The Attack of the Five Minute Monster From the Deep

Apparently Prager "U"s (brought to us by radio talk show host Dennis Praeger and his fellow travellers) mantra is give me five minutes and we will give you the intellectual history of the universe. Such a notion is, of course, absurd as anyone who has dealt with reality knows. In fact, demagogues like Jonah Golderg, one of Praeger "U's" many talking heads who have recently been appearing on my Facebook page thanks, no doubt, to weird human algorithms or algorithms become missionaries to heathens like myself, might be seen as latter-day Pauly Shore's starring in their own American sitcom passion plays if they didn't actually appear to believe the demagoguery that comes out of their mouths.

What folks like Goldberg do is what demagogues, apologists, and polemicists have always done and will always do. They create caricatured and stereotyped and, of course, unnuanced straw men to then batter into dust in the liberal/commie/nazi/socialist/anarchist wind with their conservative hammers and sickles. They, for instance, don't interrogate and excavate the history of terms they talk about such as social justice and they really don't engage those who have written about justice from other points of view like Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre. Instead they confine their "analysis" to a caricature and stereotype of whatever they are "analysing" and which they have already demonised. They don't reflect on their sacred statements such as that which asserts that all states, be they monarchical, fascist, corporate, "democratic", or oligarchic, are the same, tyrannical. They confine their "analysis" to a caricature and stereotype of "government" or "states" that they have already demonised in their holy writ, oral and written. They don't see academia as it is. Engineers and physicists are hardly revolutionaries bent on destroying conservative fairy tales. They don't see reality as it is. Like it or not the US, as documents show, aided and abetted the overthrow of Chile's president.

In the end Prager U is yet another fundamentalist theocratic religion. We can actually count the ways that it is in its five-minute presentations and in the comments on the various five minute pontifications on the Prager U Facebook page. There’s the belief amongst many of the faithful that once the priestly authorities have spoken there is no need for further exploration of a topic. There’s the belief amongst many of the faithful in the inerrancy of the sacred texts of the religion. All hail the power of Hayek’s name. There are those five-minute Prager U catechisms that socialise or try to socialise the faithful, new, converts, or old, into how and what true believers should think. There are those ahistorical and anti-historical attitudes of many of the faithful. There’s the belief among many of the faithful that true believers need to mission to the many heretics outside the Prager church. There’s even a willingness among many of the red faced emotional true believing faithful that, should evangelism fail, heretics should symbolically and even perhaps actually be burned at the inquisitorial stake. Prager U is a religion. Prager U is a theocratic religion just like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam before it. Everyone, by now, should expect this inquisition.