The brute, the mystic, the thinker

Men’s epistemology—or, more precisely, their psycho-epistemology, their method of awareness—is the most fundamental standard by which they can be classified.

Few men are consistent in that respect; most men keep switching from one level of awareness to another, according to the circumstances or the issues involved, ranging from moments of full rationality to an almost somnambulistic stupor. But the battle of human history is fought and determined by those who are predominantly consistent, those who, for good or evil, are committed to and motivated by their chosen psycho-epistemology and its corollary view of existence—with echoes responding to them, in support or opposition, in the switching, flickering souls of the others.

A man’s method of using his consciousness determines his method of survival.

The 3 contestants are:

1. Attila
2. The Witch Doctor
3. The Producer

The man of force, the man of feelings, the man of reason

The brute, the mystic, the thinker.*

The rest of mankind calls it expedient to be tossed by the current of events from one of those roles to another, not choosing to identify the fact that those three are the source which determines the current’s direction.

The producers, so far, have been the forgotten men of history.

With the exception of a few brief periods, the producers have not been the leaders or the term-setters of men’s societies, although the degree of their influence and freedom was the degree of a society’s welfare and progress. Most societies have been ruled by Attila and the Witch Doctor. The cause is not some innate tendency to evil in human nature, but the fact that reason is a volitional faculty which man has to choose to discover, employ and preserve. Irrationality is a state of default, the state of an unachieved human stature. When men do not choose to reach the conceptual level, their consciousness has no recourse but to its automatic, perceptual, semi-animal functions. If a missing link between the human and the animal species is to be found, Attila and the Witch Doctor are that missing link—the profiteers on men’s default.

The sound of the first human step in recorded history, the prelude to the entrance of the producer on the historical scene, was the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece. All earlier cultures had been ruled, not by reason, but by mysticism: the task of philosophy—the formulation of an integrated view of man, of existence, of the universe—was the monopoly of various religions that enforced their views by the authority of a claim to supernatural knowledge and dictated the rules that controlled men’s lives. Philosophy was born in a period when Attila was impotent to assist the Witch Doctor—when a comparative degree of political freedom undercut the power of mysticism and, for the first time, man was free to face an unobstructed universe, free to declare that his mind was competent to deal with all the problems of his existence and that reason was his only means of knowledge.

Even though the influence of the Witch Doctor’s views permeated the works of the early philosophers, reason, for the first time, was identified and acknowledged as man’s ruling faculty, a recognition it had never been granted before. Plato’s system was a monument to the Witch Doctor’s metaphysics— with its two realities, with the physical world as a semi-illusory, imperfect, inferior realm, subordinated to a realm of abstractions (which means, in fact, though not in Plato’s statement: subordinated to man’s consciousness), with reason in the position of an inferior but necessary servant that paves the way for the ultimate burst of mystic revelation which discloses a “superior” truth.

But Aristotle’s philosophy was the intellect’s Declaration of Independence. Aristotle, the father of logic, should be given the title of the world’s first intellectual, in the purest and noblest sense of that word. No matter what remnants of Platonism did exist in Aristotle’s system, his incomparable achievement lay in the fact that he defined the basic principles of a rational view of existence and of man’s consciousness: that there is only one reality, the one which man perceives—that it exists as an objective absolute (which means: independently of the consciousness, the wishes or the feelings of any perceiver)—that the task of man’s consciousness is to perceive, not to create, reality—that abstractions are man’s method of integrating his sensory material—that man’s mind is his only tool of knowledge—that A is A.

If we consider the fact that to this day everything that makes us civilized beings, every rational value that we possess—including the birth of science, the industrial revolution, the creation of the United States, even the structure of our language—is the result of Aristotle’s influence, of the degree to which, explicitly or implicitly, men accepted his epistemological principles, we would have to say: never have so many owed so much to one man.

Just as the Witch Doctor is impotent without Attila, so Attila is impotent without the Witch Doctor; neither can make his power last without the other. Politically, the centuries of the Greco-Roman civilization were still dominated by Attila (by the rule of local tyrants or tribal aristocracies), but it was a tame, uncertain, subdued Attila, who had to contend with the influence of philosophy (not of faith) in men’s minds. The best aspects of Western civilization still owe their roots to the intellectual achievements of that era.

Attila regained his power with the rise of statism in the Roman Empire. What followed was the fall of Rome, as a drained hulk, bankrupt in spirit and body, unable to muster any power of resistance to the invasion of barbarian hordes— then the looting and devastation of Europe by the literal Attila, and the centuries of brute violence, of bloody tribal warfare, of unrecorded chaos, known as the Dark Ages. The Witch Doctors were re-emerging, with a new version of mysticism, in answer to the pleas for help of the various local Attilas, who were bowing to them voluntarily, in speedy conversions, in exchange for the guidance of some form of basic principles to help them stabilize their power. The Middle Ages was a period ruled by the Witch Doctor, in a firm, if mutually jealous, alliance with Attila. The Witch Doctors controlled every aspect of human life and thought, while the feudal Attilas looted one another’s domains, collected material tributes from serfs—who worked, lived and starved in subhuman conditions—and maintained the Witch Doctors’ monopoly on spiritual law and order, by the power to burn heretics at the stake.

Philosophy, in that era, existed as a “handmaiden of theology,” and the dominant influence was, appropriately, Plato’s in the form of Plotinus and Augustine. Aristotle’s works were lost to the scholars of Europe for centuries. The prelude to the Renaissance was the return of Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas. The Renaissance—the rebirth of man’s mind—blasted the rule of the Witch Doctor sky-high, setting the earth free of his power. The liberation was not total, nor was it immediate: the convulsions lasted for centuries, but the cultural influence of mysticism—of avowed mysticism—was broken. Men could no longer be told to reject their mind as an impotent tool, when the proof of its potency was so magnificently evident that the lowest perceptual-level mentality was not able fully to evade it: men were seeing the achievements of science. The Renaissance did not dethrone Attila at once: he clung to his fading power a while longer, building his absolute monarchies on the remnants of his crumbling feudal state. But once again, as in the Greco-Roman era, Attila was ineffectual when left on his own. He was mentally helpless and scared, unable to cope with the tide of liberation sweeping the world. He ran blindly amuck in the practice of his only skill and purpose, that of material extortion, bringing nations to ragged poverty by his constant wars and levies, taxing away the last of his subjects’ possessions. But when it came to intellectual issues, he kept appeasing the advocates of freedom, he assumed the role of their pupil, protector and “patron of the arts,” lapsing occasionally into frantic bursts of censorship and persecution, then returning to the role of “enlightened monarch.” Attila, like any bully and like many animals, feels confident only when he smells fear in his opponents—and it is not fear that thinkers project when they fight for the freedom of the mind. “The divine right of kings” was not much of a weapon against men who were discovering the rights of man.

The industrial revolution completed the task of the Renaissance: it blasted Attila off his throne. For the first time in history, men gained control over physical nature and threw off the control of men over men—that is: men discovered science and political freedom.

The first society in history whose leaders were neither Attilas nor Witch Doctors, a society led, dominated and created by the Producers, was the United States of America. The moral code implicit in its political principles was not the Witch Doctor’s code of self-sacrifice. The political principles embodied in its Constitution were not Attila’s blank check on brute force, but men’s protection against any future Attila’s ambition.