[FRIAM] [[Narcissism Again]again]

[Owen Densmore]

>
> problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan

to see as problematic?

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 5:57 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
>
>
> I kind of got buried by the list last week, but we seem to keep coming
> back to this topic, even when we are  talking about globalism.
>
>
>
> So.  Let me just share one thought.  I have said a hundred times that I
> think the great achievement of the Right in my life time has been to
> problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan consensus of the 1950’s  One of the
> elements of that consensus was that there is a truth of most matters and if
> we gather inclusively, talk calmly, reason closely, study carefully,
> investigate rigorously,  we will, together , come to it.  What was, at the
> time of my coming of age, the shared foundation of argument, became over
> last 50 years, *a position in the argument.  *The alternative to this
> Deweyan position seems to be something like, “*There is no truth of the
> matter; there is only the exercise of power.  He who wins the argument, by
> whatever means, wins the truth.  Truth is not something that is arrived at;
> it is won.”*
>
>
>
> So.  My sense of trump is that in fact, he is not lying.  On the contrary,
> he does not share the view of discourse that makes lying a possibility.
> From Trump’s point of view, “Whatever I can win with is true.”  Hence, if
> he wins with what we call “a lie”, it is true.
>
>
>
> I feel we are straying along the edge of some *Nietzschean *chasm here.
> Unfortunately  I haven’t read any Nietzsche .  A brief rummage in
> Wikipedia, led me to The Parable of the Madman
> <http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/nietzsche-madman.asp>. And THAT led
> me to wonder if the TV Series, Madmen
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Men>, about marketing execs in the
> 60’s, was written with Nietzsche in mind.  In any case, if there is ever a
> domain in which the truth is that which wins, it would be marketing.
>
>
>
> So, if we are going to counter Trump, it cannot be by demonstrating that
> he lies.  It has to be by demonstrating that liars don’t win.
>
>
>
> Heavy lift.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
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