is an important concept, because equality is otherwise unattainable. In fact, I would argue that equality doesn’t even exist in reality, and can only exist under the law. We cannot affect equality in any other way.

No two people are truly equal, because individuals are all unique. Even identical twins are not truly, actually equal.

There is always some variation, and that difference nullifies any possibility of true equality. This is precisely why ‘equality under the law’ is such an important distinction.

You might wear the same size glove as another person, but your fingerprints are yours and yours alone. Right down to the DNA, we are unique, no one else is our equal.

When we talk about a free society, and Liberty of the individual, we are talking about an aspiration that is difficult to achieve. If everyone is free to do as they please, without any restriction at all, then that liberty might infringe on the liberty of others. This is where the Law becomes a necessity. Complete Liberty, with no Law, is a brutal society instead of a peaceful one.

With Liberty, And Justice, For All...

We’ve all said it a million times. We were taught the pledge as children, and

most of us can recite it verbatim with a mere prompt. We gloss right over this final phrase, thinking of it as a simple listing of two separate concepts.

But Justice and Liberty are not easily maintained at the same time. Liberty alone leads to harm, as Justice without respect for Liberty leads to brutality. So the lofty idea that we could create a stasis where these two concepts co-exist, well, that’s what the founders referred to as a ‘grand experiment’.

To speak in the vernacular One must know the words And master the vocabulary And adjectives and verbs To engage one’s civic interest Cannot be avoided It happens automatically And this can be exploited

Equality under the law was not instantaneously realized when the founders declared it as our goal. We’ve been working, all along, to create a ‘more perfect union’, and that process continues. This is as it was meant to be, too. The founders knew all too well that undoing millennia of authoritarian rule would not happen because they declared their independence from those authoritarians. They knew that there would be a process. They knew that maintaining Liberty and Justice, simultaneously, was a balancing act.

To who so lacks the wit and will Of their own design Still has words and words to say But how did these they find?

To be sure one’s thoughts are pure And not from someone else One must think and think some more Thinking for oneself

Consider the symbol of Justice, the scales held in the hand of the blindfolded woman. While she is in the dark as to the mere appearance of those who seek her guidance, Lady Justice holds scales in her hand, and a sword at her side. The scales serve to balance the Law against Liberty, and the sword shows the force of the law, to defend the innocent and punish the guilty. They knew, perhaps better than we do today, that Liberty alone would quickly dissipate, and chaos would upend our new nation.

The grand ambition of balancing Liberty and Justice, erring on the side of Liberty, is the foundation of our nation. Without this concept, we’re doomed to lose both. And when we falsely believe that ‘equality’ can be achieved in all areas of life, we destroy individual Liberty.

You can respond to what you’ve read, or write what matters to you.

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www.LibertyLiberally.com

From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle

Volume II - Issue IV

(Ed. Note: I published this online, out there in the aether, and found a few folks who pushed back. I had a unique take on the topic, as you’ll see as you read. I knew I needed to write a second part to build on this, the first. Both parts are published in this edition of Liberty, Liberally.)

Have you considered that had you been taught about CRT, Critical Theory and other associated academic topics, your world wouldn’t have been taken over by this nonsense?

Face it, you’d never heard of Critial Race Theory until a year or two ago.

You were ignorant of it, and as a direct result of your ignorance, it’s overtaken the culture.

They haven’t been teaching CRT, or any Critical Theory, to school kids.

If they had, we would have seen this coming. They’ve been teaching it to teachers, administrators, and usually under different nomenclature. Critical Pedagogy, for example, has affected our educational institutions in an insidious way. And those of our communities who’ve gone into the educational field, and were taught to teach in these ways, were equally unprepared to push back as are the rest of us.

Had we all been taught about critical theory, and its myriad manifestations, we could have avoided all of these dialectical traps that have ensnared our culture. But we were simply ignorant of these machinations.

No, they do not teach your children, as they didn’t teach you, the methodology of how they teach students. The teachers didn’t explain to you, when you were a student, what they were taught in college to prepare them to teach. And their teachers, too, were not necessarily taught the nuts-and-bolts theory behind their own curricula. In fact, the people who have most impacted education in general were the theorists who developed these systems, and those are the people who ought to be known.

If you were to study, for example, Paulo Freire, you would find that his ideas about education and its administration have been profoundly important to the direction of education around the world. The problem with critical pedagogy, as is the case with critical theory in general, is that they actively problematize. They seek out problems, even and especially in the absence of a community consensus that a problem exists. This is the ‘critical’ part of Critical Theory. In contrast, a traditional, Liberal Education teaches us how to respond to problems as they arise. There is no activist dimension to traditional, liberal education.

Critical Theorists and their unwitting accomplices aim to exploit this inherent limitation of Liberal Education (that we only respond to issues as they arise), to artificially create conflict to bring about predetermined outcomes.

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The opposite of ‘Critical Pedagogy’ as a methodology of education is called ‘Liberal Education’.

A Liberal Education is based on the traditional seven liberal arts. A strong liberal education would include various disciplines of thought, even including critical theory, but would remind the student that their education is to allow them to respond appropriately to living in a liberal, or free, society. They are not compelled to activism by our Western tradition of education.

However, the common, ironic misuse of the word ‘liberal’ in describing a partisan ideology that is literally illiberal is yet another indication that our education system has failed to teach even the basics of Liberty. In fact, most people hear the word ‘liberal’, and they associate it instantly with this political faction that only masquerades as such.

This language manipulation is a sign, a red flag, that Marxian influence is afoot. And Critical Theory is, after all, a neo-Marxist development.

Critical Pedagogy has a different goal than Liberal Education. Critical Pedagogy does not simply allow the student the psychological skillset to respond to a free society in a cooperative and peaceful manner, but rather, it activates the student to problematize, to criticize everything and anything, real or imagined, with political upheaval as its practical end. Critical Theory, in fact, is not and never can be simply ‘theory’.

This is why a solid, Liberal Education would include an understanding about these activist traditions of pedagogy.

We, as a People, must be taught about these systems of indoctrination, or we will fall prey to them.

Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Social Emotional Learning, they call it all sorts of things. This is part of the ‘problematizing’ process, aimed at causing chaos in a community, from which these ‘theorists’ who are literally activists hope to manifest some perfection of society. It’s a pipe dream, a fanciful thought, that by destroying whatever can be destroyed, they will leave only the perfect, indestructible reality in it’s wake. It’s the ideology of totalitarian control, applied to the psyche of the individual.

We should learn to be critical of critical theory, but that’s when they call you names. Why, though? Why can’t they reasonably defend their assertions?

The beauty of being critical of Critical Theory, in all its variety, is that it cannot withstand its own methods. It falls apart under scrutiny. It crumbles, almost instantly, under the watchful eye of reason. But only if you can recognize it, and respond appropriately.

No, they didn’t teach us CRT in school.

And it shows.

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2

I recently wrote an essay, and published it online, on social media. The title of the essay, ‘They Don’t Teach Kids About CRT, But The Should’, was intended to draw attention to a new perspective.

It was a mildly provocative title, but it truly encapsulated my perspective.

In that essay, I embraced the common defense of CRT, being that they are not actually teaching your children CRT in school. This was not a tricky title, but a substantive assertion. They really aren’t, and that’s by design.

Now, you would think that those who support CRT, Critical Theory, and associated disciplines in general, would have at least appreciated that I was agreeing with them on this point. You would think that, though I made my criticisms of these academic traditions clear in the essay, those who support these concepts would have at least appreciated that I agreed with them that they are not teaching CRT to kids.

They didn’t.

I went a step further, though. I didn’t just affirm that well-worn defense of CRT, that they weren’t teaching it to kids, but I said that they should be. At this point, you would think proponents of ‘critical consciousness’ would have rallied behind my message, regardless of my criticism of the Critical Theory tradition. After all, I agree that they aren’t teaching it to kids, but more than that, I think they should be teaching it to kids. But that’s the thing about Critical Theory in general. They really don’t want the masses to understand it - only those who’ve been properly trained, and whose trajectory is set towards activism.

That’s where my essay went wrong for the proponents of CRT. They didn’t care that I backed up their defense of CRT, or that I even wanted to teach kids about it. What they cared about, what bothered them, was that I wanted that topic to be taught... critically.

You see, in the liberal educational tradition, we teach all kinds of ideas, and those ideas would all be subject to critical thinking on the part of the student.

Liberal Arts, the traditional seven, teach this type of critical thinking that allows for diversity of thought to arise in a free society (this is the true fountainhead of progress, but that’s another essay).

However, Critical Theory is distinct from critical thinking. That’s why they don’t teach kids about Critical Theory, because kids say the darndest things. Kids will suss out any inkling of unfairness, inequality, any iota of idiocy, and call it for what it is. Critical Theory informs a so-called ‘critical consciousness’, but that ‘consciousness’ goes against common sense. It is counterintuitive, and children will make a mockery of it. That’s why they don’t teach it TO kids - they apply it ON kids. This prepares those children for further indoctrination at a later date, when they’ve become conditioned to not question or criticize these ideas, for fear for social castigation.

Those who actually believe in instituting ‘critical consciousness’ through infiltration of institutions understand all too well that they cannot hope to succeed any other way. They know that without ongoing indoctrination of these ideas, no one will accept these overtly discriminatory practices that Critical Theory suggests as a means to an end.

They believe so much in their modern mythos that they know that rational investigation will challenge their faith.

For those of you who oppose CRT, pay attention.

The way to defeat these maddening manipulations is to become aware of them. Understand them, learn them - dig in. That’s the only defense against them, and it’s a victorious one.

That’s why my essay triggered some proponents of Critical Theory, even though I seemingly agreed with their premises. The biggest red flag about this ideologically driven drivel is that it cannot be questioned. This is the totalitarian ethos, evidencing a Marxian root. The hypocrisy, that everything is subject to criticism, except their own ideas about everything; it’s an abuser’s perspective.

In our Liberal Educational system, all ideas can be challenged, just like any healthy relationship. That’s why the founders spoke of a ‘more perfect union’, because free expression allowed for a process of perfection to occur.

Critical Theory, a neo-Marxist tradition by its own admission, simply does not believe in that freedom of thought, or the freedom to question authority.

Those who author these ideas are the authority on these ideas, and those who adhere to them without question are the collaborators of that authoritarianism.

My essay seemingly supported the widespread dissemination of these ideas, removing them from the rarified air of Mount Olympus, where the traditions of the Totalitarian Titans are taught.

My essay was a promethean perspective, that these ideas are only powerful over humanity in that they are kept from humanity. This is why these sycophants were offended, because they know that their power is tenuously maintained by widespread ignorance of their methods.

In closing, consider this...

If these ideas were good ideas, that everything should be subjected to ‘critical consciousness’ in the tradition of Critical Theorists, then why wouldn’t they want Critical Theory itself to be ‘critically’ considered? If their ideas were good ideas, wouldn’t widespread dissemination of those thoughts prove that to be the case? Can’t they gain a consensus through public discourse? If my criticisms of Critical Theory as a broad tradition were unfounded, then my advocacy for CRT to be taught to kids would be a win for its proponents, right?

Right.

So my essay, that affirmed that CRT is not being taught to children, and advocated that it should be taught to children, was met with scorn from the people who defend CRT. Imagine that.

I summarized my critical sentiment at the end of that essay, by saying that applying criticism, even their Critical Theorists’ process of criticism, to Critical Theories themselves would destroy them forthwith.

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From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle