Every Christmas has its own story

For Christmas, in 2002, Nordica (then 16), our friend Michele and I designed a game for my retired US Army Sergeant Major dad called, "War on Words.” http://nord.twu.net/acl/research/waronwords.html

I wanted my dad to understand our work more than anyone else in the world. He had said he couldn't understand what in the hell I was talking about, and the concept of communitarianism was beyond his grasp. We made the game so that my dad would “get it” and help us after he saw the enemy we identified. We based the whole game on the Hegelian dialectical formula used to trick people into giving up their freedom via Orwellian terms. The dialectic makes us choose from 2 false sides, a million times over, leading us to their ultimate synthesis, when we all happily embrace one big, fat, false, final conclusion called Communitarianism. The tutorial accompanying his game was called, "What is the Hegelian Dialectic?"

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/05/dialectic.htm

My dad was super annoyed with that early version of the game. Not only did I appear totally freaked out by what I “thought” I knew, he had never studied logic and thought anyone with a PhD after their name should not be trusted anyway. So, it was a flop, and we went back to the drawing board and expanded the tutorial with a brief introduction to logic and how we deduced our argument opposing the entire conclusion. Posted online for the first time in December 2002, we sent the link out to all the academics still alive we named in our thesis. It became our present to to the world in 2003. In 2007, we published it in hard copy.

We didn't do it for fans. We didn't write it for attention, titles, money or fame. We did it because we knew that we had stumbled onto something everyone in the world deserves a chance to know, and we thought Amitai Etzioni deserved to know not all Americans were falling for his game.

our view

We don't expect you to see communitarianism the way that we do. We don't even see it the same way, and we co-wrote the antithesis to it. We want you to see it with your own eyes. We are convinced the best solutions to it will come out of freed minds once the problem is identified internally. Our solution is not your solution, and we don't prescribe one.

http://educate-yourself.org/cn/hegeliandialectic20aug09.shtml

The goal of our work is still the purpose of the game "War on Words" in 2002, 1. to step outside the dialectic, 2. examine your arguments from a dialectical perspective, and 3. re-enter the game as a knowledgeable player.

It's that third stage of the game that's the hardest to play, and I've known very few people who can play it. I stayed stuck in the self examination phase, because I had a lot of baggage I brought to the table that had to be dealt with first. Today I'm ready to take my rightful place in American industry.

I get to say, it's been one of my greatest joys witnessing people I know breaking free, being real in the face of the unreality of our fabricated life. In the USA, UK, Vietnam or the many other places where people have seen the dialectic at work and coming quickly to its conclusion. There are many nations that identify communitarianism as authoritarian and sectarian, as do we.

http://www.thefire.org/the-authoritarian-communitarian-impulse/

If you cannot afford to purchase "What is the Hegelian Dialectic?", it is available for free all over the internet, having been reposted and republished by others in various forms and for various purposes, hundreds of times. http://12160.info/profiles/blogs/what-is-the-hegelian-dialectic-by-niki-raapana-and-nordica

For the past few years at Christmas I gifted out the pdf of the combined 2012 edition of "2020: Our Common Destiny and The Anti Communitarian Manifesto". I'm happy to be able to do it again this year. Message or email me if you'd like a ebook for Christmas! And send me a review please if you're one of the folks who already got theirs. And, okay, send me your complaints if you're still waiting for a hard copy, nothing like waiting years for a book, I'm sure. Anyone else in our shoes would have filed bankruptcy a long time ago. But we're hanging on and planning for another print job, as unbelievable as it sounds. If at first you don't succeed... 

I'm still not going to promote 2020/TACM in any usual way, no more book tours will be announced, but I will make time to write a few more articles, update 2020, do a few more radio interviews, participate in the conference about communitarianism I have scheduled in the UK in March, rebuild the ACL library, and oh yeah, write a paper for peer review.

We made history with our thesis. As my dad would say, "no brag, just fact." It's an amazing feeling. I wish my dad had lived to see it. I'm grateful I did.

Cheers!

%Merry Christmas, merry Christmas, hope you have some fun this year!"%