Reason First: What Motivates a Would-be Murderer?

All it takes is a phone call. Call it a prank. Call it a sincere yelp for help. Whatever the case, the idea of placing a phone call to a Sussex Technical High School official in Georgetown, Delaware has been taken seriously by Delaware State Police. A fifteen-year-old student of the school has been brought into custody for making “terroristic threats” against the institution of learning. What this signals is the ongoing war of unreason against rationality.

The toxic mixture of not thinking before one acts and picking up a telephone and for another young person to even contemplate bringing a gun to school ought to give one pause. So who can take the blame other than the would-be shooter? It is the John Dewey system of education that distorts and disfigures the minds of the youth from pre-K to PhD. And after the students receive this vicious version of learning, they may still harbor horrific thoughts that lead to tragedies.

Dewey’s way of teaching young people continues to this day. This Progressive system permits emotion over thought, and opinion unrelated to facts. What this does is create a perfect storm in the minds of the few who may have the potential to achieve greatness in life but choose to throw away all that they have attained and damage and destroy their own lives as well as others.

It is not video games, music, film, or comics that provoke gunmen. It is the concept of wanting to quash the soul and make a monster of themselves that impels them. It is not broken homes or mental illness. Millions have issues with their mind and others come from households where the parents have split. The root of this evil is the schooling that teaches the young and ultimately leaves them stunted, bewildered, and confused. Additionally, they might display fits of rage and aggression.

Again, the majority of Americans will not pick up a pistol or high-powered rifle and mow down folks at a synagogue, church, concert, theater, night club, megastore, and yes, a school. The destruction that the Dewey system has wrought throughout the decades is hardly acted upon by rational United States citizens. The truth is that pragmatism, or going with just feels like it will work, causes people to subjugate thinking for acting out of emotion.

The threat of the initiation of physical force fostered in the brain of a 15-year-old is horrendous. What ought to be considered is his alleged reasons, not his feelings for calling into the Delaware school with such a particularly heinous remark. Youngsters don’t entertain these thoughts at their first transitions into becoming thoughtful beings. They must be programmed to feel. The only way to prevent these threats and attacks is to deprogram the current way that children are taught in school.

In similar fashion, people join cults. Ted Patrick rescued his son from the Children of God (COG) cult. He went on to aid other families in returning their sons and daughters from other cults and became the “father of deprogramming.” He is the wellspring for turning minds against collectivist and tribalist ideals. The fountainhead that can provide for the deprogramming of current and future generations is Ayn Rand. Her revolutionary mental framework not only denounces the Dewey system, but provides a radical and new way of delivering knowledge and wisdom to individuals.

What Rand’s work has to offer is a worldview that emotion is an extremely important part of the human condition yet it also must come second to reason. The 15-year-old, if he had understood, applied, and integrated Rand’s thinking would not have made that phone call. And if everyone else adopted her principles, there wouldn’t be any other callers or mass-murderers across America or the world.