Mark Hamill and Peter Cushing

When I first saw this photo, I saw it out of context.

I love Star Wars. I’ve been a fan ever since I was a little kid.

As most diehard Star Wars fans can attest too: I bought all the lego sets, watched all the movies and television shows (multiple times), and have some Star Wars keepsakes lying around my home.

Obviously, I’m pretty set in stone. That’s why when I first saw this photo, I couldn’t help but have an unsettling reaction.

I remember feeling like my mind shivered. All I saw was Luke Skywalker having a good time with Grand Moff Tarkin, resident top evil-doer of the Galactic Empire. It took some seconds to realize that it was just Mark Hamill and Peter Cushing backstage sharing some downtime. However, at that moment, I felt a sense of betrayal.

I’ve never been a Luke Skywalker fan. (I’m more of an Obi-Wan guy myself). Yet, he has always stood in my mind as a hero. Not a hero I would plop a poster of on a wall of mine or empty out my wallet for a figurine of, (which I have done for Obi-Wan) but a kind of hero you would read about in a history book.

A picture of my Obi-Wan statuette, next to my Wonder Woman one.

We read of great stories of say allied soldiers and generals in World War II, slave abolitionists during the Civil War era, and revolutionaries going against their authoritarian overlords all over the world. We admire these men and women, but for the most part, they aren’t people we think about often.

However, when we see pictures of them, at the ready: We know they are good.

When I saw that picture, that’s how Luke appeared to me: A part of the good. I didn’t need to double-check, I didn’t need to go back and figure out who he was. Like any concept, any abstraction you have a word for like “justice,” “virtue,” “friend,” “table,” you know what you’re talking about without having to go through the whole process of, ‘wait, what’s justice again . . . what’s a table? . . . who’s Luke Skywalker?’

The question becomes: Why would you ever go against what you know to be good, what you know to be true? Moreover, what would be the idea(s) that would tell you doing so was the right thing to do? What kind of system would allow you to go against your values with a pat on the back?

In application, what would lead a Luke Skywalker to go against his friends in favor of a Tarkin? In the real world, what would lead someone like me to go against what I love in support of what I hate?

The answer to all: The philosophy of Pragmatism.

William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, respectively.

To begin, we must understand three men on an essential level: William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce; all American philosophers of the 19th century who have had an enduring impact ever since.

Any philosophy buff knows that there was a divide amongst them, specifically Peirce, with the latter two. What I call Pragmatism is what Peirce called “Pragmaticism.” Peirce re-branded his philosophy because, in his view, he had an essential disagreement with James and Dewey. Regardless, I think all three men share the same fundamentals, albeit definite differences. Besides, when was the last time philosophers ever agreed on the details? Because of this almost universal fact of philosophers, I will collapse them into our heading: “Pragmatism.”

To begin, Peirce had a view of “Tsycheism,” where the root word comes from the Greek goddess “Tyche,” i.e., “fortune.” Essentially, the universe is bound by chance and is in an existential condition of change that is governed not by laws, but habit.

Statue of Tyche, from Curious Expeditions, Flickr.

For example, one’s commitment to go to the gym regularly becomes a habit. However, many of us are painfully aware of the times when we have forgone our healthy practices. We had the choice; we weren’t bound by law to go to the gym at ‘this set time’ and at ‘this set location.’

The difference between a law and a habit is that a habit can be changed at any time. We decide not to go to the gym for whatever reason, warranted, or unwarranted. However, one has no choice to not follow the law of the land without consequences.

What Peirce does is extend our volition from ourselves to the very universe as such. The issue becomes: Since there isn’t exactly some authority we can ask when such a change of universal habit will come; who’s to say gravity will endure tomorrow? (Hence, Peirce’s “habits” are like Hume’s “regularities”).

Just like how the universe is in a regular fit, so are we by association. Take a classic-example: Swans.

Once upon a time, all swans were white. Then, one day, we in the Western hemisphere receive word that there are black swans in Australia. Who knew! Therefore, because the facts of reality are in one way today, and can be in a different amalgamation tomorrow, our knowledge is like a habit. It’s reliable as far as it goes, and it lasts until the sun sets. Then, we have to treat each day as a new practical beginning: Did anything change? Probably.

Poof! The black swan emerges in the United Kingdom, BNPS.CO.UK.

Whereas James and Dewey don’t harken to Tyche for their universal basis, they do beckon the call of more standard Philosophy.

What happened to Dewey in his early life happened to the lot of us: He read Kant.

Here’s the dilemma: There’s you, and then there’s the computer you are reading this article on. You experience the computer as a square with keys connected to another square with a beautiful clean glass surface. But what is a computer like, as such? “As such,” meaning, what is it like before you experience it as an unfiltered thing different from the processing your mind does to give you that square connected to another square thing you’re using right now?

Put it another way: What would the world be like if all humans were gone? What would it look like without you inserting your cognitive filters like the retinas in your eyes or the packaging of images your brain does?

The answer for Dewey: Experience and Nature.

In this work that is one of his most known in the Pragmatist school of thought, Dewey contends that there is the “stable and the precarious,” the “determinate and the indeterminate” within all things, which he aggregates into the concept “generic traits.” What this means in every-day life is that the things we experience are always in a state of change and aren’t in any one way at any given time.

Sound familiar?

What happened is Dewey basically conceded that getting at the true nature of things, the essence of things was impossible. (Even some commentators argue that he shouldn’t have even tried explaining the matter because, once you start thinking about his whole ‘solution,’ it doesn’t really hold up). What ends up happening is that Dewey realizes that this kind of ever-lasting ‘change’ doesn’t really happen to the things around you, like how the chair you’re sitting on isn’t transforming into a toaster. So, he replaces it with societal and cultural transformation. (More on this later).

Whereas Dewey and Peirce at least have a contorted sense of reality, William James ends up in a worse situation.

Regarding his work Essays in Radical Empiricism, he holds that we never actually experience a difference between mind and body, subject and matter, you and computer, but rather, a pure experience that synthesizes both. A “pure experience” is: “The immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories…a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats…”

What does this mean?

Think of the universe as one container of play-doh. It’s this gooey-clay like stuff, and therefore, can be mix and matched, shaped into anything. This play-duh is the “immediate flux of life,” the “a that,” which can be “any definite what.”

How do you then fundamentally tell the difference between things?

You can’t. Or, at least it’s very unclear. (Dewey actually went on to say in a letter to Arthur Bentley that what goes to unite these things to Dewey seems like a “jelly-like cosmic world-stuff of pure experience”).

Plato’s World of Forms.

The three eventually come to the same conclusions. They still think that a kind of universal, unchanging, timeless truth(s) is impossible for us as human beings to know. Therefore, all three men determine that one can only decide what is right or wrong, positive or negative, within the moment one experiences a given event. They hold we can’t escape these facts of nature since we’re human; we have to make judgments and interact with the world less we become vegetables.

For Peirce, since the world and ourselves are constantly changing, we may not be able to rely on universal principles, but we do have empiricism. In a standard scientific model, we figure out what’s right and wrong when we test a hypothesis.

For James, who is famous for setting many criteria in terms of how psychology is to be taught in academia, he holds, like Peirce, that we can figure out truths based in an experimental fashion when we study and analyze the human mind. Furthermore, aligned with Peirce, a “truth” is based on its “practical” outcome. Essentially: Did your experiment work or not? If the former, then your ideas of how to succeed are true, if the latter, your ideas lead to failure, and are false.

See a pattern forming?

What’s more, since human beings are fundamentally the same, we can activate our minds, experience things as individual persons: We can take solace in knowing we have “shared experiences.” (These “shared experiences” for James are about as close as we can get to universal facts of man).

For example, if we show the election of Donald Trump to a liberal, a conservative, a libertarian, a communist, an anarchist, a capitalist, a socialist, and a progressive: We’re going to get very different results.

However, if we take all these people and put their hands in an ice-bath, then we get the same result:

“Ah!”

Inauguration Day, Evan Vucci, Getty.

Dewey, like James and Peirce, holds that an idea, a concept, a principle is like an instrument. Like any scientific instrument such as a Bunsen burner or a beaker, they convey truths insofar as they are instrumental, i.e., useful. (That’s why another word for “Pragmatism” is “Instrumentalism”).

The three stories end by encompassing a unity: Objective truths are either impossible or inaccessible to man, and therefore, we can only use principles as far as our eyes permit us to see in any given moment of inquiry.

The question becomes: Now what?

In one sense, it seems very short-sighted. Indeed, what would the point be in studying different fields if everything is always subject to change at any given point in time? If our knowledge is repeatedly under threat of new knowledge or chance accidents, how can we be sure of anything?

All three authors hold the same essential answer: The scientific method.

Remember Dewey’s generic traits? Since everything is in an active state of conflict, the scientific method is the agreed-upon tool that we will use to understand the problems of reality. Dewey even goes as far as to say in Experience and Nature that every thing, every idea, every principle is an experiment, even if it isn’t made initially to be a laboratory activity.

The conjunction of problematic [precarious] and determinate [stable] characters in nature renders every existence, as well as every idea and human act, an experiment in fact, even though not in design.

Why is everything an experiment? Because we conduct tests to solve a problem, don’t we? (Hence, I like to think of Dewey’s view of the world as ‘Problematic,’ criticisms aside).

For example, when we learn about principles in different avenues of life, say dentistry, we discover the merits of these principles based on their practical effects. Therefore, when our dentist says that we should brush our teeth, we do so because of its practical effects. We see that our teeth become healthy and stay white. Hence, we have a principle we can keep.

However, I left out a crucial step: Why do we care at all that our teeth are white, or healthy?

For the pragmatists, the answer is always relative. Maybe we like the security of knowing our teeth won’t fall out of our mouths. Maybe we like being healthy for the spiritual aspect of being able to declare to ourselves, ‘I’m healthy!’ Maybe we want to make sure that that person of interest at work doesn’t think we are gross. Maybe we want to save money by not having to continually pay for fill-ins. Maybe we just like the colour white as opposed to yellow.

Whatever the case may be, it’s subjective, i.e., contingent on what any given subject, i.e., person may wish.

This is why Pragmatism doesn’t just leave you as a paralyzed single-celled amoeba, plainly swimming through the world, blind past your immediate surroundings. However, it does leave open an avenue that is worse than blindness: Destruction.

Since all knowledge is every-shifting and at risk of falling apart at the seams, one can’t integrate, i.e., put together all that one knows.

For example, let’s take a tenet from Christianity, thou shall not lie. Seems innocuous enough, right? Now, let’s instill it in you if it isn’t already there.

Now, let’s pretend we hear a knock on the door.

You open the door. The person across from us says,

“Hello. I’m with the SS, and we’re doing routine inspections for fugitives. You wouldn’t happen to be harboring any enemies of the state, would you? Namely, people of Jewish descendant?”

You harken to your principle: “Thou shall not lie.” However, a conflict emerges: You like Fred and his wife and kids that you are hiding in your attic. The question becomes, what do you do? Do you stay loyal to your principle, or loyal to your friend and his family?

According to Pragmatism, we know the playbook: Do what brings you practical effects.

For you, (assuming you have a stroke of courage and honesty), you say to the man at the door,

“Nope.”

And shut the door.

You end up feeling good about yourself: You realize your principle would have made your life miserable since you would never be able to forgive yourself.

Now take your neighbor.

The next day, we hear screaming and crying. Turns out, Rob next door gave away the Jewish family he was harboring.

After some time, we ask why he did so. He says to us,

“Well, you see, I’m a Christian. I don’t think it’s quite right to lie. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did. I want to be principled, and we all know the number one time to be principled is when the going gets tough.”

The question becomes, according to Pragmatism: Who’s right, ultimately?

The answer, according to Pragmatism: Blank-out.

The evil of Pragmatism is not relativism. Many people, pragmatists, and non-pragmatists alike wouldn’t know what to do or say. And so, what explicitly does Pragmatism bring to the table?

We often hear talk of “what’s right for everyone,” or “the public interest.” Especially in times like these in terms of our pandemic, we have been very socially conscious, so much so, we practice social-distancing.

To speak more broadly, we often have to figure out what’s in society’s interest, or our group’s interest, say our labour union, or our business, or our country.

Whatever it may be, a conflict inevitably emerges. Whether it be individual against individual, group versus group, nation versus nation, we have to deal with a burgeoning problem.

What Pragmatism brings to the table here is the doctrine of compromise.

Compromise, according to Dewey, must be socially based.

John Dewey, second row, under light fixture. President of the Chicago Philosophy Club, later, the Chicago School of Pragmatism. 1896, University of Chicago.

As said, Dewey did end up realizing that for him to say that every existent is in a state of change, or in some kind of state of tension remains somewhat faulty. That’s why in a forward to a new edition of Experience and Nature that actually never came out, Dewey said: “I would entitle the book Culture and Nature.” He called the “obstacles,” which were really just the holes people poked in Dewey’s work as “insurmountable.” Therefore, when his epistemology was under siege, it was replaced with a kind of philosophical anthropology, and we then promptly see Dewey enter into his democratic stage of life.

Since we talk about changes over time not just in America, but all across the world, we thus see that the problems of reality, how everything is made up of stability and flux, security and chaos is an all-encompassing reality for humans. We recognize that this tug of war is, in fact, generic.

We thus enter into what Dewey called a “universe of discourse.”

Whereas Dewey brings up this phrase in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, he actually never defines it. I think the reason, again, stems from the fact that he tried to ‘do’ metaphysics (which is just a fancy word for the study of reality). Nevertheless, since everything interacts in a universe, a culture, nothing is in a vacuum. One needs knowledge of banking for law, mechanics for chemistry, science for politics. This level of learning is at the individual stage, where knowledge is relational. The same experience now gets shifted to the collective level where knowledge and its truth or falsehood is based on relationships.

To show just how consistent Dewey is, he writes in Experience and Nature,

Although breathing is in fact a function that includes both air and the operations of the lungs, we may detach the latter for study, even though we cannot separate it in fact.

We see here that on the material side, our lungs need air. But air needs our lungs. An inseparable relation.

Thus, in How we Think on the spiritual side, truth needs me. But also you.

Truth, in final analysis, is the statement of things “as they are,” not as they are in the inane and desolate void of isolation from human concern, but as they are in a shared and progressive experience….Truth, truthfulness, transparent and brave publicity of intercourse, are the source and the reward of friendship. Truth is having things in common.

“Things in common.” What are those? Values, goals, knowledge. An inseparable relationship.

(It must be stated that there is evidence that is surely convincing of the contrary in Dewey’s other writings. However, the fact that one can make a case for both my analysis and a more favorable view of Dewey merely proves my ultimate point: This is all obliterating identity. Trying to have your cake and eat it too only further makes matters blurred, confusing, and seem almost inseparable).

Let’s see how this all now plays out.

We often hear of factory jobs being lost in certain parts of the country.

Promptly, we often get engaged in yelling matches about what we should do about it.

There are many actors to consider.

There are the labour unions, the workers, and the corporations. There are the families of all these people, their potential relief packages, which then brings in the taxpayer. Then, there are the politicians, the law firms, and the lobbyists themselves to consider since they will represent the labour unions, the workers, and the corporations. Hence, we get a cycle of conflict that must be adjourned.

So, what do we do?

Dewey tells us: We compromise.

Just like how on the individual level, we must consider many realms of knowledge, so too on the social level, we must expand our focus to all voices who want to be heard.

Pericles’ Funeral Oration, (1853), Philipp von Foltz.

(Epistemology is the study of how we know things. How do you know ‘this many’ of electrons are in zinc? How do you know whether you should lie to the SS agent, or not? How do you know whose interests we should follow? We see here Pragmatism’s epistemological cashing out, i.e., how one’s fundamental premises get applied in the real world).

Dewey, in his writings, eventually tells us that democracy is “a way of life.” It’s not perfect, because remember, nothing can be absolute. Nothing can be universal. But, if we apply the scientific method (which all pragmatists agree upon) to our experience in the community, we will get an answer that we can use within our lives to practice. We can live practically, just like when we went to the dentist numerous times and saw that our teeth went from yellow to white.

However, the massive pitfall emerges: Whose goal do we focus on, strive towards, and ultimately, bring into reality? And then: Who or what do we call upon to tell us whether our goal was ultimately worthy of our time? If it genuinely brought us the results we were hoping for?

The problem only gets exacerbated further when Dewey revised the generic view of liberalism within his day.

Whereas the old, classical view of liberalism was focused on the negative, ‘don’t infringe on others,’ ‘don’t use force,’ and viewed individuals as just part of the world before society ever came about: Dewey thought that liberty should be much more focused on the positive.

In The Future of Liberalism, he wrote:

Liberalism knows that an individual is nothing fixed, given ready-made. [He] is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation but with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical: — including in ‘cultural’, economic, legal and political institutions as well as science and art.

Dewey states the obvious: We don’t live on desert islands. We gain immense value from living with others, and it is an achievement to make oneself into a man or woman of substance.

Dewey also provides a new account of liberty that doubles down on this focus of the positive in The Public and its Problems, writing that liberty:

Is the secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association.

Since no thing exists on its own, so does no person. However, Dewey, ever the humanist thought it right that democracy should encourage positive action. Therefore, the true measure of freedom, of liberty is when a person becomes self-actualized by engaging with society.

Individual happiness undoubtedly, in my view, stands as the end goal of life. However, the pitfall only widens for Dewey, being:

If the goals of a group necessarily involve the use of force to get others to do something unprovoked, then no matter what: An individual’s rights get trampled since his right to his own creations becomes the path of happiness for others.

If we focus on the labour union’s demands for the increase of wages, and we use democracy, i.e., the government to coerce corporations into relinquishing their reserve capital to them, business becomes the spiritual lifeblood for anyone who gets enough votes to get a fix. Or, on the flip-side: If we bring our attention to the goal of business where say they want to put their workers in slave-like conditions, and thus, gets enough votes to allow for it, that also becomes a physical lifeblood.

The principle remains the same in either case: Someone will get sacrificed.

The cause of this entrenched battle is the obliteration of the axiom of identity, which has been the fundamental issue thus far.

The axiom of identity simply states that a thing is itself and not anything else at the same time. A table is a table and not also a chair. But, according to Pragmatism, nothing is on its own. If that’s true, then no one can have his or her personal goals, values, truths. If the singular “goal” of society must encompass you and me, and rests on the ‘values’ and ‘truths’ that only emerge out of the relationships we form with one another, then, there will always be a conflict.

What’s worse, and evil: No one has their own identity. Pragmatism replaces “I” for “Society.”

To obliterate all meaning in individual things and persons is to pave the way for any tyrant, any philosopher-king to claim he has exclusive access to what real knowledge is, as well as to what ‘society wants,’ whether under the guise of what the ‘Aryan race’ wants, what the ‘Proletariat’ wishes, the ‘church,’ ‘God,’ the ‘community,’ the ‘party,’ the ‘patriarchy,’ the ‘state,’ ‘men,’ ‘women,’ ‘minorities,’ etc., etc., etc.

(This all becomes very ironic. Part of why Dewey in Experience and Nature rejected the metaphysics of Plato, Hegel, and others was because he didn’t like how only select individuals were privy to the vital know-how within society. And yet, his very philosophy allows for such corrupt villains to realize his worst fears: Inequality).

What does the individual want? Nothing… He doesn’t have any wants outside of us. So now, it’s merely a perpetual war of collective desires.

Dewey and his fellow pragmatists created a system that allows for a perpetual state of ‘stability and precariousness’ where none actually existed in the first place.

John Dewey in TIME magazine, June 4, 1928.

I am not going to explain further what I think should be done in our factory workers versus business case. This isn’t an article on proper capitalistic mechanisms. Instead, I am going to explain what’s the most rotten with this whole system by ending where we started: Fiction.

Let’s take two factions that you may be familiar with: The rebels and the Empire. Or, we can take the New Republic and the First Order. (They’re basically the same thing).

After some years of fighting, after years of bloodshed and misery: The leaders come to the table. They discuss terms of peace and all the ins and outs of how peacetime would look like.

Mind you, reader, these are still the same people you see on the screen. Leia is still Leia, and Palpatine is still Palpatine. It’s a stroke of luck that the two sides came to a moment of a cease-fire. Now, let’s see what they are trying to achieve.

The goals of Leia: Peace, freedom, liberty (just like her heroic mother).

The goals of Palpatine: Peace, control, security (just like his monstrous pupil).

Let’s say we take the view of Leia since we are ultimately concerned with how to live a good life, not a rotten one.

The question becomes, what should Leia do to accomplish her goal that no one rational would argue with?

According to Pragmatism: Compromise….

And so she does.

And it works!

What we get is the Old Republic and the Separatists, i.e., the prequels.

Certainly, we would see a time of peace and a sense that everything is going back to normal. We simply put a line through “Old” and spayed over “New” like graffiti on a billboard: “The New Republic.”

The question I pose to you, reader: How long do you think this will last?

We actually have a timeline: From the beginning of The Phantom Menace to the end of The Revenge of the Sith.

Why would this happen so oddly similarily?

Because history repeats itself.

As I said, the people are the same, Leia and Palpatine. But so is everything else. The war machines of the Republic and the First Order are still there, the manpower, and the infrastructure. That covers the material side of things. Now, more importantly, the sentiments and ideas are the same.

The generals of Palpatine are still ruled by fear, and therefore, will continue to want to offset their anxieties by dominating over the innocent. The soldiers are still indoctrinated into thinking democracy is a fool’s errand, the Jedi are evil, and the people of the Republic are standing in the way of progress, what with their ideals and all.

The rebels, in their minds, are still, in fact, rebel scum.

The generals of Leia still want to liberate the worlds conquered by the imperials where the people are subjugated to the lives of slavery. The soldiers still believe in democracy for all people as a way of life, they think the Jedi were betrayed and that the men and women of the Empire are standing in the way of freedom, what with their objectively backward ideas and all.

The Empire, in their minds, are still, in fact, bucket heads.

Why would history repeat itself?

Because the ideas are the same. It would only be a matter of time before imperials jump back in their ships in the name of control and the rebels pick up their blasters in the name of liberty.

The issue isn’t compromise as such. When a husband and wife are contemplating pizza or sushi for dinner, respectively, the husband picking sushi or the wife picking pizza doesn’t make either a scoundrel. Compromise on concretes works, and is entirely in line with morality.

Compromise on principle, however, not only doesn’t work but is immoral.

It doesn’t work because as alluded too: There will be an eventual eruption of war where Leia would probably be replaced as the leader since she showed she is ready to make deal(s) with the Empire. (However, Palpatine would keep his job because he’s evil, and remember: Pragmatism is evil).

By having that hypothetical peace conference, it merely kicks the can down the road. It shifts the responsibility of dealing with the fundamental conflict for the rebel’s children to deal with, namely: The fact that good and evil cannot co-exist long-term. Evil will always try to have its way if the good allows it.

Why is compromise on principle immoral? Specifically, why would Leia be a part of the evil?

Imagine you are driving on a backroad dead at night. You see to your right, a man in a ski mask engaged in a tug of war match with a woman.

The rope is her purse.

You do nothing.

What ends up happening is that, of course, the thief smiles since he doesn’t expect you to call the police. But what most people don’t realize is that the woman, the good doesn’t expect anything from you either.

If the good and the evil can expect nothing from the good (you in this scenario), who inevitably ends up winning? Who ends up losing?

This is why Leia would be immoral: She is stabbing all her friends, allies, and the innocent in the back by making it seem like it’s the right thing to do to.

This ladies and gentlemen is why Pragmatism is uniquely evil.

People have been making deals with the devil long before Dewey, Peirce, and James had even been born. People have been coming up with rationalization after rationalization as to why they had “no choice.” However, everyone knows deep down that dealing with the devil is objectively evil. No one’s pretense was ever so rooted on such a systematic level.

What Pragmatism brings to the table is that it leads us to believe that making a bargain with evil was the right thing to do and that we should be proud of it.

Today, I have shown through fiction, and by outlining Pragmatism’s metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political premises as to why I think the philosophy is evil. The philosophy:

Swipes wholesale away identity. Creates an artificial Problematic based society. Makes compromise on principle a virtue.

Some of you will say for three: “But Nick, Star Wars isn’t the real world. Come on.”

A picture isn’t an argument, but I simply leave you with these two next photos.

I plead with you to simply ask yourself: Like in the picture of Luke Skywalker and Grand Moff Tarkin, who is supposed to represent the good, and who is supposed to represent the evil, and if you can stomach the smiling.

Barack Obama meeting Hugo Chávez at the 2009 Summit of the Americas with future dictator Nicolás Maduro in the background. Reuters.

Donald Trump meeting Kim Jung-un, Singapore, 2019. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Endnote:

I am indebted to the work of Richard Gale on “The Metaphysics of John Dewey,” and the entries on John Dewey and William James in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as well as Bill Pedroso’s work summarizing the essence of Pragmatism in his work “The Anatomy of Ideas III: Pragmatism and Progressivism” for providing me with an in-depth understanding of the Pragmatist philosophy.

All quotes have come from the Southern Illinois University Press collection Works of John Dewey, separated into Later Works, Middle Works, and Early Works.