Anti-logic: the education plague
by Jon Rappoport
February 5, 2016
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)
In all times and places, logic is never taught to the masses. There is no intention to do so.
Now, in our “egalitarian society,” education carries with it great PR pretension, a fakery that outflanks any other period in history.
Therefore, graduating students wrongly believe they know how to think.
In my latest collection, Power Outside The Matrix, I include a long audio tutorial, Analyzing Information in the Age of Disinformation, which is all about carrying out deep investigations of major official scenarios/stories, and discovering how and where these official structures can be penetrated, taken apart, and unfolded, so all their flaws and deceptions are exposed.
This training is meant to remedy the deep hole people find themselves in, when they go up against entrenched (or even alternative) “knowledge.”
For example, there is a particular logical fallacy I call: “this means that.”
It runs rampant throughout society. The fallacy bleeds into the reasoning process, into notions of self-worth, into people’s need to identify themselves with an “acceptable” position.
Take the concept of manmade global warming. For many people, affirming this as a reality means:
“I’m defending the sacred quality of life on Earth, I’m helping the planet, I’m exposing the nasty crimes of big corporations, I’m acknowledging and shining a spotlight on the selfish and petty actions of the masses, I’m in the vanguard of recognizing that this issue represents the greatest threat humankind has ever known, I’m transcending ‘profits over values’, I’m envisioning with others a better world, I’m aligning myself with the best international scientific minds, I’m experiencing the sensation of having a larger mission in life.”
This—manmade global warming—means all that.
Therefore, how do you approach rational discourse on the subject of manmade warming?
You don’t.
There is no logic to be found. There is only “this means that.”
The concept or idea or symbol of manmade warming is so fully packed with sentiment, it resists all attempts at entry.
Here is another example: “America must field a powerful military force all over the world.”
For many people this means: “US wars are good and righteous wars, support our troops, admire the representations of war in sports, praise large American corporations, vote for a ‘tough President’, winning is everything, expand the Pentagon budget, develop a kick-ass attitude, love technology in all forms and degrees, obey and agree with institutional authority, assume that bigger is always better.”
“This means that.”
Therefore, a rational discussion about the wisdom of deploying the US military all over the planet is impossible. The amount of packed sentiment is a suit of body and mind armor.
In the case of manmade warming, examining the science behind the hypothesis becomes completely irrelevant. To even begin to look at it feels like an act of betrayal to the person who has “this means that” firmly in place.
Nothing in the person’s education has ever challenged his reflexive hard-wired “this-that” formulation. A breakthrough has never been made in the area of logic.
Instead, education has, at best, skated across the surface of “this means that” and left it undisturbed.
With some degree of accuracy, one could say that all the other traditional logical fallacies—ad hominem attack, straw man, vague generality, circular reasoning, appeal to authority, etc.—spring from “this means that.”
When I attended college in the 1950s, it was my good fortune to have a logic professor who could analyze and separate a thousand angels dancing on the head of a pin—and at the same time, maintain his great and natural charm and sense of humor.
Our conversations outside of class were moments of excitement. They were also rugged mind workouts.
His parting shot to me, as I was about to graduate: “Know what you don’t know.”
Some 20 years later, when I began a career as a reporter, that piece of advice came back to me.
I was prepared to do investigations, because I could make assessments of what I didn’t know and therefore needed to find out.
I could evaluate sources, who would often try to deploy logical flaws to derail me.
One of the great delights of reporting is discovering that the story you’re working on isn’t the story. The story turns out to be something else entirely.
That was the case in 1987, when I got down to writing my first book, AIDS Inc (note: AIDS Inc is included as bonus in Power Outside The Matrix). People were coming at me from every direction, feeding me their half-baked theories about what AIDS “really was.”
They seemed to believe that, because they were departing from the conventional wisdom on the subject, they must be right.
Encountering that odd notion of self-entitlement stood me in good stead, from that time forward.
When I eventually arrived at the bottom of the AIDS story, I was shocked to see it wasn’t at all what I predicted it would be.
It’s astounding how many logical steps people are willing to skip over, when they have a “this means that” cooking in their heads.
Like a foreign traveler visiting a bizarre museum, I’ve encountered many varieties of sophistry over the past 30 years.
Logic isn’t the be-all and end-all. But it is, in the largest sense, an ever-expanding method you can use to probe deeper and deeper into an argument, a line of reasoning, and engage with the basic assumptions that underlie a position a person is occupying.
It’s as if you’re learning a story backwards, moving toward the beginning, where all the secrets are.
And chances are good that you will eventually encounter some form of the abiding “this means that,” hiding like a horned toad under a bush.
He’s there, he’s quiet, he’s waiting, and when you turn a branch away from a shadow, he stares at you and you know you’ve arrived at the nexus:
the unyielding stubborn source of confusion and illogic.
And sometimes, on good days, you can get the horned toad to tell his story. His real story. All the way through. And you can see him regain his lost sanity.
That’s an experience not to be missed. You’ll remember it for your whole life.
Here are the contents of my collection, Power Outside The Matrix:
These are audio presentations. 55 total hours.
* Analyzing Information in the Age of Disinformation (11.5-hours)
* Writer’s Tutorial (8.5-hours)
* Power Outside The Matrix and The Invention of New Reality—creative techniques (6.5-hours)
Then you will receive the following audio presentations I have previously done:
* The Third Philosophy of Imagination (1-hour)
* The Infinite Imagination (3-hours)
* The Mass Projection of Events (1.5-hours)
* The Decentralization of Power (1.5-hours)
* Creating the Future (6-hours)
* Pictures of Reality (6-hours)
* The Real History of America (2-hours)
* Corporations: The New Gods (7.5-hours)
I have included an additional bonus section:
* The complete text (331 pages) of AIDS INC., the book that exposed a conspiracy of scientific fraud deep within the medical research establishment. The book has become a sought-after item, since its publication in 1988. It contains material about viruses, medical testing, and the invention of disease that is, now and in the future, vital to our understanding of phony epidemics arising in our midst (and how to analyze them). I assure you, the revelations in the book will surprise you; they cut much deeper and are more subtle than “virus made in a lab” scenarios.
* A 2-hour radio interview I did on AIDS in Dec 1987 with host Roy Tuckman on KPFK in Los Angeles, California.
* My book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies
(All the audio presentations are mp3 files and the books are pdf files. You download them upon purchase. You’ll receive an email with a link to the entire collection.)
This is about your power. Not as an abstract idea, but as a living core of your being. This is about accessing that power, expanding it, and using it.
On this road, there are no limits.
That’s what Power Outside The Matrix is all about.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Jon,\ Thanks for the “this means that”. I had some argumentation theory on college. All the fallacies were mentioned and explained. There is fallacies all over the place. It was not new to me, it only gave some theoretical reference to my intuitive evaluations of socalled reasoning. “this means that” isn’t for me even a fallacy, there is no reasoning at all in it, it is the outright refusal to reason, it seems to me an emotional reaction to a propaganda item which has been sensitized to get the sensible people to it to knee-jerk and NOT think, but combine one stimulus to the only allowed response. It is nothing, no reasoning, but do not dare to mention it, because then you run into a persons belief system. How dare you to question my care for the eco-systems, how dare you ……….. et cetera. So many examples can be given of Zhombie responses under the best and brightest of people with the higher intellectual grades and performances in their own eyes. What can be done against a belief system? Hope they die off sooner or later? This will only happen when zhombie education is stopped and education can be morphed into something real as chosen by the individual right from the start. This will not be allowed as long as education is used to conquer the minds in the interests of the emperors on the globe. Groet, Jan Ligthart
Very much so. Now, try applying that thinking to Darwinian Evolution. Then you’ll really see how indoctrinated people are, and unable to use logic.
Reblogged this on John Barleycorn and commented:
Totally agree.
Thank you for this common sense approach, in times when it gets difficult to find any…..
Maybe I should have posted this video here. So here it is again:
Interesting conversation, today, between Jon Rappoport and Alex Jones:
Free Your Mind From the Chains of Tyranny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI2D31GJKfA
“This means that” is a much quicker way to discover faulty thinking (in many cases) than trying to sift through various logical fallacies. I’m often much too generous in assuming that the person in error is trying to use logic unsuccessfully, when what they are really doing is a process of rationalizing ill-formed concepts.
When I started to question my religion some years ago, I was always mystified how to go about dismantling the proposition that Jesus took on punishment for our sins. Logically, it works. Sin is bad (by definition). Sin has to be punished. Therefore, God punished his son for us. Thanks, God.
But no one inside the system dares question the whole idea of punishment by proxy. Is that any kind of justice, to punish the innocent? How does that makes things right? This fatal flaw in Christian theology is beyond logical analysis. It all depends on what “makes sense.”
To the true believer, it makes sense, because, as you say, their own self-worth and group identity are wrapped up in it. Just by tweaking core concepts, you can rationalize just about anything this way. You can create whole systems and change the world. Police actions in foreign countries. Creating new money and giving it away to rich guys who made bad investments. Invading Afghanistan and Iraq after we are supposedly attacked by 13 Saudis.
I think that “this means that” has been used so successfully against us in America and Europe because we have a heritage of being conditioned in a baseless theology. Once you learn your basic gospel message, the pattern has been set, epoxied to your sense of self-worth.