Here's the deal. One can never know oneself exhaustively. But one can know oneself truly.
The proof of this is found in more than one place, I will name but two: Jungian depth psychology and Husserlian phenomenology. Stay with me.
Jung's psychology illuminates the dance between what we can know about ourselves and what we cannot. What is beyond knowing remains fully active in us nonetheless. It is the dynamic continuous interaction between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. It is here, in the midst of this matrix that one discovers the endless generative knowledge of oneself as a creative and reasoning person.
Husserlian phenomenology is not unlike this. In Edmund Husserl's phenomenological protocol we come across the existence of horizons of knowledge. As with the physical earth's horizons, so too our horizons of knowledge continuously reveal and recede, informing us and inviting us to discover more about our subject.
Why do I bring this up? Because there are at least two ways one can discover one's true self, one's true being, and one's true mind about what this life means: we can do it through the study of profound disciplines like psychology or philosophy. We can also do it through good old fashioned face-to-face debate with others. Introverts will likely be more drawn to a self-managed learning program and take on studies under their own initiative. But the majority, who lean to extraversion (in our highly extraverted culture), will prefer to learn and grow through honest, thoughtful debate with others, debate entered into in good faith. That is the social and political basis of our deep need for free speech.
It is through the social interaction of reasoned free speech that we come to be convinced of what is true and right. Without it, we are left to our ignorance and isolation. You see where I am going with this?
Charlie Kirk was a man who believed in the powers of free speech. Free speech is a socially self-corrective process that maintains the health of the body politic, but only when we engage freely in the marketplace of ideas. If we have the courage to first learn what it is we are thinking, and then follow that by stating our thoughts clearly, publicly, then we must also respect others enough to accept something of their response to our ideas. Why speak if you do not want to potentially learn from a reasoned reply?
But America has changed since the onset of the internet and especially since the outbreak of social media. We have raised an enormous and poisonous crop of cowards, escapists who blame others for their problems and the problems that plague society. These are people who hide behind their phones and computers and duke it out using numerous false personas. This principle and practice now permeates all levels of human society, from the interpersonal up the scale to the international.
C. G. Jung might ask, "Isn't it bad enough that we already hide behind our public masks, our personas? Now we are given powerful new tools that exponentially augment just how lost we are."
The real you and the real I do not live and develop in cyberspace. We live, learn, and love in proximal contact with one another.
This is where the question of love and hate come in. Can I love you if we are always at a distance from one another? In the past, I attempted to hold onto romantic relationships and good friendships that became challenged by distances of hundreds, even thousands of miles. We spoke a language of love but, without coming together our desire faded and our love fizzled to nothing. Love requires laying eyes on one another, sharing space, touching, hearing each other's voice without any sort of electronic mediation.
A similar strain is put on students who only learn online. Much is lost that would otherwise be communicated in an on-ground classroom. Learning is decimated when all the cues of physical presence are taken out of the equation. Just so, social media makes it easy to live in a bubble of reality; but we were not designed to live meaningful lives in such a way. If the language I imbibe is hate language it will eventually erupt and drive me to express that hatred physically and socially in real time.
That seems to be a big part of what happened in the case of the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. A young assassin, who had been raised on the ubiquitous medium of communication of social media, lost his way. He stopped thinking for himself. He allowed the hateful thoughts of the radical left to infiltrate and colonize his mind using words that have nearly lost their original definitions, words like Nazi and Fascist.
The reason I do not go to campuses and raise crowds to promote free speech is that I learned a long time ago that crowds are made up of individuals who may or may not think for themselves. This is most important to me. I am genuinely intimidated by, and still squarely face, the prospect of not knowing my own mind, not knowing the truth. I seek it out daily, and this makes me a bit more serious than most.
I want to think my own thoughts and express the truth as it actually appears. But when I experience followers tagging along, I fear they have lightly given up their responsibility to themselves. Each of us has a sacred responsibility to seek and know the truth, to come to a genuine understanding of himself or herself. To ignore and then let go of this overriding purpose is a form of suicide. I cannot be complicit in murder such as this through my charismatic leadership. That is why I am so hesitant to lead groups. Institutions, yes; crowds, no. Attachment to a charismatic leader may all too easily become for many others their complicit silent abdication of self, the disavowal of sustained dedicated exploration for genuine self knowledge. Existence means being self-directed, not other-directed.
As a human being, my essence is creative, loving, reasoning, intentional. There is not now nor ever will be a machine that can duplicate - not just mimic - those qualities. Why? Because such qualities are not merely agglomerations of vast datasets; they have roots deep into the mystery of self awareness, they are based on the unique inscrutable existence of human consciousness, the riddle of subjectivity. Consciousness is both a collective universal thing and at the same time a profoundly personal thing as well. This is what I will never abandon: the truth of the mystery of my being as I find it unfolding in the horizons of my own self knowledge.
Today I see far too many people, young and old, doing what far too many have done in the past. They gave up the sacred task of coming to self knowledge that leads to becoming full, whole individuals. Instead, they have taken up the battle cry of hatred against the enemy, the oppressor, the so-called Nazi, the so-called Fascist, (their fellow Americans) without even understanding what they are doing. They cling to and hide themselves in the crowd all the while abdicating the throne of their own spirit, deposing their innate faculties, replacing them with a lie.
And have you noticed that the hatred is not directed against the former leaders of the Progressive Left who now hide in the shadows? It is not directed against the propagandizing legacy media? Or against the leaders of higher education who have betrayed the trust of their students? These are they who, over decades of coordinated group think, instigated our current troubles. They remain untouched for now.
If you hate even the very notion of America, leave. China is waiting with open arms. Give up your freedoms. Then you cannot be held accountable for properly living up to your rights as an American. Go where slavery to the State is expected and even compelled. Then you can stop thinking for yourself for good.
For those choosing to stay in the land of the free and home of the brave, speak up, if only a little bit. Remind your family members and your neighbors of the historically unique inheritance we possess just for having been born in the United States.