People celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk are worse than sick—they’re downright evil.

Has there always been this much evil? Or is it worse than it used to be? The answer is not only is it worse, it is much worse, because the philosophical basis of our country has been deteriorating for years.

The United States was created by men of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th centuries that used reason as the primary source of knowledge. In essence, the United States was based on reason, and it is reason that has been abandoned due to bad philosophical ideas.

In the 1920s, the Frankfurt School in Germany taught and expanded upon the ideology of communism by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was there that Critical theory, a theory that criticizes modern society, was born. By holding this belief, that Western Civilization stood in the way of provoking a socialist revolution, the Frankfurt School condemned Western culture. To put it another way, they went about trying to destroy Western Civilization because they viewed reason as a threat.

The ideas of Marx and Engels traveled to the United States, and quickly spread through our universities, high schools, elementary schools, and even in preschools. Education became a prime target because one of the fastest ways to destroy a country or civilization is through the children. The goal is to prevent them from learning how to think, because then when children become adults, they can be controlled by the state. Like Lenin purportedly said, “Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.”

“Father of education” John Dewey (1849–1952) developed a system to dumb down children called “progressive” education, and his approach is used today in most schools, both public and private. He was a social determinist and diehard socialist, who loathed individualism and capitalism. He aimed to turn America into a socialist state like the Soviet Union, so, to that end, he created a plan to fundamentally transform education. He thought that there was no free will, the child was formed by social relationships instead of his own mind, and the individual should be subordinated to the group—but perhaps Dewey’s most horrific position was his view of reality. Unlike the educator Maria Montessori, he did not think that objective truth existed. Instead, he thought that truth is whatever the group believes. So, unless there were some social benefit, he viewed the individual pursuit of knowledge as a negative objective and even discouraged it. The purpose of education, according to Dewey, is to socialize children, not to understand the real world.

The idea that “the truth is whatever the group believes” stands against identifying the facts of reality and paralyzes thinking. With this kind of system, relationships take primacy over truth, so, to avoid conflicts among the students, children feel pressured to agree rather than to try to figure out right from wrong or truth from falsehood.

When students go to college, they are told outright that there is no such thing as reality. They are told that reality is different for everyone, that no one can know anything for sure. Students are taught to disregard facts, and even worse, that they don’t exist. Those who think reality is unknowable live in a state of confusion and therefore feel insecure. In order to navigate life, they become reliant upon what other people say is true, and go around repeating what they have heard as factual.  If a person does not operate by identifying the facts of reality by himself, the only other way to function is with emotions and whims.

Ideas matter. And false ideas that are accepted have negative results. If there is no such thing as reality, a man can change into a woman, insults and smears can be called tolerance, morality is fluid, and death can be celebrated. Evil flourishes by default when reason, the means of human survival, is abandoned.

Our country needs reason, and reason has been rejected because reality has been rejected. Without objective reality, anyone's views are just as valid as anyone else's, anything goes, and the world collapses in chaos and evil as we are witnessing today. Charlie Kirk was correct when he said, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” But it is even more accurate to say, as Ayn Rand pointed out, “When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.”

Charlotte Cushman is a Montessori educator who taught for over 40 years, and co-owned and operated two Montessori schools. She authored Montessori: Why It Matters for Your Child’s Success and Happiness, Effective Discipline the Montessori Way, Your Life Belongs to You, and Save Montessori from Social Justice: Woke Montessori Schools are Betraying the Teachings of Maria Montessori. She has been involved in the study of Ayn Rand’s philosophy since 1970.  Her book website is Cushmanbooks.com and her opposition to social justice in Montessori website is authenticmontessorieducation.com.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.