LOGIC AND FREEDOM
By Jon Rappoport
To listen to a free one-hour seminar describing Jon’s course, call 1-219-509-8113. Passcode is 624093. The recording will be available until June 3.
MAY 11, 2010. The hallmark of oppressive systems is whim. In other words, a leader can change his mind at any moment, and the people have to follow.
On Monday, the leader said X will always be true. On Tuesday, the leader announced Y is the eternal truth. But X and Y don’t go together. In fact, they oppose each other. It’s up to the people, the sheep, to somehow reconcile X and Y. And they better do it quietly. If a person states the obvious, that X and Y are incompatible, he might have his head chopped off.
Roughly 2400 years ago, Aristotle set down a simple and devastating fact of logic. X and not-X is a contradiction. You can’t have X and not-X. That’s illogical. It’s called the law of non-contradiction, and it’s the basis of logic.
In political terms, Aristotle’s law exploded the whole notion that leaders could hold contradictory ideas and force them on the population.
And ever since then, Aristotle has been a beacon of sanity for people who live under oppressive leaders.
George Orwell, in his novel, 1984, illustrated these political implications by showing the lunacy of contradiction. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. WAR IS PEACE. These were two common slogans of the controlling government in the novel. Furthermore, the reluctant hero, Winston Smith, has a job in which his duty is to revise all official history so that it always appears to be “true.”
Orwell was, in a sense, referring back to the foundation of rational thought laid down by Aristotle. He was illustrating what a world would look like in which Aristotle had been destroyed.
Logic implies liberty, because it empowers every individual with the capacity to think beyond the machinations of any controlling elite.
To the degree that logic is buried and ignored by the educational system, the door is opened to arbitrary authoritarian power.
But what happens when no one in the educational system even recognizes that the absence of logic courses is a problem? Teachers and administrators have themselves grown up without ever studying logic. Therefore, they don’t see the gaping hole in the curriculum.
How many people know who Aristotle was or that he set down principles which allowed civilization and science to advance beyond slave status? How many people understand what the tradition of logic adds up to?
Jon Rappoport is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a course for high school students. He has been working as an investigative reporter for 25 years. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, he has published articles in LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. He has taught in several private schools in New York and Los Angeles, and has tutored extensively in remedial English at Santa Monica College. At Amherst College, where he graduated with a BA in philosophy, he studied formal logic under Joseph Epstein, a revered professor of philosophy. Mr. Rappoport can be reached at qjrconsulting@gmail.com