The Watering Hole, Thursday, May 31st, 2012: Mitt Romney, Tabula Rasa

Lately, when I think about Mitt Romney and his multitude of verifiable flip-flops and evasions, and his campaign focus on his Bain Capital “business experience” as being his best qualification for becoming the President of the United States of America, the phrase “Tabula Rasa” keeps popping into my mind. So I decided to investigate why the phrase seemed appropriate when referring to Candidate Romney.

According to Wikipedia:

“Tabula rasa is the epistemological[1] theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the “nurture” side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one’s personality, social and emotional behaviour, and intelligence. The term in Latin equates to the English “blank slate” (or more accurately, “erased slate”) (which refers to writing on a slate sheet in chalk) but comes from the Roman tabula or wax tablet, used for notes, which was blanked by heating the wax and then smoothing it to give a tabula rasa.”[emphasis mine]

This certainly explained a good bit about why, when I think of Mitt Romney, I can’t help thinking “tabula rasa.” Mr. Romney does exhibit behavior consistent with one who wants to wipe out the ‘notes’ on the wax tablet of his career as Governor of Massachusetts, during which he not only signed into law healthcare reform similar to President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act”, but also failed to deliver the promised job growth in the state; the job growth promise that he based on his “private business career” at Bain Capital. Instead, Romney took Massachusetts down to 47th place in the nation in terms of job growth. It also explains why the number of jobs that he claimed to have created at Bain went from an unverifiable 100,000 down to 10,000; and why Romney has now gone back to claiming 100,000 again.

In addition, the “Tabula Rasa” theory would explain Romney’s lack of character, empathy, and any sort of insight into the world in which the vast majority of U.S. citizens live.

[1]“Epistemology: (from Greek ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē), meaning “knowledge, understanding”, and λόγος (logos), meaning “study of”) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions:

What is knowledge?
How is knowledge acquired?
To what extent is it possible for a given subject or entity to be known?

“Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification…Statements of “belief” sometimes mean the speaker has faith that something would prove to be useful or successful in some sense—perhaps the speaker might “believe in” his or her favorite football team. This is not the kind of belief usually addressed within epistemology. The kind dealt with is when “to believe something” simply means any cognitive content held as true in spite of the absence of proof or even evidence. For example, to believe that the sky is blue is to think that the proposition “The sky is blue” is true even if the sky is visibly red.”[emphasis mine]

And this seems to be the pattern of not just Mitt Romney, but of most Republicans. They have no compunction about firmly stating “facts” that are so completely and patently false, one wonders just what “red-sky” world they think they’re living in. For my part, I WISH that all Republicans were living on some distant planet under a red sky, rather than fouling our own beautiful and fragile blue-sky planet.

This is our daily open thread — share your thoughts!