Collectivism 136, Part 2: The Phenomenology of the Mind, Brought to You by a Christian Nationalist

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Hey gang, welcome back to Safe White Space!

This is Part 2 of my review on Collectivism 136, a Packet of Accelerated Christian Education (PACE). If this is your first time checking in and need some context, I suggest you start with Part 1 of Collectivism 133, where I explain what the PACEs are and broadly how ACE operates:

Before we begin, let me explain some things about the scope of this post, because it’s a little different than normal. In this section of the PACE, Donald Howard, the author of Accelerated Christian Education, does something very out of habit. In this section, he actually presents a philosopher’s (Hegel’s) theories, as opposed to solely bashing their character and claiming they were a direct agent of Satan. While he never directly quotes Hegel (or accurately summarizes him), there is something refreshing about these theories at least seeing the light of day. Even though he presented all of Hegel’s theories in an absurd, petulant, and whiny way, there are somethings we can extract from this section that are worthwhile.

As a part of studying Hegel for this post, I listened to a variety of people who’ve intensely scrutinized his work. The one thing everyone agrees on, is that Hegel is one of the most difficult philosophers to understand, for two particular reasons. For one, topics of Hegel’s work, like “contradiction,” and “negation,” and then, “the negation of the negation (itself a contradiction),” etc., can all be frustrating at first and could feel like a pointless mental exercise. For two, Hegel was a notoriously bad orator and writer. I assume we all have that really smart friend who sucks at articulating themselves? That’s Hegel. And when you’re already discussing something as complex as the “negation of the negation,” that problem gets compounded.

Due to Hegel’s poor articulation, everyone interprets Hegel’s writing into their own words. The quickest example of this confusion is the title of Hegel’s exposition The Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes), which some interpret as The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel wasn’t clear about how to interpret “Geistes,” in this context. Potentially, on purpose. If people disagree in 2024 about the proper title of an essay, that should give you an idea of how difficult it can be to parse Hegel’s theories. The difference between serious historians/philosophers interpreting Hegel into their own words, and Donald doing so, is the intent. Donald had no interest in humanizing Hegel, or explaining his theories in the way they were intended.

So, between the complicated nature of Hegel’s philosophy and writing style, and the fact that Donald never intended to present Hegel in good-faith to his students, the first ten pages of this PACE are an absolute circus. I’ve cut over 4000 words from the post because staying on topic is so hard. Hegel is such an interesting philosopher, and Donald’s takes are so stupid that you should go learn more about him. Super cool stuff.

If there is something I leave out that you want addressed, please let me know in the comments, but I am going to keep this as concise as possible without compromising the material.

We’re starting off with the empirical errors I found in this PACE:

Exhibit 174

On September 17 September 16, 1837, seventy-six-year-old Philippe Michele Buonarrotti *Buonarroti died in the city of Paris—all but forgotten.

Collectivism 136, page 18

Here, the PACE adds a middle name:

Exhibit 175

However, Francois—Emile Noel Babeuf, “first among the conspiracy of equals,” survived to be guillotined the following day- -May 28 May 27, 1797—at Vendome.

Collectivism 136, page 16

I don’t know why…

On page two and three we get a real whatever sort of biography of Hegel which starts with this little guy:

Exhibit 176

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 28, August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany.

Collectivism 136, page 2

Four errors feels pretty good for a PACE that’s been around 43 years. For reference, 19 were found in Collectivism 134:

Collectivism 134, Part 1: 19 Errors and Counting (Maaaybe Some Antisemitism...)

Next, we’re covering Donald’s presentation of Hegel’s work. This bit crosses the line from wrong, to lying. Most of this could have been fine if the egregious editorializing was replaced with a genuine attempt to teach his students something about Hegel. Something that doesn’t get conveyed well in my posts, is that so much of this “education,” is just Donald’s frustrated opinion.

So naturally, we get Donald’s classic flair for the absurd:

Exhibit 177

Hegel’s philosophy.

The semi-theological ramblings of Georg W. F. Hegel, which have come down to us as Hegelian philosophy, are but a confusing hodge-podge of obvious contradictions—a circumstance not only recognized by Hegel himself, but one deliberately incorporated into his philosophical system.

Collectivism 136, page 3

Contradictions are like any new concept. Until you get the hang of it, it’s “confusing.” Throughout this section, Donald projected his confusion like the Bat Signal and his frustration bleeds through the pages.

To be as concise about contradictions as I know how, I’ll give you some examples of of contradictions. A rhetorical contradiction would be “This statement is false.” If “this statement is false,” than the statement is true, in which case, it’s not. Or is it? WHO CAN KNOW??

An observable contradiction would be something like the fact that the Sun is rising for you, but for another human exactly like you, it’s setting. Both of you can still trust your sensory perception, but you have to zoom out your point of view to correct for this contradiction. Until this was explained to you as a kid, you couldn’t know what you didn’t know; you had no idea that someone on the other side of the world was observing the very opposite (night or day) in their sky.

This concept that we have created about the sun rising and setting isn’t invalidated after we acknowledge that the sun isn’t actually doing anything, but rather that it’s the earth rotating as it orbits the sun. We both know what we mean by “the sun is rising,” but we have increased our awareness when we recognize that the sun isn’t rising for everyone. Using these terms (rising, setting) is an expedient way to describe our surroundings, and helps us communicate effectively.

A philosophical contradiction would be us, ourselves. Because I don’t know you, we’ll take me as an example. I am who I am, and I’ve always been me, but I’m not the same me as when I was five. At five I played soccer, was a Kindergartner, and wet the bed at night. Now I’m 30, a writer, an uncle, and a diagnosed bipolar. Between then and now, I’ve been a basketball player, a high school student, a 2nd Class Petty Officer, a four time college dropout, and a server.

I am all of these people that make up me.

Spreading this type of awareness back in the 17 and 1800s literally changed the way illiterate people and the peasant class saw themselves and their overlords. There was a massive contradiction between the way the the peasant class and the aristocrats lived, and people recognized that it didn’t/doesn’t have to be that way. I can’t remember who, but I recently heard someone say that all of philosophy is recognizing that “nothing necessarily has to be the way that it is,” and I really liked that.

That’s why Hegel and similar philosophers are so threatening to someone like Donald, who deeply identifies with rich, white, slave-owning, landlord autocrats.

Hegel’s foundational theory was presented as a “confusing hodge-podge,” of contradictions that shouldn’t have been “deliberately incorporated into [Hegel’s] philosophical system,” which would be to ignore these existing contradictions altogether. That’s also all we get on contradictions, which is entirely necessary to understand the rest of Hegel’s work. So, we’re already crossing a nonstarter to qualify this PACE as education. The rest of this section is corrupted before we even get to it.

Next is the “Absolute Idea.” The only way for Donald to comprehend the “Absolute Idea,” was in relation to his White Republican Jesus, which means Donald was incapable of speaking Hegel’s language, even if he actually tried.

It’s difficult to tell what of this next paragraph is suppose to be Hegel’s philosophy, and what is Donald’s summation, largely due to Donald’s petulant whining compromising the educational text. I’ll post a pic in the footnotes of this paragraph, but I’ve isolated the important part here:

Exhibit 178

“Absolute Idea.”

Hegel’s philosophy was based upon the absurd supposition that fundamental reality was some nebulous entity which he labeled the “Absolute Idea.” That so-called “Absolute Idea,” although spiritual in nature rather than physical, could in no way be equated with the true living God of the universe, but was merely the culmination of ultimate thought. Hegel further asserted that “Absolute Idea,” consisted of “pure thought,” thinking about “pure thought” and thereby thinking itself into existence!

Collectivism 136, page 4¹

The way Donald framed this whole paragraph is just insane. So, for this section, I’m going to explain why the Absolute Idea in particular made Donald so upset.

This presupposition of Hegel’s Absolute Idea, that something can think itself into existence, implies that anything can think itself into existence. That’s an idea that is extremely threatening to the top down hierarchy of our society, in a very physical sense. If the Absolute Idea thought itself into existence, so too can we.

Let’s again take me as an example and build on this idea that the me I am now is not the same me as when I was five, but that I’ve also never not been wholly me. Despite my relativity to me, I am still absolutely me at any given moment. However, there is a third me at play. The activating force behind this ever changing me is based upon my ability to (accurately) recognize who I am now and project that person onto where I believe I want to be. In this process, I’m thinking that person, my future self, into existence. I didn’t wake up one day in the military. I pictured myself in the uniform, I imagined what I thought being in the military was like, I liked what I projected, and I went for it.

Without the ability to cast ourselves in other roles, we’d be permanently stuck and dependent on the outside forces acting on us.

Implementing these new found cognitive frameworks increases our ability to exercise free will. Per Hegel, doing whatever you want isn’t freedom. Knowing why you’re doing the things you do and why you want to do them, that’s free will.

With that framework in mind, picture a person that can only recognize their immediate being and their surroundings through sensory stimuli. They hungry, they eat, they poop and sleep, and when the rooster cockadoodle-doos, they wake up. If that person was the top of the metaphorical and literal food chain in their biome, in a way, you could say they have total freedom. There is nothing they can’t do, no overriding outside force is acting on them; they do what they want, whenever they want. But that’s not freedom, as Hegel understood it. He’d see that as being a slave to your surroundings and base instincts, without even recognizing so.

Now, put this same person in a slave colony. Maybe this person even recognizes that they are a slave and who their masters are. But if they can’t even imagine the concept of “free,” or picture themselves as deserving of freedom, they cannot, in every literal sense of the word, take direct action to achieve such ends. This is why the upper classes have to restrict education and deride philosophy as a worthless endeavor (often on the pretense that it “can’t make money”). Their Achilles' heel is human enlightenment.

“I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so.”
Robert Frobisher [David Mitchell]

Last thing about the Absolute Idea. The PACE says this bit:

Exhibit 179

The one true approach to reality, then, was through Hegelian logic in an attempt to arrive at “Absolute Idea.”

Collectivism 136, page 4

False.

Maybe at one point in his life Hegel considered it possible that you could, “arrive at Absolute Idea,” but he very much didn’t later in his life. His whole thing was that everything is constantly in a state of change and contradiction, and that there will never be an instance when anyone has arrived at anything. The reason Donald presented the Absolute Idea this way is to lean into that narrative that all philosophers are trying to “ascend the throne of Heaven,” as agents of Satan. He wanted his students to regard Hegel’s Absolute Idea as an attempt to replace God.

That’s where we’re gonna leave off today. In Part 3 we will compare the philosophies of Hegel and Donald, and I am sooo excited to do so. Donald was not only an evil sniveling prick, he was truly the dumbest person any of us have ever heard of. Tim Pool? Steven Crowder? Alex Jones? Brilliant compared to Donald. I think a core reason is self-awareness. Those three don’t try to tangle with the big boys. They know their place in this world is grifting off the dumbest people, and going toe to toe with someone grounded in reality is an existential threat to their livelihood. They tend to not venture out from their niche markets.

Donald on the other hand, bought all of his own lies at some point, which led to him write some of the least self-aware and dumbest stuff I have ever seen. I can’t wait to show you :)

Thank you all for reading, and keep those millstones at the ready.

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Matthew 18:6

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