QUANTUM PHILOSOPHY GOVERNS

Since it’s beginning to look like the Bush Administration (assuming that there ever was one) has been acting on some philosophical principals, I started thinking. I love philosophy. I’ve loved it ever since I found the Spinoza definition of God, “God is a triangle---before there was anything--- the three interior angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, and after everything is gone the laws governing a triangle will still be the same.” Well, I went back to the dorm armed with this insight and one of the dorm inhabitants said, “God is a fucking parallelogram, fuck face.” Well you can imagine the impending brawl as everyone took sides in this argument, one that was ruined by some stoner who brought up quantum mechanics as being God too. The resulting confusion was settled when one of the budding philosophers observed that God was a marijuana cigarette and that we should all contemplate that. So instead of brawling we got loaded, missed classes, and tried all day to get laid. Late that night I wrote my groundbreaking “C minus“ paper on Pussy and Quantum Physics (It’s possible that two equally stupid bitches--identical in every way --- separated by a billion miles will put out at the same exact times---or maybe they won't. There is no way to predict.). But I digress.

The thing about philosophers is that they say things that every moron on the planet already knows but never thought about. Like the Calvinist view that lying includes things you don’t say. For example if I sell you a car with defective breaks and don’t tell you about them because you didn’t ask----I lied. Who the fuck doesn’t know that?

And so it seems that members of this Administration are big fans of a guy named Immanuel Kant, a guy who said things everybody already knew. But Kant wrote three chapters about each individual thing while cleverly using huge unknown words like a priori, “categorical imperative,” and the ever popular concept of causality, all of which allowed the educated moron class, the people who think they think, to justify either what they were already doing or what they wanted to do.

Nobody on the planet really knows if Kant was cool or not. This guy said shit like: it is permissible never to help those who are less well-off than ourselves. Another winner that I particularly like would be that it is permissible to borrow money under false pretenses if you really need it (something I've lived). Only there are a dozen “buts” following that Maxim. He also created a thing called a hypothetical imperative, which has the form, "If you want X, then do A." Now this assumes that X is a really really good thing.

But he also has a categorical imperative which is :"Do A." That's it, just do it (Nike anyone?). Then Kant said that A is absolute and universal. Moral action for Kant always follows from the categorical imperative:,

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it become a universal law."

The administration made the error that one a hell of a lot of us made, mainly because it sounded good. We were buttressed by some Russian fugitive from a Gulag (Natan Sharansky) who wrote a fucking book called "The Case for Democracy," which said in essence that every person on the planet wanted freedom (the subtitle of this book is: "the Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror). Yeah, that's right.

So believing this Russian who survived Stalin while following Kant---the philosopher guy who posed the philosophical maxim that stated If X is what you want, then do A to get it, and this is absolute and universal. Moral action for Kant always follows from the categorical imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it will become universal law." In this formula, “X” was freedom and “A” was the use of force to get it. So we just went out and shot for “A,” and we now have total shit. Another awful way to look at it is that it’s OK to kill civilians as long as the goal is pure. So Saddam had an impure goal and we had a pure one.

So I don’t know which philosophy obtains right now but you can bet that it is nothing as useful as my magnificent philosophical observation made eons ago in a dorm that is far far away: “It’s possible that two equally stupid bitches separated by a billion miles will put out at exactly the same time----or not.” The world still isn’t ready for Quantum Philosophy. Had we considered it we would have come to the conclusion that X would be the desire for freedom but that it's possible that freedom would only be expressed in America, and only perhaps much later in the Middle East.

Or not at all.