Today’s society is being subverted by sophistry and by a generally accepted cultural trend of lying. Political propaganda is flooding all of the major information media with so much ideological disinformation and fake news that it has become impossible for ordinary citizens to know what the real world is and how to cope with the constant barrage of aggressive ideological gibberish. Today’s culture has reached what may be the highest degree of falsification and sophistry of language in all of recorded history. The question is: How to get out of this predicament?
Plato’s Cratylus dialogue answers that question: you have to examine your own mind as well as the minds of others. The idea is not to examine what to think, but how to think. Plato uses etymology to teach us how to look at what is behind language and behind “things”, like names in this case, in order to learn the proper way to discover the axioms that are behind human thinking.
