Cartesian Crises
It only seems appropriate that I’m having this epistemological crisis because I don’t know what I know and I don’t know why I believe what I believe. This was brought to my attention by an old teacher with whom I still communicate, Dr. Murphy. We were talking about me being a libertarian. Really, if I’m so gun ho about people having individual rights, I kind of have to know where these rights come from. I think my subconscious has been mulling this over for the longest time. If you read any founding documents of the United States, they don’t particularly say God gave us our rights, but they say “Providence” and other things you wouldn’t normally capitalize. So: my mission, as someone who doesn’t know a lot about God or Providence or whatever gives us those rights, is to figure it out. I remember Dr. Mikhalevsky telling our class about this all too briefly. She said that the fact that the universe operates under logos, it is intelligible and gosh darn it, after that, I forget how it gives us natural rights. But I’ll work on it, I promise, promise, promise.
In other news, someone stole my basil plant that was outside our dorm. I wasn’t really upset, but I would have been less disappointed if it had just fallen over and broken in some freak accident, for obvious reasons. In other, other news, I am currently reading The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell talking about the floundering learning of people and the successive successes of the bureaucracy-run, idiot-making laws and government.