I was contemplating the image of ideas as art. Creating cognitive art, beautiful pictures, to be hung in a private gallery within the confines of their skulls, is the primary task of people I call Thought Aesthetes.
This is normally, of course, accomplished by the reasonable expectation of social reward, and congratulations of precisely the sort a Picasso received, or a Van Gogh should have received.
If you add to this the invariant creation in the process of an unquestionable virtue which attends all visitors to the gallery, and you have a virtually impregnable fortress.
Of course, impregnating these fortresses with new and better ideas is precisely the task of all people living today who possess, in my preferred formulation, common decency and common sense.
And it occurs to me the image of the images can evolve. Rather than a picture on the wall, what about an open ended play? This is vastly more true to life. Or perhaps little engines, which build good ideas everywhere they go–which is my own aim–or tear them down, which is the aim, ultimately, of those I term Cultural Sadeists.
Perhaps our ideas are attached to a sort of clothesline system, in which we pull a rope, and pull them into the world on the top, then pull them back on the bottom, to see what happened. We then change them, until eventually we get back what we expected and wanted, regularly. This is Science.
It is hard for me to overemphasize the STUCKNESS–emotionally, socially, morally and intellectually–which underlies those pushing these ridiculous Left Wing ideas, which have all been decisively refuted over and over by at least 3-4 generations of educated men and women, who spoke in many voices, but always to such a similarly devastating effect that, as I continue to insist, the survival of this lunacy is obviously a matter of social psychopathology, and not of the tenability and viability of ANY of it.
And, again, behind the stupid intellectuals are corrupt people who want what their kind has always wanted. The first step to true Liberalism is understanding these people can use any language to get what they want, and that the task of the truly honest is perennial vigilance, and a ready willingness to call bullshit on anything that does not make sense.