I Did Not Have a Classical Liberal Education

In past posts I've opined that the difference between classical and modern liberalism is the underlying logical structure.

I should mention. I did not have a classical liberal education. I had the same progressive education as everyone else.

I grew up adoring the 60s. I thought Rock and Roll was a substantive form of music. I parroted the petty prejudices of the professoriat as they lavished praise on Jimmy Carter and heaped scorn on Reagan. I remember the deep dismay when the snarl words failed to turn the tide against the Teflon President.

I was interested in the foundations of mathematics and hoped to become a teacher; so I studied the history of mathematics. I saw classical logic as some sort of primitive state of thought that existed before symbolic logic and set theory.

My primary interest was the foundations of calculus.Since the equations of calculus play a fundamental role in physics, economics and many sciences, I believe that it was imperative to develop a way to teach calculus in high school. So, I had this ambition of become a high school math teacher who would focus on analytic geometry and calculus.

I saw myself as a young progressive thinker. I went to school in the Bay Area in about the same time that David Horowitz made his departure from progressivism. I saw first hand the things Horowitz went through in Radical Son.

Horowitz took his progressive writing style and turned the guns on the progressive movement.

As I was still in school, I simply became more attentive to foundational issues and began investigating the differences between classical and modern liberalism.

Unfortunately, my blatant act of questioning the foundations of progressivism caused me to be flunked out of college.

It was not until several years after college that I began reading books on logic and realized that fundamental transition that took place in the 1800s between the development of classical logic.

I happen to live in Utah. Utah is a closed society. By closed, I mean it is a society that is dead bolted shut against open discourse and new ideas.

For example, for the last six years, I've had the hope of either attending or hosting a meeting about free market health care reform. In six years, I've been unable to find any conservative groups holding meetings about free market health care reform, and all of my attempts to host a meeting have failed.

I can understand people being unwilling to talk to me. But Health Care is the single most important issue of our generation and I find no-one in the state talking about alternatives to the health exchanges.

NOTE to Utah: PPACA is a network of health exchanges regulated by the Federal Government but run at the state level. Creating an exchange that is run at a state level and is regulated by the Federal Government is not an alternative to PPACA.

Being a pariah doesn't bother me, but a complete blackout of discourse is troubling.

I keep coming back to this one point:

If Conservatives continue their stonewall suppression of discourse, there is no option but to give into PPACA. Quite frankly, I fear that if Americans the few remaining free market aspects of our health care, that we will soon lose all freedoms. If we don't have freedom to direct the care of our bodies then what freedom is there?

Having received the same progressive education as the rest of America and having never been in a situation where open inquiry and discourse was allowed, I am just left banging my head against stone walls without the slightest idea of how to act.