Sophistry prefers broad and colorful generalizations.  Rationally practical speech and patterns of thought build on reliable facts about nature, including human nature, without ignoring (i.e., “compartmentalizing” away) contradictions that appear as the logical inferences are constructed upward from the non-changing reliable facts at the bottom.  Plato loved those generalized theories about perfect goals.  Socrates could not stop asking questions about nature, especially when analogous to previously known ideas within nature.  Aristotle says Socrates invented “inductive reasoning” by means of all…..

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In my 70-year lifetime, as best I remember, the first ersatz-science to successfully fob itself off as a legitimate “natural science” was Economics.  [Today the most prestigious universities (i.e., Sophists) fob off all kinds of crazy sophisticated bullshit fields as if they too were legitimate sciences, sometimes even as if they were legitimate “natural sciences.” ]  Once an ersatz-science achieves the political status of a truly useful natural science, the (worldwide) Social  Oligarchy accepts its pronouncements as the factual equivalent…..

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Since Plato never felt the need to learn accounting for himself, he would not  have noticed any of the “loose ends” that made no rational sense at certain irrational financial moments in my “Socratic” reading of financial history.  Here are a few examples that would get Socrates’ attention.  (Not all directly involve Accounting.)

Several weeks after I, and countless others, watched a significant percentage of my modest investments dematerialize on “Black Monday” in October 1987, I read explanations of How…..

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If the questions were “Why” and “How” the American Economy was failing to offer a reasonable opportunity for earning a better life than one’s parents for most of America’s “middle-class” of common citizens, and failing to do so for at least one generation or more – Socrates and Plato would agree on the need for “transparent” and reliably truthful Accounting records to ensure the data about money was truthful and reliable.  No one can rationally reason without reliable data.

Whenever…..

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The only people who sincerely believe the American Economy is not really broken (but just requires superior tinkering or a better way of modifying the Social Protocols that govern human behavior, especially in the economic world) are delusional because they are not rationally learning from history. More than half a century of real history proves they are delusional.

[Socrates, like any other practical and rational man, would try to find “Why” and “How” things did not work out well for…..

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Western thought and philosophy was fundamentally founded by two real human beings: Socrates (469-399 BCE) and Plato (430?-347 BCE).

Socrates never wrote anything down.

Plato opened the most famous higher education institution in the history of the world (The Academy – 380’s BCE – 525 CE when closed by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian).

Plato left behind 47 dialogs of theoretical abstractions that constitute the basis for all philosophy and the derivative forms of higher education that followed. I have harbored…..

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My publisher asked “What do you want readers to take away from your writing?”

If I really were Socrates, I would have the exact same three-part answer in 399 BCE Athens as makes sense to me now in 2015 in the USA.

To get people to really think for themselves – as reasoning individuals. To get every citizen to feel “entitled” to rational explanations from the politicians, the leaders, the “experts and authorities” and the professional educators and not be…..

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