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    Socrates: The Hood Rat of Antiquity

    Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree


    Socrates: The Hood Rat of Antiquity
    Socrates was indeed the hood rat of antiquity. He had absolutely no stature in society, and he never wrote a thing for posterity. To modernize his own words, his sentiments were essentially, "My thing is simply hangin' out on the block and discussing reality."  So we wouldn't have even known who he was if it weren't for "youngsters" like Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon, who spoke of him in their writings.
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    So when I think of Socrates, it brings to mind some of the older brothers in the neighborhood that I grew up in, and who were very much responsible for the awaking my own mind. They used to sit around for hours on end pontificating on everything from political science to the origin of the universe. While they held absolutely no formal "credentials" to validate their knowledge, their legitimacy was girded firmly in place by their wisdom, insight, and tremendous intellect alone. These were the Eulipians:
     
    THE EULIPIANS
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    Some of the greatest minds I've ever known held court while sitting on empty milk crates in the parking lot of ghetto liquor stores. At their feet I embraced the love of knowledge, and through their tutelage defined self-worth In my own terms.
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    These were the "Eulipians" - writers, poets, musicians, painters, and uncommon drunks - those shade-tree philosophers who contemplate the fungus between the toes society; Who dance with reckless abandon, unfettered by formal inhibition through the presumptuous speculation of the ages; and who live in county jails, cardboard boxes, alley ways, and luxury Apartments - insignificant here in Great Bruteland, but of ultimate significance in the eyes of God.
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    While these obscure intellectuals stand well outside the mainstream of academy, I’ve watch with astonished delight as they sang, scat, and scribed their various philosophies into the mainstream of human knowledge.
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    Miles, Bird, Trane, Langston Hughes, Eulipians all. I’m a Eulipian. We’re easy to spot, because we all sing but one song - "Knowledge is free, thus, will transcend all attempts to be contained through barriers of caste and privilege, leaving man's innate thirst for knowledge free to someday overwhelm his passionate lust for stupidity."
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    OSCAR BROWN, JR. - EULIPIAN
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    Eric L. Wattree
    Http://wattree.blogspot.com
    [email protected]
     

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    Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

    Comments

    My son keeps bring me my old books; hundreds of them.

    So I find some book I have not read in decades; The Apology or as this translator calls it The Defence of Socrates along with Euthyphro and Crito.

    David Gallop notes in his introduction that the old lore involving the Gods and the Titans did not sit well with Socrates. He gave little praise to Hesiod or Homer with regard to 'the legends'.

    In making Socrates confess his distates for such stories, Plato implicitly criticizes the earliest Greek poets, Homer & Hesiod, and traditional Greek religion. (xi)

    Socrates would challenge the definition of 'holy' or 'sacred' or 'service to the gods' or any number of silly words & phrases used by the politicians of the time.

    I was going to actually try a Pantheon 500 a few years ago presenting a religious show based upon the Greek Gods rather than the bullshite present by Roberts. hahahaha

    What does the phrase 'disagreeable to the gods' actually mean? (xi)

    'Socratic irony' is often identified with pretending not to know what one does know. (xv)

    I have been working on a rant on Huckabee within this context.

    The fat guy who once became thin and praising the lord the entire time and now just fat again! hahahahah

    I.F. Stone actually wrote a tome attacking THE SOCRATES. hahhaah

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone

     

    The bastard was just an old curmudgeon whom no grown-up could actually get along with. hahaha No matter what you presented to Socrates the refrain might be:

    THAT'S NOT RIGHT!

     

     

    I love your post!

    We need the gadfly; always.

    It aint fun, but we need that goddamnable gadfly to remind us that there is a thin line (at times) between the ideal of knowledge and hubris on the part of the fellow attempting to demonstrate that he actually has 'knowledge'.

    Anyway, anytime someone like Huckabee declares what is sacred and what is profane or what is right and what is wrong and when he informs us about what GOD ALMIGHTY thinks about things; you gotta stop and think.

    And we must come to the conclusion at times that the Huckabees of this world cannot demonstrate that they know ANYTHING OF SUBSTANCE AT ALL!

    So I side with the neighborhood Socrates most of the time. hahahah

    I mean the odds are on the side of the local philosopher more often than not!

    The end.

    (Oh my 110 page tome: World's Classic...Plato etc. by David Gallop; Oxford University Press; c 1997)

     

     


    I agree, Richard. Just about everything I write encourages the people to ignore the "experts" and be independent of thought. Education is about learning how to think, not what to think. So I live to poke holes in the gasbags of society. 


    There is a Buddhist saying that claims the farmer tilling his fields is more likely to reach enlightment than the monk meditating in the monastery.


    I agree, Trope.

    "Experts" tend to be much too regimented in their thinking. Here’s an exchange between myself and a very good friend of mine:

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    WHY I LIVE TO POKE HOLES IN THE GASBAGS OF SOCIETY:

    PB: "They need to be told WHAT AND HOW TO THINK!!!!!! Especially if their parent is a mastermind like me!!!! That is the same approach I took with my students. I was quick to remind them that there's a reason why they were student's and I was the Professor...although the need to do so was exceedingly rare. And always at the beginning of the semester. Even after they became Professors they often sought my advice and comment on their work."

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    Wattree: I have to disagree with you here, P.
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    You were the professor because you had information on a given subject to impart. That’s fine. But by the time our children reach college we should have already educated them to the point where they are independent enough in their thinking not to take the information that you’ve imparted at face value.
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    As a professor, your job is to relate "facts," not to dictate how those facts should be manipulated. Because the fact is, just because you’re the professor, that doesn’t mean that you’re more intelligent than every student in your class. Therefore, there may be students in your class who are capable of taking the facts that you’ve related and draw insights from those facts that you’ve never considered.
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    That’s why it’s very important that one of the very first things we learn in life is to be an independent thinker. While we should ALWAYS consider incoming information from ANY source, we should NEVER give anyone else’s ability to think priority over our own. That’s how and why Cornel West was able to bamboozle the people for so long. The vast majority of people made the erroneous assumption that he was more intelligent that they were, so even when they thought that he’d said something ridiculous, they just wrote off their own thoughts. We should be EDUCATED to never make that mistake. I raised my son and daughter to question EVERYTHING - including me.
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    As I posted on your wall earlier today, when Socrates was alive they called him a hood rat, because he didn't hold any credentials or stature in society. He was just a brother who liked to stand out on the block and discuss reality. We wouldn’t have even heard of him if he hadn’t drawn the attention of "youngsters" like Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon, because he never wrote a thing. When I think of him he reminds me a lot of old Gigglin’ Willie from my hood. And just like Gigglin’ Willie, the powers that be had so little respect for Socrates that they profiled him, and later, killed him. But today, in spite of his former stature as a hood rat, scholars the world over agree on one thing - they agree that Socrates was the father of modern thought. So here’s a question: What if Socrates would have subordinated his thinking to some zip just because the other guy had a title or more credentials? If he had, the world would have sustained a tremendous loss.

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    PB: "What i am talking about has nothing to do with credentials, since I am an autodidact. The fact is that i knew more than them and therefore I was not much interested in what they thought because when I would give them a chance to speak I could see how uninformed they were. I have a very hierarchical approach to teaching. Its simple: If we are intellectual equals then we will treat each other as colleagues. If you are more knowledgeable than me in a subject - it goes without saying that nobody knows everything, so I am speaking of areas where we have expertise - I will keep quiet and listen, respectfully asking questions. But when I am the most knowledgeable, and I can usually tell that in about 15 minutes max, then I expect the student to pay attention and not waste my time with bullshit arguments. After all, they are not only wasting my time but the other students too. That's my approach and I'm sticking to it! you have your way and have mine. That's the long and the short of it. And by the way, I am a good teacher."

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    Wattree: I don't doubt that you're a good teacher, P. But having information and having the insight to manipulate that information are two different things. If the music teacher who taught Charlie Parker music theory would have told Bird, "I know more than you, and therefore, I’m not much interested in what you think, because I can see how uninformed you are," he would have been making a huge mistake, because just because the professor knew more ABOUT music than Bird did, that didn’t mean that he UNDERSTOOD music like Bird did. So there’s a big, and very important, difference between simply having information and facts, and having insight and understanding. That’s why the knowledgeable TEACH, while the insightful CREATE.
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    The reason for that is, if you take a surgeon with an IQ of 120, and a high school dropout with an IQ of 140, while the surgeon may have more information at his immediate access due to his educational advantage, he’ll never be as smart as that high school dropout. So if they were placed in a situation where all things were equal, the high school dropout would be able to connect the dots more efficiently than the surgeon every time.
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    I learned that when I was a teenager and going in and out of juvenile institutions. While I was a high school dropout at the time, I could manipulate those social workers and Deputy Probation Officers to do or write damn near anything I wanted them to. They had more education than I did, at the time, but they didn’t have the G-2.