Kamala Harris, who laughed about jailing the parents of truant children, has become an "intersectional feminist." "Orwellian" is when climate change deniers are excluded from debating global warming. "Gaslighting," a name for a form of abuse in which a person makes someone else question their sanity, can now be applied to an entire country. Idea s that enter popular culture are often bastardized, washing up in newspaper columns and on Twitter, sapped of all meaning. government is putting chemicals in drinking water to turn frogs gay. The misinterpretation of philosophical, theoretical, and literary terms is not confined to internet misogynists or people who think that the U.S. Perhaps we shouldn’t be that surprised at any of this. Hegel has also reached so-called the world of "neomasculinity." Roosh V wrote a 2015 screed warning his readers about ‘the Hegelian dialectic." Op-eds breaking down problem, reaction, solution were published on the site. “The global banking cartel has used one tried and tested method to create wars, rob us of our currency, and eat away at our substance: this process of control over the masses is called The Hegelian Dialectic,” warns a voice in one ominous report. Identifying the origin of this peculiar interpretation of Hegel is difficult, though explanations of “the Hegelian dialectic” were appearing in Infowars broadcasts around a decade ago. The COVID-19 pandemic? Oh, you better believe that’s a Hegelian dialectic.Ī meme misuses the Hegelian dialectic to blame the COVID pandemic on Bill Gates. Nazism and the holocaust? Hegelian dialectic. Something happens (a thesis), which provokes a response (an antithesis) both ideas are then melded together (a synthesis).Ĭonspiracy theorist David Icke uses a variation of this formula, which he calls "problem, reaction, solution." According to Icke, the owners of global financial institutions – overwhelmingly Jewish, naturally, as is the case in most "theories" of this nature – have been responsible for most of the major crises of the past century, using a Hegel-style strategy to control the world. An extremely popular – though overly simplistic – reading states that Hegel’s dialectic is a way of understanding the world through an abstraction: the triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thesisĭialectics are perhaps the most misinterpreted aspect of Hegel’s thinking. This is a form of mass mind control that shepherds an oblivious public towards tyranny and oppression: the Hegelian dialectic. New laws and policies that are enacted, however, covertly serve the purpose that the dark forces wanted all along: the enslavement of humanity. Afterward, a solution to restore public order is proposed. The theory goes like so: dark forces contrive a crisis, which causes outrage or instills fear in the public. Internet conspiracy theorists have interpreted Hegel’s philosophy as an instrument of social control used by a shadowy cabal bent on implementing a New World Order. Bertrand Russell remarked in The History of Western Philosophy that Hegel illustrated “an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences.”įrom dogmatic arch-rationalist to bloodthirsty warmonger, the charges against Hegel are diverse and far-reaching, much to the frustration of contemporary Hegel scholars, who have long sought to dispel some of the myths associated with their field of study.īut on paranoid subreddits and in dark corners of Twitter, Hegel is being discussed in an entirely different way one even stranger than billionaire weirdo Elon Musk’s contention that Hegel was the inspiration behind the video game Fallout: New Vegas. Over 100 years later, Karl Popper wrote in The Open Society and its Enemies that Hegel was a proto-fascist apologist for the totalitarian Prussian state. Influential fellow 19th-century philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling disparaged Hegel and, some say, grossly misrepresented his philosophy. Hegel has been subject to countless smears and distortions since his death. It isn’t entirely Hegel’s fault that his ideas are not widely understood though it doesn’t help that German Idealism, the philosophical movement to which he belonged, used highly obtuse language that’s even more difficult to understand in translation. In 2021, Hegel’s vast body of work remains mostly inaccessible to non-specialists. Legend has it that when the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was nearing his final moments in November of 1831, he purportedly uttered the following words: “Only one man ever understood me, and even he didn’t understand me.” This assessment, like many of those offered by the notoriously obtuse and complicated German philosopher, can be applied today.
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