For my part, for 35 years all that has been heard in America is: "I'm, poor, my marriage is messed up, my life is messed up, I'm not hooked on drugs but I won't stop using them, my career is messed up," and so forth. In response as to whether the people in such condition will change anything they are doing so as to quit destroying themselves or those around them, these people will say "Hell no because I'm right about everything!"—and believe themsevles intellectuals who know everything.

In reality they are nothing but arrogant spoiled chronic screw-ups with big vocabularies.

I'm tired of people doing the opposite of everything I say, then coming after me with elaborate and evasive philosophical treatises demanding my social servitude to the consequences they bring upon themselves. My patience is at an raw end. Let them die or kill each other off, and if I can encourage them in that learning experience, I'll do it as a public service as long as they do it elsewhere where I don't have to be bothered with them.

The fact is, the questions about proving whether reality exists, or proving its nature, and proving proof exists are, or should be, meaningless to me. They should be, except people employ those questions to immobilize me and/or gain power over me. The first step toward my enslavement begins with deconstructive arguments demanding proof that any of my rights exist. The doubtfulness of proving reality is where such arguments can ultimately begin if proponents of my enslavement are pressed to their intellectual limits.

What is reality? In terms of defining what reality is maybe the best place to go for an answer is to find a healthy eight or nine year old Midwestern farm kid and watch him or ask him. What he needs to do to help make a farm work, and the answer he gives in response to your questions, is probably a good definition of reality. Before kids were brainwashed into liberalism from day one, or are beaten down by adult neurotics and psychotics, and before TV, kids had a good idea of what reality was. At times, kids would make realistic observations that were embarrassing to adults. A few good boots in the arse takes that out of them.

Certainly there are certain developmental refinements that need to be made. We learn that a desert mirage doesn't really exist although we might initially have thought otherwise. Magician David Copperfield can make Greyhound buses come from apparently nowhere behind curtains. About 30 or 35 years ago a levitation machine that floats beautiful women off tables for magic acts cost $10,000 from a magician's supply house in Chicago. Copperfield must have built a hum dinger to handle a Greyhound bus.

Looking Behind the Curtain

We refine and quantify certain observations of reality through combining it with inference. We learn there is a second tier of reality. We learn to look behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz to find the ventriloquist when one aspect of perceived reality seems to differ with that consistency seen in other aspects of perceived reality. We become more detailed and accurate in examination of reality. The instantaneous forces and directional path of a moving or falling object, for example, can be accurately found by derivatives of mathematical calculus. The apparent irrationality of the desert mirage becomes resolved with detailed examination of the reflection and refraction of light.

Looking behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz can occasionally lead to difficulty when what's behind the curtain is a widespread belief in which considerable numbers of people have emotional or other investment. Society and the social establishment tend to promote adherence to complacent continuity and seek to internalize an inhibition against disturbing that complacency within the population. Deviance from that by those of us subject to uninhibited curiosity is apt to produce fear, hostility, and rejection.

So Galileo rolled balls up and down ramps out of curiosity to obtain a primitive idea of the conservation of energy. It put some people in a little over their head at the time. And, apparently, Columbus noticed ships sailed over the horizon in such a way that the lower portion of the ships became occluded from view before the tops, leading to the inference that the surface of the earth might be curved instead of flat. Using the position of the stars and whatever, he calculated the curve by primitive methods and was off by about 6,000 miles of earth circumference, leaving room to bump into the unexpected continent that was to become America in the way of his attempted Westward sail to India and China. But he had the approximate right idea.

These can be looked at as healthy acts of uncontaminated or uninhibited curiosity combined with disciplined inference rather than rebellion or hostility. Such acts are horrifying to those other people programmed into inhibition and frightened to deviate from it. Or they can be horrifying to those with various investment in superstition. Or they can be horrifying to those incapable of curiosity and thought. There is a difference between uninhibited curiosity and inference versus rebellion, although some people don't understand that difference. Some people interpret healthy curiosity as rebellion. Others all too willingly attempt to mistake their blind infantile rebellion for genius. The latter condition is tempting because one doesn't need a mentality of quality to qualify as genius, only primitive anger is sufficient.

We have an undoubted confidence in reality as children, which most of us carry through adulthood if we don't get entangled in the word games of philosophy or liberalism. If you asked a 10 year old whether he'd jump off the edge of a cliff he'd tell you you're nuts because he assumes both of you know he'd fall and be killed. Reality becomes an assumption. It's not a bad idea to continue that undoubted confidence.

Don't ask an educated deconstructed liberal whether he'd jump off a cliff because you are apt to get an hour-long harangue referencing every philosophical school for the last 500 years, punctuated by assertions that only simplistic right wing primitives believe the question to be simple. Unlike the 10 year old, the deconstructed liberal assumes you know nothing, but he knows everything, except whatever he knows is doubtful whenever he thinks it's doubtful.

Get Real

It strikes me here that what I am doing is violating one of my own rules. That rule is never get involved in somebody else's craziness or stupidity. A mature serious functioning adult with integrity knows or assumes what reality is, and lives by it. If a person tells me he doesn't know what reality is, at this time of life I have no patience with him and the conversation is ended. My answer is, reality is reality. Get the hell away and don't come back until you know what's real. I don't want to be bothered with spoiled kids or professional kooks.

But for purposes of this article I will temporarily suspend the rule.

Those of us who are what are commonly called political conservatives often let ourselves become drawn into debates characterized by unbalanced pseudointegrity. These are mind games played by leftists in which they demand integrity from us and others, and we treat them as though they had personal integrity, when they have no personal integrity and have no intention of following the rules they demand from others. That is, we are in the bad habit of treating tormentors who have no integrity as if they were sincere, or as if they gave a damn, or are amenable to logic while they roll their eyes to the sky in imitation of innocence.

It's a losing game. They are not sincere. They are being deliberately evasive. They are only trying to wear us down or confuse us. There is no reason to believe we can change them with the truth.

As people of good will, we never play the same game, and we move toward a defensive position. We typically assume reality rather than base argument on deconstruction. We don't base arguments by saying, "Prove the real world exists and logic exists before I believe poverty exists and the consequent need for socialism exists." Such argument from what has been mislabeled the political right would move the discussion to an intellectual and premise parity with the deconstructive political left. To argue from such parity would produce the response, "Now you are being silly," from leftists/counterculturists. That response would be correct. Silliness is allowed on the deconstructive political left, but not for anyone else.

We are prohibited from arguing from a position of deconstructive parity because that would produce a cultural free-fall into an atmosphere of madness, and that madness is what we are attempting to prevent or counteract.

I remember a political argument from years ago between a young conservative professor and an angry leftist senior law student. The professor nailed the lawyer's hide to the wall on every point. Finally, the lawyer retorted to the professor that the professor's arguments were invalid because eventually we were all going to die anyway—an interesting basis on which to build rational support for a new society.

Beginning in the mid 60s, generations wanted to do many things without being questioned. They deconstructed the apparent validity of reality to avoid criticism as well as to avoid any limits upon their behavior. So you would get some kid who was wacked out on drugs who argued all reality was subjective and his new-found reality in a constant condition of stupefied euphoria was just as valid as anybody else's. According to the rules of deconstructive philosophical word games his argument can't be disproven within the realm of modern intellectual discourse. And furthermore, he was working for a kinder gentler left-wing society that would enable him to stay in that condition at the expense of others. That's the way it is in the contemporary educated world. Violation of that is imposition of your arbitrary subjective reality and value system upon his. You become the bad guy and the evil-doer. A generation of parents found themselves subjected to a system of accusations they were completely unequipped to deal with.

Immobilized by Doubt

In politics, it used to be believed people were endowed with certain inalienable rights. But, for purposes of building a society where the individual was declared to be in servitude to the demands of society and other people, this has been declared doubtful and unprovable. (And, get this, under politically correct conceptions, logic and rationality have been declared arbitrary inventions of European civilization employed to keep black people in subjugation.)

The crusade to inculcate subjective deconstructionism has been highly successful. The fear of violating the equal right to any subjective reality has created a widespread condition within the American population, and educated populations elsewhere, that closely approximates a type of serious advanced immobilizing involutional schizophrenia. People sit immobile in corners like hopeless back ward mental patients in states of guilt-ridden inhibition pondering doubts about questioning other people's demanded right to unconditional respect for their own subjective realities, no matter how bizarre those subjective realities become. Many societal members are plagued by the condition psychiatrists once called "the madness of doubt" in some of their more disturbed patients. The country is immobilized by questions of what is reality, what is pornography, what is maladjustment. People slobber on themselves in a state of withdrawn deconstructed catatonia while a United State President immobilizes them with arguments undefining what is "is", and what sex is. Confident definition or belief in anything has been eroded to the point of nonfunctionality—to the point of being dangerous.

As a societal symptom we have (still at the moment of writing) a serious presidential candidate in Al Gore who acts as if someone has been inside his brain with an eggbeater. In the deconstructed world, this is acceptable. On election day many tens of millions of people in similar condition will vote for him. If Gore loses the electiont he basis of his loss will not be on his thought processes, but his likeability coefficient.

In some of the older texts there was a recognized condition called analytic neurosis. This was a debilitated condition evidenced by patients who had been in psychoanalytic treatment too long. It is one of the tasks of psychoanalysis to ask questions that ultimately lead to the experiences or interpretations that become the source of psychological adjustment problems. It is my opinion that analytic neurosis can arise from asking the wrong questions and too many questions which have the result of disassembling and undermining the patient's confident sense of reality, turning him or her inward to a deconstructed regressed inner world. It's possible to delete a patient's internal premise structure and leave him with nothing. Essentially, the patient becomes vitally deconstructed.

America is suffering from a form of analytic neurosis from constant questioning that is abusive rather than being helpful. The public mentality is being tinkered with by other people who are often malicious in intent and/or incompetent to know what it is they are tinkering with.

On the overall view we have evolved two, or several, large groups of people, each pointing fingers at each other and accusing each other of being crazy, intolerant, or whatever.

For those who are novices, or haven't noticed. your subjective reality always turns out to be inferior to, and subservient to, somebody else's subjective reality when they want to do whatever it is they want to do, in the type of leftist society they are building.

One contradiction in leftist philosophy is that all the premises of leftist philosophy are just as philosophically doubtful as the premises of non-leftist philosophy when the same rules are applied that are used to assert doubtfulness of non-leftist philosophy. If the existence of the real world can not be proven to exist or reality can not be defined, then why is socialism necessary to solve asserted realities that can't be proven to exist?

Why is doubtfulness of the existence of reality so important?

Sources of Reality Doubt

Here are the primary reasons for the arguments or concern that I have found over years of study.

1) Some students are highly suggestible in a restricted artificial academic atmosphere that they become entangled in various arguments.

2) Some people have lived a horrid undermining life that is so terrible and/or irrational that reality seems unbelievable. They become susceptible to argument as to its doubtfulness.

3) What some people want to do is so unreasonable that they are compelled to argue reality, rationality, and mental maladjustment do not exist in order to do it.

4) Drugs and/or the subjective reality of TV have displaced close connection with real reality.

5) Some people are not prepared to take a place in reality or the real world, or don't like the prospect, and, so, work to reject it.

Some so-called meditation systems, which are little more than forms of dedication to acquiring schizophrenia, promote turning away from the outside world while turning inward toward a subjective reality, and have the same reality-separating effects as drugs.

Elements numbered one and two tend to interact with each other synergistically. In fact all the elements interact.

The answer to the question of what is reality is sometimes psychotherapeutic in the sense of relieving some of the fears or whatever is motivating reality rejection. On occasion, dealing with the real issues that motivate reality rejection ends such rejection.

Pull Some Weeds

A question in my mind is, does this acquaintance of yours [referring to the Harvard acquaintence of the letter writer of Part 1] have any concrete investment in reality—or even life? If he doesn't plow his field in the spring, will he still eat in the fall? The chances are 1,000 to one, no, he'll still eat. And that's the kind of life free from such responsibility that he probably wants to lead. Does he need to run an industry of some kind without losing money at it? No. That isn't his life plan or orientation. With luck he'll spend his life at a university with tenured license to secure other people's money while contemplating his navel. Or, like many others, he will seek to hide in a bureaucracy where he is responsible for doing as little as possible as infrequently as possible. Or, like many others, he will seek a life as a social activist and/or professional alienated malcontent. Anything else he engages in will be entered into under protest or resentment.

In short, he, and many others, do not have responsibility of feeding or caring for themselves on a concrete level. As such, there is no need for them to challenge the premises of their arguments as there are no consequences for not changing them. It's easier to disbelive in reality if you aren't required to live in it, or escape living in it.

Parenthetically, one of the primary goals of socialism is to create a world of cushy and even dignified hiding places for the expanding mass of such personalities.

A serious rule is: If you want to know what reality is, get out of your self-protective shell of distant speculation and live reality, and deal with reality. The problem with not knowing what reality is that there has been too much Harvard and not enough outside world. Places such as Harvard are constructed to be asylums for people who want to hide from reality. One does not learn about reality from other people seeking to hide from reality. If someone wants to know what reality is, the answer is sometimes to leave the artificial world designed to push reality and responsibility away.

I am reminded of Ross Perot's comments regarding Bill Clinton's thinking processes when he said. "He needs to go out and pull weeds." That was Perot's way of saying Clinton needed to test his thinking by involving it with reality.

Robert L. Kocher is the author of "Attitude Channeling and Brainwashing," as well as many other articles (available at http://zolatimes.com/writers/kocher.html). His email address is steiner@moutain.net.