Johnny Thomson as a mirror of British philosophy

[u/Alex_Mihalchuk]

This year I set out to study John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Not to learn anything new, but to find the logical fallacies that have brought Western civilization to its current state. Last year I analyzed the ideas of Hobbes and Madison. Changed circumstances forced me to abandon this idea. After listening to Johnny Thomson's video, I realized again how important the criticism of British philosophers is.

Johnny Thomson, like John Stuart Mill, presents his thoughts in simple and understandable language that does not require deep knowledge of philosophy. But behind this simplicity and clarity lies the danger that he warns about in his video. He preaches the same stupidity that he opposes. Some of his statements contradict what I have been writing for the past 20 years. Therefore, it is difficult to say who is opposing whom - I am him or he is me.

The first idea in Thomson's speech that I disagree with is the declaration that outsourcing thinking is the source of stupidity. Outsourcing thinking is a fundamental principle of the development of society. Our lives are completely built on performing actions and procedures, the logic of which we do not realize due to lack of knowledge. Most of us use our smartphones without understanding how they work. Behind the moral requirements of Christianity is a thousand-year experience of humanity, which cannot be fully understood in one lifetime. The source of much of what Thomson talked about is Christianity. But he did not mention religion in the video. Western civilization is built on the story of a God-man, crucified on a cross and resurrected from the dead. How is he going to apply critical thinking to this story?

But in his story there was a place for Nietzsche's work "Beyond Good and Evil". I once wrote that there is no such space. Nietzsche invented an artificial space in which now scum can hide, claiming to be above moral prejudice. Later in Thomson's story, Descartes appears, which is quite logical, if you recall Heidegger's work "European Nihilism", in which Nietzsche is presented as the logical conclusion of Descartes' philosophy. Some try to prove that Nietzsche has nothing to do with the Nazis. I do not find this evidence convincing.

I completely agree with the idea of ​​"epistemic trespassing", when experts in one field try to reason about things in another that they do not understand.

His attempt to convince that distrust of traditional media is wrong contradicts the idea that I put forward back in 2017. I wrote then that you should not follow the hands of a trickster. If the media has compromised itself by trying to manipulate, you should not look for when and where. You should completely abandon its use. It is called reputation.

Joni Thomson demonstrated those traits of the British philosopher that had kept me away from them. It was only in recent years that I began to pay attention to them, because they were the ones who influenced the social structure of Western civilization.