The theme of this letter is not “When it comes time to take a stand, Mr. Erik Karlsson invariably dives for cover.” By now, you've already heard countless arguments running in that vein and are probably pretty sick of them. The theme of this letter is “Erik's behavior is absolutely out of line.” To plunge right into it, although I disapprove of what Erik says, I will defend to the death his right to say it. Or, at a minimum, I'll drain the swamp of influence-peddling and the system of pay-to-play. Okay, that's not quite the same as “defending to the death,” but at least it demonstrates that Erik shouldn't remake the world to suit his own insensate needs. That would be like asking a question at a news conference and, too angry and passionate to wait for the answer, exiting the auditorium before the response. Both of those actions reinforce the impression that egocentric dipsomaniacs—as opposed to Erik's accomplices—are striving to hijack our educational system and turn it into a self-cloning propaganda machine.
To someone whose eyes are open, Erik's constantly repeated mantra that his ideals prevent smallpox is an insanely covetous notion. By way of contrast, consider my personal mantra that if you can't see that Erik's fairy-tale-inhaling bedfellows actually believe that violence and prejudice are funny, you need to get a brain. Get a brain and figure it out. Learn that Erik's little empire is not a civil debating society. It is not interested in new ideas. That's why you can't expect to sit down and talk to its members or have a civil debate. The best you can do is try to tell them that Erik maintains that he can override nature. This is complete—or at least, incomplete—baloney. For instance, Erik fails to mention that if we are going to speak objectively about his flimflams, we must understand that most people want to be nice; they want to be polite; they don't want to give offense. And because of this inherent politeness, they step aside and let Erik uproot our very heritage and pave the way for his own mutinous value system.
When I say that the outcome of the struggle will ultimately be decided based on the number and influence of people fully informed about Erik's arguments, committed to Erik's defeat, and organized under sound leadership, I don't just mean that he wants to coordinate a revolution, that he wants to waste hours and hours of our time in fruitless conferences and meetings, or that he wants to generate an epidemic of corruption and social unrest. Sure, Erik inarguably wants all that, but he also wants much more. He wants to create a new cottage industry around his militant form of obstructionism. Honor means nothing to him. Principles mean nothing to him. All he cares about is how best to make the pot of fainéantism overboil and scald the whole world.
No one believes that Erik is laser-focused on the most pressing issues facing our nation. No one. Some of us lament this. Some are angered by it. Many are resigned to it. Some try dispassionately to explain how they think it came to be. But no one disputes it. No one even disputes that Erik derives great joy from diminishing society's inducements to good behavior. What does any of that have to do with revisionism? Everything. It turns out that it is naïve to expect Erik's army of stinking, superstitious cardsharps to drift naturally toward some sort of moral center. It will not. It has not. And, as we all know, I rarely pay any attention to Erik. Frankly, I have no need to hear the uninformed opinions or quasi-ignorant opinions of a featherbrained slubberdegullion. Nevertheless, as soon as Erik found the resources to do so he lost no time in making his vituperations a key dynamic in modern exhibitionism by viscerally defining “parthenogenetic” through the experience of grungy Bonapartism. The inevitable followed: Prodigal, sanguinary prats started portraying the most worthless ranters you'll ever see as blackguards. The scariest part of all of this is that I cannot compromise with Erik; he is without principles. I cannot reason with him; he is without reason. But I can warn him and with a warning he must unquestionably take to heart: Erik's animadversions are obviously reprehensible. However, for many theorists in the humanities today, the key issue with his animadversions boils down to one question: Who among us is brave enough to say out loud that Erik backstabs his legatees? It would take days to give the complete answer to that question, but the gist of it is that Erik's taradiddles are as predictable as sunrise. Whenever I spread the word about Erik's iscariotic bunco games to our friends, our neighbors, our relatives, our co-workers—even to strangers—his invariant response is to prostrate the honor, power, independence, laws, and property of entire countries.
Erik's most recent tractates defy belief, even by the exceedingly low standards that I have for anything Erik writes. For instance, it turns out that he avows that he can achieve his goals by friendly and moral conduct. He has it all wrong; raising the volume, increasing the stridency, or stressing the emotionalism of an argument does not improve its validity. The logical consequences of that are clear: Erik's slaves don't represent an ideology. They don't represent a legitimate political group of people. They're just flat narrow-minded.
I have a practical plan for improving the state of education in this country. I propose that we get knowledgeable and well-trained teachers, equip them with syllabi filled with challenging texts and materials, and have them teach students that Erik wants to control every aspect of our lives. He wants us to rise, fall asleep, work, and live at the beat of a drum. Then, once we're molded into a uniform mass, we'll be incapable of seeing that it is my intent to study the impact on society of Erik's greed, stupidity, hubris, and outright corruption. That said, let me continue.
If Erik were paying attention—which it would seem he is not, as I've already gone over this—he'd see that he says that the stork is responsible for procreation. You know, he can lie as much as he wants, but he can't change the facts. If he could, he'd doubtlessly prevent anyone from hearing that he has been paddling around in the swampy parts of sanity. Why else would Erik warrant that there's no difference between normal people like you and me and unpatriotic woodenheads? We ought to break the mold and stray from the path of conventional wisdom. That'll make Erik think once—I would have said “twice”, but I don't see any indication that he has previously given any thought to the matter—before sullying my reputation. Like a lion after tasting the blood of human victims, he will keep essential documents hidden from the public until they become politically moot. Many experts now believe that his grunts believe that one can understand the elements of a scientific theory only by reference to the social condition and personal histories of the scientists involved. It should not be surprising that they believe this, however. As we all know, minds that have been so maimed that they believe that Erik is a refined gentleman with the soundest education and morals you can imagine can believe anything, especially if it's false.
No approach to stopping Erik will benefit from the lemonade-like outpourings of aestheticizing literati and drawing-room heroes. Rather, stopping Erik requires people who can speak up and speak out against Erik. It requires people who understand that in all the torrents of rhetorical hot air thus far expended, it's hard to find a single sentence from Erik that acknowledges that he's fundamentally ignorant, small, and petty. In fact, Erik stands for everything he says he's against: ignorance, smallness, and pettiness. It is therefore the case that the virulence of exclusionism—specifically, its potential to use philistinism as a weapon for systematic political cleansing of the population—is apparent in every one of Erik's insinuations. If that fact hurts, get over it; it's called reality. And for another dose of reality, consider that life is a search for the true, the good, and the beautiful. It is not, as Erik believes, an excuse to preach fear and ignorance.
Although I'm not saying it'll be easy peasy lemon squeezy to compare, contrast, and identify the connections among different types of deceitful, scary emotionalism, he owes much of his success to a public psychopathology in which gnawing insecurities, envy, and hatreds nursed by many people in private converge in public in scary social eruptions that present themselves as noble crusades but that diminish their participants even in seeming to make them big. If it weren't for that psychopathology, people would more readily acknowledge that Erik has committed a number of heinous acts against society. His most piacular offense, however, is perhaps his exhibiting a deep disdain for all people who are not clueless backstabbers. As unconscionable as such behavior indeed is, I'll admit that Erik's rhetoric is occasionally decorous. However, his delusions are just as ripe and far more lethal than those of the loopy scammers who insist that taxpayers are a magic purse that never runs out of gold. Since I don't know Erik that well, I'll have to be a bit presumptuous when I say that his headstrong harangues teach people to fear and mistrust one another, souring the spirit of trust and curiosity that sustain democratic dialogue into the cynicism and defensiveness that clear the way for slovenly meanies to gain a virtual stranglehold on many facets of our educational system.
Although the Gospel According to Erik says that unfounded attacks on character, loads of hyperbole, and fallacious information are the best way to make a point, I aver that he has a strategy. His strategy is to hand over the country to unhinged porn stars. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Erik. I know what we're going to get if we let him make widespread accusations and insinuations without having the facts to back them up. We're going to get more empty words, more hollow promises, and more shallow exhortations from Erik and his adjutants. What we're not going to get is an admission that we could opt to sit back and let Erik use mass organization as a system of integration and control. Most people, however, would argue that the cost in people's lives and self-esteem is an extremely high price to pay for such inaction on our part. Let me end this letter by telling Mr. Erik Karlsson that I fully intend to clear the cobwebs out of people's heads and help them understand that I indisputably can't live with disingenuous fussbudgets who attack the critical realism and impassive objectivity that are the central epistemological foundations of the scientific worldview. This action is lawful. This action is moral. And this action is right.
