By Democritus
The fastest and most efficient way to stop the perpetuation of white-supremist Eurocentric educational policies and practices is to decenter Western culture by abolishing logos from the academy and replacing it with logo(s).
Logos is Greek for “word” or “reason”. Logos represents the reasoning process, which brings order out of chaos. To Heraclitus (500 BC), logos also represented the divine reason implicit in the Cosmos that gave it order and meaning. However, we know that the world, which is godless in reality, is best described not by Cosmos but by the empty, disordered, structureless void of Chaos. Chaos is Cosmos without logos. Heraclitus was wrong on all counts. The word logos is actually a tool of misinformation.
The Stoics (300 BC) perpetuated Heraclitus’ misinformation campaign and defined logos as the active rational and spiritual principle that permeated all reality. The misinformation campaign was ramped up by Philo of Alexandria (20 BC), who defined logos as the intermediary between God and the Cosmos. Misinformation became disinformation and the disinformation spread like wildfire. Logos was soon defined as both the agent of creation and the agent of reason through which the human mind came to perceive and understand God. The disinformation campaign peaked when John the Apostle (6 AD) synonymized logos with Jesus Christ–the way, the truth, and the life.
However, given that reason is a sign of whiteness, and that there is no objective truth, in order to stop the perpetuation of white-supremist Eurocentric educational policies, we must decenter whiteness and rid ourselves once and for all of the baggage of logos.
We must turn our backs on the Western tradition that has given us logic and various “ologies”, including psychology and biology, and follow Ibram X. Kendi, the Great Visionary celebrated by Cornell University, who realized that “[e]ducational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy. It is a suicidal strategy.” In order to teach us to become Antiracists at approximately $541.67 per minute, Kendi has chosen to devaluate words and reasons (Note that I have borrowed the words in italics from Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of an antiSemite). We should also follow the advice of Saints Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, who, with the help of the Black Lives Matter Spirit, begat Ibram X. Kendi.
Following Kendi the Wise, we must seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If [they] press [us] too closely, [we must] abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. (Again, note that I have borrowed the words in italics from Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of an antiSemite).
As we abolish logos from colleges and universities, we must replace it with its homophone logo(s). Logo(s) is the plural of logo, a word coined in the January 1, 1937 issue of Advertising & Selling to describe the logogram in the first ad ever written for the new-fangled mechanical pencil called ‘Eversharp’.
Logo(s) are conducive to the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion movement. Just think of the possibilities!
And by defining people by a logo that does not connote the whole truth, as opposed using the exhaustive and exhausting logos which must pass the rational test of time of being an acceptable public truth, it becomes easy to cancel the architects of Western culture such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and celebrate people defined by their logo(s) instead.
0 Comments