MAY 13, 2010. First, a bit of business. I now have a Facebook page. Here is the link:
http://www.facebook.com/people/Jon-Rappoport/100001082109384
You can find some of my articles and videos there. Over time, we’ll add more to the page. Feel free to spread the word.
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Several thousand years ago, the pharaohs began building monuments to themselves.
Well, they didn’t build them. They didn’t design them, either. The design work was left to brilliant court architects. Unlike the myths of the state religion, the architecture actually had to work. The pyramids and temples had to stay standing once finished. And after a period of experimentation, they did.
So the architects were capable of rational thought, scientific thought.
However, the METHOD of that thought was never codified or described in written manuscripts. There were two reasons for the omission. One, no one actually considered it might be useful to explain the process of rational thinking. And two, the pharaohs and priests would have laid severe punishment on anyone who tried.
After all, the masses were supposed to obey orders. The masses were under the thumb of the elite class. It would be dangerous to arm the population with the tools of logic. Thinking for oneself wasn’t part of the political equation. Independent thought might lead people to question the cosmology that propped up the priests and the pharaohs. And from there, it would only be a short step to questioning the whole religious and political leadership.
It would fall to ancient Athens to articulate the method of logical thought. Plato was the father in this regard. In his fictional Dialogues, he used Socrates to interrogate citizens of the day about major concepts like Justice and The Good. Socrates would, for example, show his opponents that their opinions inevitably led to absurdities or contradictions.
In the process, it became obvious that lucid thinking was of great value, and its abandonment was intolerable.
Socrates’ sub-text went something like this: “You are thinking about the highest values of life. That’s a good thing. Now let us examine exactly how you are thinking about these values. Let us find those premises about which you have no doubt. Let us reason from those premises, and then we’ll see where we arrive. Do we come to acceptable conclusions, or do you end up on the rocks of contradiction and confusion? Is this not a worthwhile endeavor?”
No one had ever written like this before. No one had thought to do it, and no one had dared to.
Aristotle, one of Plato’s students, went even further. He codified patterns of reasoning. He showed which patterns were valid and which were invalid.
For all time, these two men established logic as an independent field of study. To put this enormous revolution in more modern terms, they pioneered the critical/analytic approach to information. Today, we take this approach for granted—even though most people aren’t aware of the way such tools are supposed to be used.
In secondary schools and many colleges, the disciplined study of logic has been discarded, in favor of accepting and memorizing factoids. What has happened?
We are reverting, in a sense, to the temperament of ancient Egypt. We, too, have our vast monuments, and the citizenry stands in awe of them. Relatively few people are the designers. Other workers carry out the plans.
And just as later generations of Egyptians sacked the tombs of their kings, today’s citizens plot ways to escape and evade and, yes, even sack our primary institutions.
There are many reasons for the decline of our society, but a major flaw resides in the widespread rejection of logic and rationality.
Life is not all about logic, but a part of it is. And when that part is missing, people drift. They have no rudder. They can’t come to grips with one of the major “commodities” of our age: information. For them, information equals confusion and doubt.
If you lived in a marvelous workshop, where dozens of carpenter’s tools were displayed, and slats of wood were stacked—and if you had absolutely no idea how to use any of the tools—what would you do? If you saw no way to learn how to use those tools, you’d become frustrated, and you’d seek myths and fairy tales to bolster your confidence. You’d be open to all sorts of sales jobs from peddlers of deceit. You’d drift away from action and try on the clothes of passivity.
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 His websites are www.nomorefakenews.com and www.insolutions.info