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When I first came across the concept of "hegelian dialectic", I saw it as a flawed and dumbed down version of the empirical method.

It fails to address the alternative possibility that one or both of the contradicting ideas are wrong and shouldn't be synthesised at all.

That in fact, it could well produce something far worse.

It surprises me that anyone could use it and not notice the massive logic hole.

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Pinned.

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It only works because the audience is already captured. Centuries of Shakespeare, Jesuit theatre, and Hollywood have conditioned the masses culturally and epigenetically.

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Hi Mathew.

And a warning for most, TLDR. As with only a very few other stimulating read-and-responses, I might eventually update this to a substack.

First off, I fully agree with Mara about the Hegelian Dialectic, and started writing this partially inspired by Mara's response, even before reading other responses.

When I was running the biology labs at Temple. Uni. Japan, I also taught Freshman Writing and Public Speaking. In hindsight, that made sense because as I was allotting some time in the labs to reinforce the idea that science is a bootstrapping process alternating between inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning ... (biggest influences T.S. Kuhn, Karl Popper, and C.S. Pierce), I also put a heavy emphasis on rhetoric and reasoning in the writing process for those other two classes. One technique I taught the students to recognize as a logical fallacy was "being skewered on the horns of a false dilemma".

Hmm ... wiki still has its uses. I was just checking up to see how many centuries old the formalization of that error is, but instead found something more useful. It is a subset of a "fallacy of bifurcation", and in your reframing ... the weaponization of bifurcation. Ha. A new twist on "divide and conquer". Had I been teaching those writing/speaking courses a decade or so later, I would have included examples of emergence theory, fractal theory, chaos theory, and Bayesian probability to further reinforce that fallacy.

Ooo ... found a great little video regarding the heuristics of science as I described it in labs ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3OXwpEpl8. My example in labs was leading the students through thought-experiments using different approaches (along with assumptions, variables, controls, etc.) and the strengths and weaknesses of those approaches in "proving" a certain blend of coffee was "better" than another.

One memorable take-away from those thought experiments was that a modestly achievable goal of the scientific method is to provisionally isolate some useful correlations within an infinitely complex web of causes and effects. I can scarcely imagine the absurdity of using the Hegelian Dialectic as the primary heuristics for either the scientific method or an essay or speech worth the time to digest.

In thinking about your ending question of what actors you may have forgotten, my memory automatically raced back to Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer". Though it has been some years since I read that book, I think you may have a more sharply detailed and comprehensive description of the "bad" actors than Hoffer.

But I wonder if the targets of engineering might be more than merely crowds, consumers, or the mesmerized, and every bit as diverse and specialized (individuated, or not) as the engineers? A couple of substack buddies come to mind who might be able to shed more light than myself on the victimized ... Margaret Anna Alice (Mistakes Were Not Made) and Tereza Coraggio.

I have not yet sat down to see if the following identities, psychological constructs, or temperaments can be classified as passive actor / victims for understanding modern society, or if these are just somewhat abstract qualities of those being acted upon. Similarly, I did not see "kulangeta" among the descriptions of the engineers. I'll have to re-read and ponder over a few things ...

1 — Your starting point: "Definition: Hegelian engineering is the process by which social engineers control the dialogue surrounding ideas within a Cybernetic metaschematic in order to manipulate the evolution of society." As I tend to think in pictures and diagrams, this is quite the cognitive load.

2 — I will have to re-read your list of agents to see if they are skewed towards a particular end of a moral continuum, and then either assume we share some kind of effective altruism, posit my own, or presume Hegelian engineering is an amoral phenomenon.

That problem of morality and amoral behavior is not an easy one to untangle. Here is a very good YouTube lecture (courtesy of substack writer "streamfortyseven' that reframes the Malthusian dilemma in such a way that some, particularly "the anointed" (heads up to Thomas Sowell) can act from behind a presumption of morality, yet give a glib, post-hoc reasoning for the most morally repulsive behavior imaginable (the Trolley Car problem on steroids) ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4

3 — I have yet to determine if those actors are organized according to specialized jobs or social currency within an emergent hierarchy, or a mixture of the two. Edit ... after reading Eli's comment, that also got me wondering if the kulangeta ruling class really so smart as to have quantified and organized everyone and everything, or are we looking at an emergent phenomenon?

4 — I'll have to apply a filter of Bertrand Russell's "levels of language" (levels of abstraction) to those acted upon to see if they can be cast as distinct counterparts to each of the types of engineers ... or if not one-to-one counterparts, organized along some other spectrums such as degree or kind of exploitation (e.g. human trafficking) or physical-mental suffering (such as degree of anomie, PTSDs, turbo-cancers, or homelessness).

Going abductive here, but from my experience as a marginalized white person of color in Japan Inc., some terms that immediately came to mind include:

• "Stockholm Syndrome"

• "White Knight" volunteer

• range of competence / confidence from "Dunning-Kruger to "Imposter Syndrome",

• "Flying Monkey" enablers

• self awareness and the problem of 'free will' — (Joe Scott just released a relevant YouTube about this ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TYuTid9a6k),

But even while increasingly believing in a veneer theory of history and culture, when I think of the above, I can't help but to find myself spinning a wheel in the mandelbrot set. For example, the current psychiatric parlance of "white knight" does not appear much more than a re-working of Don Quijote. The above short-list of victims (or symptoms) are just the more recent constructs for earlier archetypes that can be found in cinema and literature. When I was teaching Comparative Culture in Japanese colleges, I used characters from the original "Blade Runner", from James Thurber's "The Unicorn in the Garden and Other Fables for Our Time", characters in classics like Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times", W.F. Murnau's "Nosferatu", Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" ... all the way back from the Upanishads to Taoist-Zen inspired metaphors to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Aesop's Fables, or Beowulf and beyond. I suspect you sense that too, as you used Shakespeare and Bacon to introduce an analysis of modern society.

Lots to think about here. Enough to start a good book.

Only stopping for now so that I can get a good night's sleep as a typhoon bears down on the neighborhood. Wondering if the crows and wagtails will be waiting on the veranda for their vittles tomorrow morning?

Cheers Mathew!

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Yes, you should be writing this into an article. Somehow I (sadly) missed that you were running your own Substack. You should have told me!

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Aug 29Liked by Mathew Crawford

Hi again Mathew.

I really have not been putting enough into my substack to warrant following. I find that by far, my best writing comes from interacting at a one-to-one level.

Now that I have parted ways with a would-be educational business partner, I'll be putting more time into substack, and my plan is to use my current stack as a place to showcase great posts (and podcasts) by others and my responses, and go under a separate stack and pseudonym for more original or controversial posts.

Thanks for such a quick response. Oops ... past midnight in Japan, and inebriated with ideas. zzzz

Oyasumi nasai!

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I see the educator in you. I am certain that you are great at it.

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LOL. Maybe, but "was".

Now, I am just a novice writer.

On the other hand, I like that Forrest Gump "Stupid is as stupid does" thingy.

So maybe we are what we do.

Or in the words of Frank Sinatra "Strangers in the night ... scooby, doobie, doo ... 😂.

Lordy, I used to have so much fun in the classroom. Just gotta learn to transfer that same mind-set to writing.

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In addition:

The Hegelian dialectic process:

The following Excerpts from “America's Secret Establishment” by Antony C. Sutton, will help the readers understand what is the Hegelian dialectic process and how it’s been used by the elites throughout history to create favorable outcomes to further their agendas

https://lionessofjudah.substack.com/p/a-sinister-force-behind-historical

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In your multiple writings LoJ, you forgot to blame bad weather on Catholics.

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If this is how you want to spin it it's unfortunate. Nobody is blaming regular Catholics, or members of other main stream Christian denominations run by members of Babylonian secret societies. Common believers are just normal people who love God and were being deceived by their wicked leaders. Satan comes as an angel of light and his apostles masquerade as apostles of Christ.

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That link to your earlier article was very helpful for me. Thank you. Mathew, would you have any disagreement with the Lioness? The main point that I did not see in Mat's post is that, for Hegel, it is the state that has the ultimate rights as well as power, and that solidifying that power is the ultimate aim of all the engineering.

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Forgive me. I have taken one day off in two months, and spend all my free time working.

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Aug 29·edited Aug 29Liked by Mathew Crawford

Hi Mathew, fantastic article as usual.

I don't think the 'System Operators' are included. The ones that manage the direction of the (gov or UN) education system, the legal definitions pumped out by the universities/dictionary/judges, religious institution leaders etc. Basically, the standard education controllers (those who maintain the programming of the status quo), not just the media and outside influencers. All new ideas still need to modify the programming that the current system has been teaching until now.

I think there is also an ongoing division operation - each time a group gets too large they need someone to come in, radicalize one portion and break it off to create a new divide and conquer aspect (with the leaders being controlled). Or perhaps this is just a tactic the system uses often.

Cheers!

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It took me two readings of your first paragraph to get your point. And this is something that I should have thought of given the relationship to Mathew's law. Yes, the network employs an army of little gnomes knitting together the falsely synthesized truths. I might say they are Mandarins, but it may elucidate the point to describe that subset of Mandarins.

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Nice. Your last sentence touches on something that troubled my own analysis ... the difficulty in distinguishing agent/actors from archetypes, temperaments, etc.

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Aug 29·edited Aug 29Liked by Mathew Crawford

great article! whats your view on shakespeare and the renaissance in europe? was the renaissance more good or bad in your view?

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You'll have to narrow the question. Or, you can wait for me to write ten books to answer it. Maybe I'll be done in a decade.

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what i mean is was the renaissance in europe overall something that benefited europeans ?

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This Hegelian engineering concept reminds me of the life work of Schumpeter. He changed views many times in his life. By the end he was proposing the "creative destruction" theory of capitalism, and that phrase reeks of Hegelianism.

In the 1930s he was attempting to apply quantum mechanics ideas to the theory of cyclical development of technology, industry and economics. That's neatly undercover Hindu philosophy as seen from the eyes of a Viennese guy emigrated to the US who had just seen his country taken over by a death cult.

As a young intellectual he was of the dogmatic type, although in his day (1908) his methodological individualism was considered revolutionary and unorthodox.

Here's what Hayek wrote for the English edition of one of his first books:

mises.org/library/book/methodological-individualism

«Schumpeter was very much a “master of his subject”, in contrast to the “puzzlers” or “muddlers” which follow their own distinct ideas; he also showed a strong receptivity to the dominant opinions in his environment and the prevailing fashion of his generation. Nowhere does this show more clearly than in the still entirely Mengerian chapter of his early book, now translated into English for the first time, and regarded as the classic exposition of a view which he later abandoned. Many of his students will be surprised to learn that the enthusiast for macro-economics and co-founder of the econometric movement had once given one of the most explicit expositions of the Austrian School’s “methodological individualism”. He even appears to have named the principle and condemned the use of statistical aggregates as not belonging to economic theory.

That this first book of his was never translated is, I believe, due to his understandable reluctance to see a work distributed which, in part, expounded views in which he no longer believed. His reluctance to keep his brilliant first book in print, much less having it translated, can probably be explained by his awareness that his own distinct opinions emerged only in his second book on the Theorie der Wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (Theory of Economic Development), which came out four years after the first. Though the author may later no longer have been prepared to defend the ideas of his first work, they are certainly essential enough to the understanding of the development of economic theory. Indeed Schumpeter made a contribution to the tradition of the Austrian School which is sufficiently original to be made available to a wider public. I regard it as a very meritorious effort that Mr. Michiel van Notten had devoted his skill to publishing a faithful translation of that part of Schumpeter’s first work which marks a distinct milestone in the evolution of opinion on the important subject of individualism»

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Be careful. I don't think that "quantum" is "neatly undercover Hindu philosophy," but rather that the European social engineers who came along, had Neo-Hinduism created (after finding Brahmins who would transcribe the verses, and lawyers to build Brahmo Samaj), then projected onto quantum theory ONTO the Dharmic religions.

The Tavistockians have done a great job of engineering blame onto EVERYONE else.

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that makes more sense.

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I don’t know if the Black Pillers fit on your list, but they sure deserve some accolades for drawing a large swath of humans into the abyss of nihilism.

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Interesting thought, yes. Black propagandists are players designed to latch onto organic participants in a way that makes them or their direction look bad. That may be the subject of another article (that I was already planning) that I can come back here and link to.

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My take on Hegelian engineering is much simpler: to control the synthesis, the outcome, one must control both the apparently opposing forces, the thesis and the antithesis. It's like the opposing forces of a pair of chopsticks, when done gently, or a hammer and anvil when done forcefully.

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A series of Intentionally false, misdirecting, binaries, orchestrated by secret societies to establish and maintain control over the direction of everything possible

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Can't we just change the name Matrix to Baywatch?

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That was Matrix software release 6.02. We're on version 8.11.

But you can always download an app like Hulu that stores the old load files.

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Not on the list:

NPCs. Joe six pack, addicted to comfort and convenience. Like a black hole, capable of taking the force of impeccable logic and an ocean of well documented historical evidence and making it vanish into the abyss of the place where a soul would normally reside. They work for free and are incapable of snitching because they have no idea they're being shifted from square to square one block at a time by a hand they swear doesn't even exist. We call them acquaintances, neighbors, coworkers, and family members. And they are legion.

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['God','only','knows'] - that's already a dialectic. knowledge is a result of right and left mind working and dividing labour of reasoning.

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I assume the Francis Bacon bit was a joke, but maybe not, and it's one of the least supported 'conspiracy' ideas out there. Please don't give it any publicity as it makes you look gullible.

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YoU BeLieVe DiFfeReNt FrOm mE, MuSt bE DuMmY.

Exceptional analysis.

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Is this agent an example of Hegelian engineering?

Mission in the Age of Digitalisation: Metaverse, Metamodernism, and Metanarrative [1

Rev. Dr. Guichun Jun

BETH Bulletin 2023 No.1

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://bethbulletin.eu/ojs/index.php/bethyb/article/download/1032/1018/2802&ved=2ahUKEwid1LO5J2IAxUDHUQIHU7XKeUQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1Ehooqw1pMkVmI5TuyKeJq

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hey matt i was wondering which alt media folks you find to be trustworthy enough?

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The ones who aren't afraid to talk with me and dont lie about me are easiest to trust.

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Aug 30·edited Aug 30

what are the names of some of these people and do they have social media platforms?

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I do not have the several hours it would take to summarize, but you're welcome to follow my articles, which link sufficiently to what I take as quality sources.

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i read your articles and i like them

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I am minded to share this far and wide specifically with the express purpose of making it known this is NOT one of the best, most informative articles I’ve ever read. ;)

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I've gotten to the point where I don't really care if I understand all the nuances of this psychopathy. I just want to be able to wave buh-bye to these evil asshats as they are flown off to colonize Mars, without oxygen.

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The problem is that they'll send your children off to Mars cursing you on the way out.

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Pardon?

What I meant was that on an intellectual level, I understand the need to better comprehend the dysfunctional circular reasoning of the devout Hegelian. But on the visceral level, all I want to "understand" is that we have finally cleared these vermin from our society.

Are you saying that because I want them shipped off to Mars, they will flip that around and inflict that back on me in a more painful way?

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Right now, they have the power, and they'll run experemts on you before theyll volunteer their own kids.

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I think maybe we are arguing different things. Keep writing the way you do, and on the topics you do, and I will go eat a Snickers bar and try to be less bitchy.

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