In Part Two of the Dialectic Process in education, written by Denise , one can also recognize the same process in seeker sensitive churches, and especially in the emergent churches. It is imperative to understand this process in order to recognize compromise, and the shifting of emphasis on objective, absolute truth to a synthesis of subjective truth. The goal is to break down pillars of truth and crumble the foundation that we as Christians stand on.
History of Modern Dialectics Our generation is lost to truth of God,
to reality of divine revelation,
to the content of God’s will,
to the power of His redemption,
and to the authority of His Word.
For this loss is paying dearly in a
swift relapse to paganism.
The savages are stirring again;
one can hear them rumbling and rustling
in the tempo of our times.
Carl F. H. Henry,
Twilight of a Great Civilization:
The Drift to Neo-Paganism
Karl Marx wanted to take man back to the Garden of Eden. But this would be a garden without God or His truth to mess it up for everybody. He wanted to take mankind, through the labor of his hands, into a world that had a sensation of oneness; by focusing on the commonalities of people, peace and love (eros) could be created. If this world of peace and sensual love was to be implemented, Marx had to change the way people thought. To this end, he incorporated the essence of the philosophies of Georg Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic materialism into his own theory.
Hegel was an early 19th century philosopher who denied there was a personal God and believed, instead, that the entire universe was god or divine energy. His pantheistic view stated that the universe was as the mind of god in a process of achieving his own self-realization. He believed the way to effect change and produce perfection was through what he called the dialectic process.
Hegel describes his dialectic as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Here is how it works: first step, thesis, is to bring a group of people together who have diverse opinions and backgrounds to talk about a social problem. The second step is called antithesis. The goal of step two is for this nonhomogenous group of people to discuss a social issue and come to a group conclusion or consensus. In order for a diverse group to come to a conclusion on any topic each person will have to sacrifice some aspect of his position. Hegel understood the power of peer pressure and counted on it as a major tool to enforce participation in the process of sacrificing ones beliefs to get along with the group. (A similar process was used by the military called “brainwashing” during WWII)
This means one must compromise ones beliefs (if ever so slight) in order to come to a group conclusion. As the group compromises on small issues they strive together toward a common goal. This blending of ideas is called synthesis because it is a melding of the opinions of all the participants. The process becomes what Hegel calls, “evolutionary”. It is described as evolutionary because the participants must continue to practice the process in a never ending cycle of small group interactions in which one must continually compromise to some degree in order to come to group conclusions. Soon all sense of conviction disappears as the conscious is numbed and compromise becomes a way of life. There are many venues in which the dialectic process is being used every day. It is utilized in both public and private education, church growth movements, Total Quality Management, and in various forms in business and government.
Hegelian dialectic is simple rebellion: turning from God’s true word. At its root is the same occultism that dates back to Nimrod, Babylonian mysticism, Gnosticism, and what we now call “New Age” thought. The dialectic is a new name for an old occult technique designed to manipulate the way people think over a long period of time, incorporating the tool of peer pressure. Sometimes it can take years to manifest in society. Marx found he could easily hide his agenda within the slow nature of the process. Marx passed his ideology to a handful of highly motivated idealists who birthed the modern socialist/communist movements.
Lenin was among those men. Lenin, however, did not like Hegel’s dialectic or Marx’s revised version of it. He believed the way to implement communism was by force. The dialectic was too time-consuming; the process could take half a life time or longer. This was much too slow for Lenin’s taste. The way he decided to change the way people think was too kill anyone who took a position that disagreed with his. He killed thousands of his own people and destroyed the infra-structure of the nation before he realized his method might be flawed. Communists who believe it takes guns and blood to implement communism in a country are called “Leninists”. There was another group of Marxists who disagreed with Lenin and his methods. They advocated dialectic process.
In the early 1900’s in Germany, two men, George Lukase and Karl Korsch, were kicked out of the communist party because they wanted to incorporate Freud into Hegel’s dialectic process. The addition of Freud into dialectic thought became known as Transformational Psychology or, as it is called today, Social Psychology. The new flavor of socialism that came from this association became known as Transformational Marxism. It is this new form of Marxism that is the underlying machine for drastic changes in American culture over the last 50 years and it is this philosophy that has so profoundly impacted education.
Lukase and Korsch set up the
Institute of Marxist Research. They soon changed the name to
The Institute of Social Research to hide the true nature of their research. These new and improved Marxists were living in Frankfurt Germany where they hoped to take over that country quickly; but another socialist beat them to the punch. In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and foiled their grand plans. They could not compete with such a charismatic personality, so they left Germany for more accessible territory...the United States. In The United States, this think-tank became known as the Frankfurt School (Frankfurtschul). The Frankfurt School was made up of 21 idealistic Marxists whose goal was, and is, to undermine Judeo-Christian values in order to overthrow Christian based western civilization. The Frankfurt school found the American educational intellectuals had already created a strong socialist infrastructure in the public school system through the work of educational icons like Horace Mann and John Dewey.
Columbia University was the initial American home to the Frankfurt School where they were generously funded by the Rockefellers, Carnegie, and Ford. Carnegie established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of teaching (CFAT) in 1905 which, along with other Carnegie organizations, funded many socialistic educational projects. An interesting aside is that the Frankfurt School was often supported by wealthy American industrialists who desired to have a docile and easily manipulated work force and understood that a quiet socialist revolution would do just that.
In 1947, the Frankfurt School planted a training facility in Bethel, Maine, with a primary purpose of training people in the use of dialectic process; now ten of these training schools stretch across the United States. There is one training campus for every five states. They have effectively placed trained men and women in influential positions in education, government, media, churches, and business.
Here is a short list of influential Frankfurt School members and their accomplishments:
Theodore Adomo went to the university at Berkeley and wrote
The Authoritarian Personality. This book was the major source for Benjamin Bloom’s book
Bloom’s Taxonomies. The philosophies and teaching methods based on
Bloom’s Taxonomies underpin, along with the writings of Vygotsky, the educational establishment in the United States today.
Jergan Habermas of the Frankfurt School moved back to Germany and set up the gymnasium system used there today.
J.L Moreno arrived in the U.S. in 1926, and is called the Father of Role Play. Role play has several aliases; it can be called sociodrama, psychodrama or sociometricdrama. Moreno’s work is based on dialectic philosophies used to change a person’s way of thinking from truth based to imagination based.
Kurt Lewis, another Frankfurt School man, arrived in the U.S. in 1933, and he refined the “group dynamic” concept which is known today as Total Quality Management among other aliases. T.Q.M. is a dialectic processing method. (Side note: Peter Drucker, Rick Warren's mentor was very involved in T.Q.M. in the business world, and used his ideas to help structure the model for church growth).
In 1947, Hediedin, set up the first training facility in Bethel, Maine, called the National Training Laboratory. It was, and is, a training college geared to produce facilitators of the dialectic process. A change agent, or facilitator’s job, is to move a group of people toward consensus by compromising position for the sake of social harmony. Since the construction of the training lab in Maine, nine other training labs have gone up across the country; one training college for every five states.
