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.