Logic misapplied: society as function

by Jon Rappoport

July 10, 2015

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.)

“People often believe two similar things are the same. They equate them. They accept loose comparisons. If someone said, ‘A car is like a plane, so therefore it is a plane,’ he would be judged a fool. But make the comparison a little more subtle, and you can get a whole population to salute, sign up, and go along.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

The civilization we now inhabit is more and more a system of functions. Person A does B. Person C does E.

People learn to expect functionality. This is important, because if they didn’t the whole apparatus would collapse.

What I’m talking about here goes beyond any rebellions among the disenfranchised. Those rebellions, such as they are, are planned for, and they will be enveloped in the System.

I’m talking about a psychology of acceptance, through which the individual agrees that he is supposed to perform in a way that satisfies a higher overall pattern.

This psychology involves language as well, which more and more becomes utilitarian. Words themselves designate function and “what is supposed to happen.”

Look at the literature/fiction of our time. The protagonist faces a problem, a conflict. He strives to solve it. He eventually succeeds. He does what he is supposed to do. The reader is satisfied. The function has been acted out.

Society’s organizations are compartmentalized. In a large corporation, bringing a new product to market means the various sections will do their jobs: R&D, design, packaging, marketing, sales, and so on. What exists in each individual beyond his sub-function is of no concern.

A person looks at an object he hasn’t seen before. He asks, “What is it for? What do I do with it? Does it work well?” He might even ask those questions about a human relationship.

All right. Now here is the punch line. A society of function appears to have a basis in logic. That is how it seems. “Don’t you understand? All the parts are coordinated. They mesh. They support each other. They make sense in terms of the overall goal, whether it is the sale of a product or the prosecution of a criminal or the execution of a war…”

The parts are logical. The functions are logical. The people who perform their jobs are logical.

No. Logic is actually a set of rules and principles that apply to a line of reasoning. Logic has to do with the validity of a string of successive statements.

Logic is a kind of map.

Logic is not the territory of society’s functioning.

This confusion set in, philosophically speaking, with the rise of the school of Pragmatism in the early 20th century. One of the school’s primary strategies was defining words according to their function. So-called “operational definition.” For example: the word “radio” means “how a radio works and what it produces.” And nothing else.

From there it was a short skip and jump to viewing society as a system whose meaning was entirely wrapped up in “how society operates to achieve articulated goals.”

Pragmatism was a deep bow in the direction of, and a reflection of, technology. Every element of society would be judged in terms of what it was for. If it didn’t have an operational purpose, it was meaningless.

Again, this approach seems logical. It carries the gloss of logic. But it is misapplied.

It also leads to a form of full-bodied totalitarianism. The individual human is defined as “his instrumental function in the overall scheme and plan.” Beyond that, any conversation about him is irrelevant and meaningless.

The next step, naturally, would focus on enunciating and debating the individual’s preferred function. Should it be X or Y or Z?

As the old joke goes, “Now that we’ve established you’re a prostitute, we’re just arguing about your price.”

And yes, millions of millions of words have subsequently been written about “the role of the individual in society.” But the battle to reduce the individual was already won. The argument now was about his operational uses on behalf of higher goals.

The entire flood of labels for individuals—white, black, male, female, straight, gay, transgender, privileged, oppressed, and so on—is actually a reshuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic, because the individual is basically being viewed in terms of whether and how he/she is benefiting or harming “the future of society and its preferred pattern.”

Function.

Many, many years ago, when I studied formal logic, I spoke to my professor about a philosophy called Scientific Humanism. I mentioned that it seemed to be an extension of the principles of logic to society. He looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Scientific Humanism,” he said, “has nothing to do with logic. It has to do with pseudo-logic forced on the population and the extinction of the individual.”

These days, a remark like that could cause a professor problems, if he took it too far. In academia, the basic war is over. The individual has been kidnapped and folded into “the greater good.”

The Platonic ideal (The Good) has taken center stage. Plato wrote dialogues with Socrates as his protagonist, and Socrates appeared to be the champion of the independent and thoughtful individual. But Plato was always holding a hole card under his shirt. It was “the overall Ideal for Society.” When he finally played that card for all it was worth in The Republic, the reader could readily see that the individual was really a function in the scheme of things; and the scheme would be dictated from the top of the food chain.

Logic? Hardly. Only the appearance of logic, as a cover story to promote a totalitarian civilization.

We can see this deception in today’s technocratic movement and its transhumanist vision. At some point in the future, the individual will be hooked up to a super-computer (the embodiment of The Good) in a brain-to-brain connection. He will have extraordinary access to trillions of pieces of data. Thus, he will be freer than ever before.

No. He will be guided by data that have been shaped and sanitized to reflect an overall plan for society. He will therefore be viewing (without knowing it) his preferred function as a citizen in the New World.

This is the true meaning of political correctness.

In the years following the ratification of the US Constitution, the principle of severely limited central government was trampled on. Not only did government expand, but its new departments, laws, regulations, and enforcers were designed to be permanent functions—thereby cementing a viewpoint on how large organizations were supposed to be run.

This was an unstated philosophy of instrumentality: the definitions of jobs and persons embodied in their assigned functions—and nothing else.

This is not logic. This is reduction. They are not the same thing.

“Oh, I did study a course in logic. It’s about how things fit together to arrive at a result.”

Loosely speaking, yes. But on closer examination, no.

Individuals wonder where their freedom went when they accept their functions. They feel the loss. They build up resentment. They look for a way out. They vaguely sense greater potential within themselves. Whether they know it or not, they begin to oppose reason, logic, thinking, because it reminds them of their captive status. Therefore, they’re unequipped to explore what is happening to society. If they become rebels, they feel inadequate to the task, and so they look to groups who mouth appealing sentiments.

Society’s elite planners are adamant about a world of functions. This is their m.o. This is at the heart of their designs. Their psychological operations are aimed at inducing massive numbers of people to accept the all-inclusive notion of function.

This is the unseen war.

The individual needs to understand all this and offload it. He is himself. He is open-ended. He is far more than a system. He is not designed to perform in a specific way. He is not simply moving around within a territory marked off by fences.

He can use logic to his benefit, but he isn’t logic or some pseudo version of it.

He isn’t a pawn or a knight or rook or a bishop or a king or a queen on the chessboard. He isn’t the chessboard or the designer of the game. He is none of those things. He is far, far more; far, far different.

He can explore “more” and “different” to the hilt. He can find answers on his own, and he can express and live those answers.

And then everything changes.

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 29^th 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.

Logic: the student’s edge, the investigator’s gold

by Jon Rappoport

July 10, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

“The discovery of logic was enormous. It changed civilization. It also equipped professional deceivers with a new level of understanding about their own mind-bending work. Today, the investigator needs a knowledge of logic as never before. He also needs to engage in a process of analysis that incorporates more than the stark rules Aristotle once laid down. He needs to know logic’s first cousins…” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

This article has two parts. To fully understand what I’m discussing, both parts are essential.

Part One:

Twenty-four-hundred years ago, in the ancient city of Athens, something unprecedented happened.

Three men changed the course of the world by introducing the discipline of logic: Socrates, Plato, and finally, Arisotle, who codified the principles of reasoning in The Organon.

Since then, all the way up the present day, mathematicians and philosophers have added to that store of knowledge, through intensive research.

In many countries, logic used to be an integral part of secondary education. It was often presented as a series of fallacies or errors one needed to avoid while thinking through a problem or assessing an argument.

Now, however, like the dinosaur, it has disappeared.

Why has it vanished from secondary-school curricula? Perhaps for the same reason fewer and fewer students study Latin or Greek. Logic is deemed irrelevant. It’s “old-fashioned.” It can be replaced by minor attempts to teach young people how to “think critically.”

That is simply not true.

We used to understand the formal meaning of the word “argument.” It was a presentation in which the speaker or writer aimed to move from a first set of ideas, along a specific, path, to a conclusion. In order to understand and evaluate an argument, one had to be able to spot departures from the rules of logic. More basically, one had to be able to follow the course of reasoning, like a stream, and not lose the way.

Today’s students are generally lacking in that tracking ability. They often don’t even realize an argument is being made. Rather, they read a chapter in a book and pick and choose what they feel are the most interesting bits of information. They drift; they founder.

They see themselves as consumers in a marketplace of ideas and words, and they buy the most attractive pieces.

This strategy breaks down the farther the student moves along the road of education.

As a former teacher, I have seen students who were, in fact, equipped with a background in logic. In every course they took, they possessed an edge that was enviable.

Logic underlies academic subjects. It is the rock on which those subjects are built. Physics, math, biology, history, languages are taught on the basis that a rational approach to the material is essential. And logic is the essence of rationality.

At best, students pick up logic piecemeal, haphazardly. The obvious step is to teach it as its own subject. If this is done, students suddenly are ahead of the game. They have an indispensable tool for thinking lucidly in any situation, in any classroom, using any text, taking any exam, writing any essay.

It is, so to speak, the difference between mapping a large area by laboriously walking the land, and filming it from the air with high-resolution cameras.

Academic achievement, as the degree of difficulty grows, is all about mastering larger and larger quantities of information. This is the primary challenge. Armed with logic, a student can win this challenge, because he sees and follows the underlying architecture around which all information is organized.

A youngster can take apart an old clock. He can examine the pieces and figure out what each piece does. But then, if he comprehends the structure, the logic of the clock, he can go further. He can understand, more deeply, how all the parts combine to produce the clock that tells time. At that point, his knowledge is unshakable.

This is what the study of logic accomplishes.

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed — which includes Jon’s Logic And Analysis course, click here.)

Part Two:

With everything that the study of logic produces, there are limits.

We not only live in an age of information, we live in an age of disinformation.

When concealment and deception are official goals, an outside person who is examining facts, arguments, premises, and lines of reasoning needs to spot patterns of propaganda, cover stories, intentionally placed distractions, and purposeful omissions of vital data.

In other words, these days we are routinely dealing with spokespeople and experts who are deploying all manner of anti-logic methods, in order to persuade audiences.

This used to be called polemic. That term has dropped out of use.

We need to understand polemic as never before.

Never mind high schools; you can’t find a good course of study on propaganda and polemic at any college or university in the world. I make that statement, because colleges are compromised from the get-go. They receive monies for research involving, for example, vaccines, medical drugs, mind control, climate change, advanced weapons systems, human genetics, pesticides, GMO crops. Propaganda and polemic on these subjects are everywhere. A real course on propaganda would expose the very colleges that teach it.

A professor who went full-bore on propaganda would be cut off at the knees by his administration. He would be attacked, defamed, smeared, hounded, and exiled by his bosses and his own colleagues.

Therefore, the study of disinformation falls outside the academic spectrum.

In my third Matrix collection, Power Outside The Matrix, I include a long section called Analyzing Information in the Age of Disinformation. It is based on my experience as a reporter over the last 30 years.

I build it on the foundation of: fleshing out and examining, in great detail, the official scenario on any subject. This is an approach that pays handsome dividends.

When you can lay out, like a map or a blueprint, the complete official scenario, you can then take it apart. You can attack its parts, one by one.

I learned how to do just that, on the fly, six years into my career as a reporter, with my first book, AIDS INC., Scandal of the Century. I came to this approach as a matter of necessity, because I was inundated with a flood of information on all sides. As soon as people became aware I was writing the book, they gave me their “best opinions” on the subject.

Those opinions ranged all the way from “virus produced in a lab” to “cosmic debris landing on Earth”—and everything in between.

At the same time, I was assembling my own discoveries re the illogical arguments government and university researchers were presenting about “the AIDS virus.”

I was also detailing, in my notes, the biases of independent journalists, who were organizing data to fit their pet causes and agendas.

And beyond any of this, I was standing in the middle of a vast muddle, because I had not yet identified the most basic premises inherent in the official scenario about HIV and AIDS. That was the real kicker. That was keeping me up at nights. I didn’t know I was missing the most basic assumptions.

In other words, I was still unconsciously buying certain official ideas about HIV and AIDS. And given that, I couldn’t move beyond a certain point. I couldn’t take the thousands of pieces of data I had and see them from the correct viewpoint. I had part of the puzzle, but not enough.

Then one day, a man who was supporting my work introduced me at a small gathering where I was delivering a speech. He made an offhand remark. It set off a string of firecrackers in my head. One explosion led to the next—and then I realized what I’d been missing.

It became clear to me—why so many people had so many ideas about AIDS.

I realize that, for many readers, my next statement will fall on deaf ears, because they don’t have all the necessary background. Nevertheless…

I realized there was no such thing as AIDS.

The suffering, pain, and death that was being called AIDS was not one thing, not one syndrome, not one disease, not one condition.

That was the first and foremost error (piece of disinformation) in the official scenario.

Now I could finish the book, and quickly. I had the deception in my hands.

I learned my lesson, which has stood me in good stead ever since. Flesh out the complete official scenario. Find all its parts. Investigate each part. Go to the most basic of all the basic assumptions in the scenario.

There is much more to say about all this, but I wanted to give you at least the flavor of analyzing disinformation about a large, large issue and a large, large false reality.

Logic helps; it is essential; but in practice, it doesn’t carry all the freight. Pushing through multiple webs of lies and half-truths and false trails is a process, and you have to engage in it, up close and personal, in order to arrive at the true foundation of the covert op.

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix — which includes Jon’s Analyzing Information in the Age of Disinformation audio lecture, click here.)

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 29^th 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.

Matrixology 101: debates that never happen

by Jon Rappoport

May 5, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

Expanding upon my previous article, in order to sustain gigantic false realities, there are honest debates that must never happen. They would reveal too much. They would shine a spotlight on vast contradictions. They would expose official storytellers to withering criticism.

And by debate, I mean extended formal conversations.

The easiest way to eliminate such debates is: never equip the young with the ability and the patience to comprehend them.

That’s working out quite well.

Let me give you an example of a debate that will never happen.

In 1987-88, while I was writing my first book, AIDS Inc., I discovered that the test most frequently used to diagnose HIV in a patient was the antibody test.

A positive test was taken to mean: the patient was carrying HIV; he was already sick or would become sick.

However, I queried an employee of the FDA. I asked: if an HIV vaccine is developed, it will produce antibodies to HIV, and then the patient will be called “immune,” correct?

In other words, if a routine blood test reveals antibodies to HIV, the patient will be told he either has AIDS or will get AIDS—but if those same antibodies are produced by a vaccine, the person will be said to be immune to HIV.

The anonymous FDA employee answered me by mail, on a piece of paper without the FDA letterhead. This is what he essentially said:

If an HIV vaccine is developed, people who take it will be given a letter they can carry around with them. If they are ever tested for HIV and the test comes up positive, they can show the letter to their doctor, to prove they are immune, rather than dangerously infected.

Otherwise, there would be no way to distinguish between “in danger of dying” and “immune.”

Extraordinary, to say the least.

This opened up a huge can of worms about several issues, one of which was the actual meaning of antibody tests.

Until 1985, positive antibody tests were generally taken to mean: the patient’s immune system is in good working order; his immune system contacted the virus in question and warded it off.

But after 1985 (and not just in the case of AIDS, but for any virus under the sun), the same antibody test was taken to mean: the patient is already ill or he will become ill.

Millions and millions of antibody tests have been given to people around the world. Just a few of the viruses tested for: SARS, West Nile, Swine Flu, Ebola.

Think about the effects of a doctor saying: “You’re positive for a very dangerous virus.”

Think about the 180-degree turnaround in interpreting the meaning of a positive test.

It generally went from “You’re fine,” to “You’re infected.”

I can think of several independent scientists who could weigh in on a debate about these tests, against official scientists.

It would be revealing, to say the least.

But it would only be revealing for people who could follow the logic and the illogic of the participants.

Otherwise, it would be like listening to a tape played backwards.

The ultimate backup plan for stifling all important debates is: never equip people with the ability to follow and understand them.

These days, this plan is called education.

Long ago, I was a schoolteacher. I found that, if I taught students logic in a straightforward way, step by step, with many examples, they responded. They caught on. They liked catching on.

It made them smarter and thus happier. It made them feel more powerful, because they were.

Every student deserves to earn that experience. It’s a tragedy and crime that so few are given the opportunity.

The antibody test is just one of a number of enormous issues in modern medicine that, if opened to real debate, would cause a seismic shift in society…assuming there were enough listeners who could track the lines of reasoning.

A true home-schooling movement should take notice of all this.

Teaching logic is work. Good work. It pays off in brighter students. It opens doors that would otherwise remain closed. It adds real substance to the idea that home schooling stands for individual independence and power, rather than State control.

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 29^th 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 emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

Propaganda is the art of overwhelming logic

by Jon Rappoport

May 5, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

One type of mind control involves defeating logic as a method of thinking.

Modern formulations of basic logic begin with the statement: You can’t have A and not-A. Which is a way of saying contradictions are unacceptable.

So it’s no surprise that mind control attempts to introduce contradictions into rational processes.

You see this in propaganda.

For example: People who are vaccinated are in danger from those who are unvaccinated. (“Keep your unvaccinated child away from my vaccinated child.”)

There is a concealed contradiction here. You can see it by merely defining (according to conventional terms) the meaning of “vaccinated.”

It means “immune,” “protected from contracting the disease targeted by the vaccine.”

But if the vaccinated person is protected and immune, then coming into contact with an unvaccinated person will bring no danger.

Therefore, the notion that vaccinated people are A) protected but not-A) in danger is absurd, a contradiction.

The easiest way to defeat logic is through deficient education. Never teach logic. Ignore it. Instead, teach specific values. Teach anything except logic. Don’t teach children how to spot contradictions.

A deficient education plus tons of ceaseless propaganda=mind control.

Logic is a significant problem for people who want a closed and unfree society. Teaching logic tends to produce sharp and independent minds.

Logic produces personal power.

Here is another example of non-logic: The ballot initiative passed last November by the voters of Maui County is illegal, because it set up a new law regarding commercial agriculture, when in fact commercial agriculture is regulated by state and federal laws, which trump county laws.

There are several ways of attacking this proposition, but the most basic way is:

The ballot initiative was not aimed at commercial agriculture. It called for a moratorium on all Monsanto/Dow experiments using non-commercial GMOs.

In what has become a federal court case, the judge and the lawyers for Dow/Monsanto are proceeding from a false basic premise.

Of course, the failure in this case is a willful ignoring of the facts. The argument is: A is B. No it isn’t. A is A.

There are a number of arguments afloat these days which proceed this way:

“The science concerning ABC is settled.”

“’Settled’ means ‘true.’”

“Therefore the science concerning ABC is true.”

However, on closer inspection, “settled” means “there is a consensus among officially favored scientists.”

Science doesn’t operate according to what officially favored scientists claim. It doesn’t operate according to consensus at all. It operates according to what is true and valid—and the best way to ascertain that is through the broadest possible analysis accomplished by a wide variety of independent researchers, who attempt to replicate prior experimental results.

Even then, there is always room for reasoned dissent.

There is much, much more I could write about logic. The issues I raise in this article are basic and should be addressed in every high school, in great detail, with many illustrations.

For instance: what are the full tacit implications of the statement found at the end of every television drug ad—“ask your doctor if X is right for you.”

For instance (at a more sophisticated level): when the press reports a new outbreak of disease, claiming it is caused by a particular virus…how was that assertion determined? On what grounds do scientists say they have found the virus that causes the disease?

I ran headlong into that one while writing my first book, AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century, and the further I investigated HIV as “the cause of AIDS,” the more I was stunned by the lack of logic present in the argument.

Logic is a sword.

Learning its many uses, while still young, creates formidable students and citizens.

Propaganda is the art of overwhelming logic.

It works, when the mind is unprepared.

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 29^th 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 emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

Education programming 101: destroy logic

by Jon Rappoport

December 3, 2014

NoMoreFakeNews.com

Once upon a time, in medieval universities, new students enrolled in the Trivium. It was the foundation curriculum. It was required. Its parts were: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Grammar: the interior construction of language.

Logic: the valid and invalid connections in the course of a formal argument; the method of proper reasoning; the deductive links in a chain, at the end of which appears a conclusion.

Rhetoric: oral and written presentation; the use of language to make a case; the capacity to persuade, even in the face of counter-argument.

Today, the subject matter of the Trivium is not only downplayed. It has been shattered.

This article focuses on the death of logic in schools.

When the intensive handling of ideas is seen as a laughable goal for education, indoctrination is plugged in as the only alternative.

The mind of the student shifts from being an active force to being a container.

The destruction of logic perverts rational thought at its core and inserts ideology masked as insight.

The actual meaning of an idea is firmly placed on the back burner. Instead? Praise or attack the people who forward ideas.

This strategy has gained great prominence.

“The revered Founders of the Republic? Shysters, con men, slaveholders, monopolists who saw rebellion from England as the way to win greater power for themselves, at the expense of everyone else living on American soil.”

Therefore, the argument continues, and this is crucial, the Founders’ IDEAS, as expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution, were rotten to the core. The ideas can be dismissed out of hand as coming from “a bad source.”

Ideas no longer need to be judged on their sense, merit, and alignment with basic principles. Nor are they judged by their position in a well-formed argument. All that is out. Now, you only have to “look to the source” and make ALL your decisions based on “who these people really were who expressed the ideas.”

And since that’s the case, learning to think or reason is unnecessary.

In logic, this used to be called the fallacious ad hominem argument. Now it’s not called anything. It’s praised as the insightful way to do intellectual business.

One by one, core ideas fall to the ax, and finally they cease to exist at all.

(To argue that very bad people have taken over an idea, and therefore the idea itself was never good, is like arguing that, since hijackers took over a plane, the plane was a despicable object altogether and probably deserved to be stolen or blown up.)

You might be surprised by the number of people who believe that the value of an idea depends entirely on who expressed the idea. If the wrong person first expressed it, it was never worthy.

Students with a vast sense of self-entitlement and meaningless self-esteem love this strategy. It allows them to parade around and call the shots and decide which ideas are important and which aren’t, without reflection. They have a scorecard of good guys and bad guys and that’s all they need.

In our teaching institutions, you could look in vain to find courses on the individual, his freedom, his power. That’s gone. It’s no accident that serious training in logic is also gone. And by serious, I mean the application of logic to formal arguments on issues that determine our future.

In many cases, instead, education is about: what group do you belong to? What are the needs of that group? Who is oppressing your group? How can you get government to solve the problem?

If you can educate the young to make snap judgments about core ideas, you eliminate their capacity to reason. You own them.

From that point on, they hold a hostile attitude toward anyone who can discuss and analyze ideas. They look at such people as an entitled and privileged class who is speaking a foreign language.

In order to engage in meaningful debate, people have to be able to recognize a train of thought and follow it. If they can’t, because they were educated not to, where are we? We’re in the dark. We’re living by slogans.

Freedom? Liberty? Collective need? Responsibility? It doesn’t matter what ideas are on the table, because the overwhelming number of people don’t know what an idea is. They don’t know how to walk up to one and look at it from several sides. They don’t know how to trace its implications. They don’t know how to fit that idea alongside its cousins. They don’t see a Whole. They see the ceaseless spinning machinery of an alien process, from which they’ve been excluded.

Then, no matter what shape society takes, it’s a dumb-show, as far the majority of its citizens are concerned.

Who solves that?

The invasive State takes charge. It picks up the pieces of the wreckage it was a key actor in delivering.

The goal of educating citizens about what it means to take part in a Republic has been blunted. This was done, a step at a time, through education.

Dismantling the ability to reason, employ logic, and handle ideas was the prow of that destructive campaign.

Therefore, the people who still know what logic is need to teach it in any way they can.

The first steps are the hardest. But when a student suddenly sees that world open up to him, when the lights go on, when information that was formerly a blur and a blob snaps into place as a recognizably logical (or illogical) sequence, when the student’s aimless wandering mind suddenly focuses with power…when he knows that he knows…the rewards are self-evident.

A dullness becomes bright.

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 29^th 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 emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com.

Independent Education: the crisis and the crossroad

by Jon Rappoport

December 2, 2014

NoMoreFakeNews.com

A hundred fifty years ago, at least some Americans recognized that all serious discourse depended on the use of the faculty called Reason.

Formal debate, science, and law all flowed from that source. The source could be bent, twisted, and deployed in devious ways—but then people would know that. They would be able to point out where the arguer had gone wrong.

A common bond existed in some schools of the day. The student was expected to learn how Reason operates, and for that he was taught the only subject which could lay out, as on a long table, the visible principles: Logic.

This was accepted.

But now, this bond is gone.

The independence engendered by the disciplined study of logic is no longer a desired quality in students.

The classroom, at best, has taken on the appearance of a fact-memorization factory; and we should express grave doubts about the relevance and truth of many of those facts.

A mind trained no farther than rote parroting—regardless of how neat and precise it may look—is a listless mind with no center. It reaches out for vagaries and abrupt spectacular lies, hoping to find what it is missing. But the search produces nothing of value, because to discover logic, one must learn the whole subject as a branch of knowledge, not as a flicker of common sense sparking here and there in the landscape.

A society filled with people who float in the drift of non-logic is a society that declines. And in its decline, it accepts preposterous leaders and bizarre, self-sabotaging programs.

Ideologies that deny individual freedom and independence are welcomed with open arms, because they mirror a muddled people’s desire to confirm that failure is the inevitable fate of all of us.

When education becomes so degraded that young students are no longer taught to reason clearly, private citizens have the obligation to rebuild that system so that the great contribution to Western civilization—logic—is reinstated in its rightful place.

Logic, the key by which true political discourse, science, and law were, in fact, originally developed, must be unearthed.

Logic and reasoning, the capacity to think, the ability to analyze ideas—an ability which has been forgotten, which has been a surpassing virtue in every shadow of a free civilization—must be restored.

Once a vital thing has been misplaced, buried, and covered over by mindless substitutions, people cannot immediately recognize the original thing has any importance, meaning, or existence.

To declare its importance makes no sense to “the crowd.” They look bewildered and shake their heads. They search their memories and find nothing.

They prefer to adhere to rumor, gossip, accusation, wild speculation, and fear mongering as the primary means of public discourse and assessment of truth.

These habits light their paths. These reflexes give them some degree of pleasure. These idols become their little gods.

To win out over such attachments and superstitions is a job for the long term.

But if our labors yield rewards, we can once again bring import to education, and to the idea of authentic freedom that once cut a wide swathe through darkness.

A string of direct and distracting abuses has saddled our schools. Among them:

* Teachers believe they need to entertain children, in order to capture their attention;

* School systems have substituted the need for public funds in the place of actually supplying a sound education;

* Under the banner of political correctness, school texts have been sanitized to the point of sterility, in order to avoid the possibility of offending, to the slightest degree, any group;

* Students rarely confront information in the form in which it is delivered, in a flood, every day, to people all over the world;

* Students have, in this respect, been coddled;

* Subjects such as sex education, which belong in the family, have been delivered into the hands of schools and teachers;

* Indeed, in certain respects, schools are asked to substitute and stand in for parents;

* Masked as “learning opportunities,” various political agendas have been inserted in school curricula;

* The basis on which every historic document establishing some degree of freedom was debated and drafted—logical thought—has been eliminated from the curriculum as a serious discipline;

* Students are permitted and even encouraged to drift and grasp at superficially attractive ideas and fads of the moment;

* In this respect, freedom has been reinterpreted to mean “mental incapacity and wandering thought”;

* The vast contributions of the ancient Greek civilization, where logic as a crucial subject was born, have been obliterated, minimized or summarized in sterile fashion;

* Logic, the connective tissue which binds together the progression of ideas in rational argument, has been kept away from students;

* The result is the production of shallow minds that cannot see the architecture of reasoning;

* Students, at sea, begin to invent wholly insufficient standards for accepting or rejecting various points of view and supposed authorities;

* Students lose their true independence without ever having gained it;

* The low level of overall literacy in our schools is matched only by the non-comprehension of rational thought;

* In the presence of these and other deficiencies and abuses, students are pushed through, from grade to grade, graduation to graduation, as a bureaucratic function, regardless of their ability.

Therefore, citizens of good intent must offload this system. They must assume responsibility for teaching children the missing key to education.

Logic; the capacity to reason, to think lucidly; to separate sense from chatter; to discover deception and avoid being influenced by it; to remain free and independent from the shifting opinions of “the herd”; to maintain personal liberty in the face of every spurious enticement to abandon it; to come to grips with competitive sets of First Principles which will lead to freedom or slavery; these are the stakes in our time.

This is the crossroad.

Choose the path that can bring us the fulfillment of a worthy goal.

Choose reason over vacuous mindlessness.

We, who still know the power of the mind, and who understand how that power can be harnessed to shape independence and liberty, can bring, out of the dust of recent history, an education that truly trains the intellect.

Logic is the foundation of such an education.

If schools, which have become madhouses and factories and medical dispensaries, will not teach it, we can teach it in our homes.

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 29^th 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 emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com.