On one hand Rav Israel Salanter was right in emphasizing the actual sitting down and learning the basic books of Musar, I would suggest that Physics also adds to this. This certainly was the path of my parents of balance. Torah with the way of the Earth.תורה עם דרך ארץ

 In the book Or Israel [Light of Israel אור ישראל]  by Isaac Blazer he brings the idea that just knowing the essentials of Musar is not enough. One should spend much time and effort to come to fear of God. While this is certainly true, I think the religious that emphasize rituals think that they have fear of God.  I think the emphasis on rituals is what replaces authentic fear of God. 

So what can lead to Fear Of God? On one hand Rav Israel Salanter was right in emphasizing the actual sitting down and learning the basic books of Musar, I would suggest that Physics also adds to this. You do not see this in the Mishna Torah of the Rambam openly, but in the Guide you see that when he emphasizes learning Physics and Metaphysics he associated Physics with Fear of God, and Metaphysics with Love of God. {In one place only.}

At any rate, I have two points to make here. One is that fear of God and good character which are the goals of Musar are in fact very important. On the other hand the religious world is the exact opposite of fear of God. The emphasis on rituals  and the worship of dead people has nothing to do with authentic fear of God.

But I must make distinction. There are great Litvak yeshivot which learn Torah for its own sake. This is praiseworthy. There are also dens of thieves that the Gra signed his name against- since he saw their root and essence. 

The Obligations of the Hearts [Chovot Levavot] in the first part is Neo Platonic [[which is  a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle]. And you can see that the Ari also is Neo Platonic. But I can not see how   a neo Platonic system is possible to hold with except by Kant or Hegel. The reason is the straight Neo Platonism does have to face a series of challenges.

 For example the challenge of Berkley where he shows that there is something incongruous about the Aristotle idea of knowledge. For Aristotle we know the fire is hot because the form of the fire comes into the head. Berkley shows that there is nothing of the hotness of the fire that comes into the head to make me understand that fire is hot. (See Thomas Reid) There are also problems with combining any sort of Platonic system with Monotheism. [i.e, in Torah you must preserve Divine Simplicity. God is not a composite.. 

And I do not think these issues can be ignored. So you have to deal with these issues somehow or other.  

Kant and  Hegel are I think the only two still standing after 200 years of Philosophy. I mean to say like Robert Hanna "forward to Kant". --that almost everything that came after these two had some good points here and there, but that is like looking for  needles in a haystack. E.g. Wittgenstein had a great point to show how Husserl was wasting his time. But not much in any other way. That seems to be the main thing about everyone after Kant of Hegel-- they get one  point very well and everything else wrong. [However I think the Kant Friesian School does make progress.]

Western doctors find things that are not wrong and give medicines that are not needed , and have no idea of what to do when there is actually a problem.

I think that even a slight raising of temperature of the oceans seems to cause a great increase in the number of parasites in the waters. For some reason I seem to be the only person that notices this. Other people spend all time surfing and swimming. But I have not heard of anyone's complaint . Still to me it seems the waters are much more filled with little worms the get under one's skin and build nests there. This we already know happens to Salmon fish. But it seems to me that this phenomenon is increasing to include humans. I myself have gotten a few and I have found squishing them and applying some kinds of hard things helps. [for example I put on toothpaste mixed with bicarbonate. This seems to help.] 

But I am not going to Western doctors who find things that are not wrong and give medicines that are not needed , and have no idea of what to do when there is actually a problem. I would have a lot more confidence in Russian or Ukrainian doctors that seem to have a rule "do no harm". That is they do not try new supposedly effective methods which are really just the new toys.

I had a intense love of Torah and hoped to spend my life learning Torah. But I can see that  there is such a thing as השגחה פרטית (Divine Providence) that sometimes can create a situation where what might be right, but that there is some deep reason why things have to work out in a different way. So while surely learning Torah is the greatest of all mitzvot as it states clearly in the Mishna in Peah (and made even more clear by the Yerushalmi that every word of Torah is worth more than all the other miztvot,) still there is plenty I needed to learn by being flung out. One invaluable lesson I learned was that the Litvak yeshivot, have no idea of why the Gra is important. They walk in that path (to some degree), but really have no concept of "Why?" I learned that the herem (excommunication) that the Gra signed is much more significant and relevant than anyone today can even begin to imagine.

["Herem" as understood as excommunication is not an exact translation. It means not to have anything to do with one under the herem at all. Not even to sit within four yards of that person. Much less to learn Torah from them.]

But by being in my personal exile, I learned at lot more. But not everything is applicable to everyone in the same way as that first lesson. For example, I learned the importance of the opinion of Ibn Pakuda [of the Obligations of the Hearts] and the Rambam about the importance of learning Physics and Metaphysics. But I realize that the Ramban [Nahmanides] must have disagreed with this at least in terms of the Metaphysics part.] 

Though not at all talented in Mathematics and Physics, I did gain some understanding by means of the idea of the Musar book אורחות צדיקים [Ways of the Just] where in the part about learning Torah, he goes into the idea of "Girsa" saying the words and going on. I used that idea of just saying the words and going on for Mathematics and Physics. That does not make me smarter, but it does help me understand a lot more than if I would say, "I am not genius, so why should I try?"

Or the sweet policy of Mao to force industrialization and thus force the peasants into industry and with no one left to plant and harvest 38 million peasants "disappeared".

 University professors in the USA can be extremely smart. Take for example Robert Paul Wolff. So what do you do when smart people argue for absurd nonsense? When it comes to Kant the guy is a genius. So one might be inclined to ask did he never hear about the Gulags? Or the sweet policy of Mao to force industrialization and thus force the peasants into industry and with no one left to plant and harvest 38 million peasants "disappeared". 

In the Vorkuta Gulag, a general came and asked over and over for at least 20 minutes the men to speak up if they have any complaints. And he promised no one would be punished. A professor of history stood up, and said "I know that for what I have to say ten years will be added to my sentence."     The general again promised for the umpteenth time that no one would be punished. The professor recounted the history of slavery, and finished by saying that what we are experiencing here, is the worst kind of slavery in the entire history of mankind.  He did not get the ten year sentence that he expected. He was shot immediately.

But this problem has bothered me for as long as I remember. I have always believed that smart in one field meant smart in another field.  However it is clear to me that Americans know this to be not true. No one [but me] ever thinks that Mozart could have been a mathematical genius. 

So back to Wolff being a Marxist. I would like to suggest that care for the weak and feeble is not a Marxist invention, but goes back to the Golden Rule. [This is something that Nietzsche saw clearly. He put the blame for morality and compassion squarely  on the shoulders of the Bible. And he was right!

But obviously the Nietzschean critique of the central problem of morality is true--most of what people claim to be their moral motives are all hypocrisy.  But contrary to Nietzsche, the fact that getting to be decent and really authentic caring person is hard, does not mean that it is impossible. [As noted  before me.] We know this already from Isaac Luria that most of this world is evil. [Foundation is equally good and evil. Creation is mostly good. Emanation is all good.] 

I think the best understanding of communism can be gained from the example of a village in South Vietnam after the Communists took over. They had been fishing, and thus making a small amount of a living. They could at least make ends meet. The Communists came with the (usual) promise of free stuff for everyone. Then came in and took away the fish. [I forget the name of the village that I am thinking of, but this was the general approach]

I can see that 20th century philosophy went from worse to worse. From where do you get that everything is a social construct? Foucoult. It is helpful to realize that he openly said that nature itself is a social construct. And his thought has been enormously successful for the Left. He could write three whole volumes concerning a philosophical understanding of sex and entirely leave out women.

I mean to say to the Left: why follow a madman?

But the problem is that it is not always easy to tell who really is mad--especially when they can talk in the sophisticated sounding talk of academics.

What are plain people like myself to do when their arguments are in areas where we have little understanding? How can we tell who really is a  tzadik and who is wicked? 

I am not sure how to answer this question since the sort of sense one needs to tell who is a righteous person whom it is fitting to take advice from and whom is wicked is not as easy as you could find in a Batman film. There is no ambiguity who is the tzadik and who is the joker.

But there is a suggestion from Michael Huemer: that reason is meant to tell us about universals. And morality is  a sort of example of universals that apply to human beings. That is a very old idea from Socrates that Reason can discern morality. Reason can also tell us whom to pay attention to and whom is the joker. 

To Saadia Gaon also we know natural law by reason. But to Maimonides reason can not know morality.[]You see this in his explanation of Abraham the patriarch who knew natural law but not by reason but by revelation.

[Of course  Kierkegaard help truth is known not by reason at all. The divide between reason and faith is not bridgeable. But I think faith and reason are mutually dependent. And faith is not by following anyone at all. And I have a certain degree of sympathy towards this idea. I see the religious world in fact is not at all religious. They believe in dead people, not God. And this fact is way beyond obvious.

I still wonder why the worship of dead corpses that the religious world is involved never seems to draw any questions. I had thought idolatry is wrong and even mentioned in the Ten Commandments. So why are the religious thought to be religious? they are heretics.

The Stogy German Professor [Marcuse] finds himself in Southern California and finds that the land of eternal sunshine and surfing and girls is all really Nazism

 The Frankfurt School is an important subject. The Stogy German Professor [Marcuse] finds himself in Southern California and finds that the land of eternal sunshine and surfing and girls is all really Nazism [just hidden and waiting to break out onto the surface.] [The One Dimensional Man of Marcuse became the main text of the student radicals.]The idea off the alienation by technology of Heidegger gets accepted by the "Greening of America" of the 1960's. The whole mixture of Freud and Marx as the liberators of Mankind becomes the norm.

The attempt to understand surfing and girls as proto Nazism had it effect as we see today with the consistent onslaught against all America values by the Left.

[The reason why these German professors were doing this is the same as "Antifa" working on getting away from Nazism. So their solution was to go to the Far Left and Show that America was too dangerously in the center. [In the 1920's there was no center.] 

[But I claim that the center is not the place of danger but rather the right place to be. But to the Left there is no center. if you are not a Freudian Marxist then you are a Nazi.]