Kirk Versus Socrates

 Charlie Kirk loved verbal sparring.  He made it into a career.  In that sense he reminds me a tiny bit of Socrates, who also loved verbal sparring.  But there was and is a vital difference.  Socrates wanted people to participate in argument so that they could understand important ideas better.  When he argued with someone, he would help that person see the implications of their own ideas and how they were sometimes self-contradictory. As handed down by his most famous student, Plato, we have some of Socrates “Dialogues”.  An interesting thing about these dialogues is that they often end in something called “aporia” .  Aporia means an impasse or stalemate.  Nobody “wins” the argument.  The point with Socratean dialogue was to start the process of inquiry, not to finish it.

 That’s not what Charlie Kirk was doing.  Charlie Kirk was using argument as a display of power, as a way of showing dominance over his sparring opponents.  He agreed to listen to their critiques, but he made a sport out of publicly demolishing his opponents, often freshmen university students. The point was winning and humiliating his younger opponents in his videos, which had a huge audience.  This was not personal guidance, as it was with Socrates, it was mass propaganda in the service of a political party.

Character matters.  Philosophy first got off the ground with Socrates.  He inspired so many that some of the most famous schools of philosophy sprung up after his death:  Plato’s Academy,  where we get the word “academic”,  The Cynics, The Stoics, the Phyronnists, all claimed to be inspired by Socrates.  The reason that Socrates was such a great influence over ancient Greek philosophy was because he lived and died for philosophy.  His life was exemplary.  And that’s what inspired his students.  

I can guarantee that a person whose point is to publicly humiliate his opponents over and over again, is not going to inspire better understanding.  There will be no schools of thought inspired by Charlie Kirk, and that’s because Kirk’s “dialogues”  were dominance displays designed to stop the process of inquiry. In this case the argument was not being used to initiate the thinking process, it was being used as a bludgeon against his political  enemies.

Intention matters.  Socrates intended to get people thinking about themselves and their society.  He believed that the people in the Greek ruling class should understand concepts such as justice, courage, and knowledge.  He was trying to facilitate understanding by encouraging open inquiry. 

 Charlie Kirk had purely political intentions.  Kirk was producing very effective propaganda in support of Donald Trump’s  Republican  party.  His intentions were the opposite of Socrates, not to encourage open inquiry, but to shut it down.  It is no coincidence that Trump is  supporting censorship, book banning, attacking public education, defunding and coercing institutions of higher learning, defunding scientific research, and threatening foreign university students.   The intention is to eliminate critical thinking and flood the zone with propaganda in order to confuse and disorient people.     This is the opposite  of open inquiry and it leads to mass ignorance and economic stagnation - the fate of neo-authoritarian countries like Russia and Hungary.