Introduction
In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” the word of the year after editors noted a 2,000 percent increase in its usage over 2015. They define it as “relating to circumstances in which people respond more to feelings and beliefs than to facts.” Another related new word, “Truthiness”, is similarly defined, as “the quality of seeming to be true according to one’s intuition, opinion, or perception without regard to logic or factual evidence”. The arrival of such words into our language reveals a dismissal of evidence and facts in favour of emotions, and simply feeling whatever you want to believe. But if truth can now be anything according to these criteria, then the concept has been rendered meaningless. These words reflect a tragic growing acceptance of living in a post-truth world in which alternative facts have superseded the facts of reality, and in which feelings or emotions equate to evidence. Populations across the western world have given in to the idea that the truth is ‘whatever we are told it is’. People seem to have given up any attempt to discern the facts of reality for themselves. By appeals to emotions, to authority, and to majority beliefs, a disturbingly large percentage of people will accept without question whatever they are told by their governments and public institutions. Logical fallacies have replaced logical thinking, and objective facts are no longer necessary to shape public opinion; the general public can be led to believe in things that contradict easily verifiable facts.
There is a serious crisis in thinking in western culture, in which a herd behaviour of indiscriminate acceptance of ideas dominates across all levels of intelligence and ‘education’. It has enabled political spin and even bare faced lying to become the ‘new normal’.
The philosophical context of the early 21st century is one in which the intellectuals openly declare that there is no truth, its all relative. Kantian idealism continues to exert its influence across the board and declares the mind incompetent to know reality by its nature. There is no objective standard of truth, and consequently facts don’t matter. We see the evidence of these ideas filtering down to the general public in those ‘new words’. Even among thinking people, it is common to hear various ideas that implicitly reject reality as being real and objective. A growing number of people believe that thought creates reality. In many circles its popular to speak in terms of ‘your truth’, and ‘my truth’, with the obvious implication that its OK if people’s ‘truths’ differ. And it’s not uncommon to find people who think that everything is an illusion and that we are living in a computer simulation. All of these ideas rest on the implicit rejection of realty as an objective absolute. In other words, they are all rooted in the basic idea that consciousness comes first, and that consciousness creates the world of things that we perceive.
There is a serious crisis in thinking across western culture. It is no longer characterised by intelligent independent thinkers, as it was in the enlightenment, but by intellectual followers. People look around at what everyone else is doing in order to see what they should believe. It has been claimed that this is due to a kind of mass psychosis referred to as ‘mass formation’. But the root cause is beneath the psychological, and at the philosophical level, and thus, escapes attention in a culture that has long forgotten the importance of fundamentals. Nathaniel Branden identified the phenomena of cognitive dependence on the group, and coined the term to name it, social metaphysics. According to Branden, instead of being reality focused and identifying objective facts, the individual social metaphysician is fundamentally people-focused and seeks to identify what others think as their main frame of cognitive reference. In other words, such people consult the group to learn what’s true. ‘What everyone else thinks’ becomes their implicit standard of truth in place of objective reality.
No doubt the thinking crisis has many contributory factors, including the discouragement of critical thinking in what passes for ‘education’ throughout the western world. But fundamentally it’s a consequence of the cultural rejection of reality as an objective absolute, and therefore as the implicit standard of truth. In other words the fundamental problem is philosophical.
There is a small percentage of people who are familiar with questioning the mainstream narrative, and who do not accept without question the events that are allowed to shape our future. So the key components of the narrative are questioned, and the lies and deception are revealed. But most thinkers do not consider the more fundamental philosophical ideas to be worth questioning. These deeper ideas tend to fly under the radar of suspicion, and constitute a kind of cultural undercurrent that sweeps the unthinking mass towards particular conclusions that ultimately undermine our intellectual base, and therefore our capacity to resist an increasingly overt political agenda towards collectivism.
This agenda towards a global collectivist society is not a secret, it is openly published and championed by many organisations, institutions and think tanks, and has been for many decades. For at least a hundred years the phrase ‘New World Order’ has been used to refer to an allegedly desirable collectivist future. Scores of politicians and leaders of the western world have used the term ‘New World Order’ to describe the basic idea of global collectivist governance. Even the United States one dollar bill and the Great Seal of the United States have on them the phrase “Novus Ordo Seclorum” which apparently translates to “new order of the ages”. This agenda is overtly pushed by many NGOs such as the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2020 they announced that the capitalist system must be “reset”. By 2030, they reassured us, we will all “own nothing, and be happy about it”. This blatant reference to the scheduled obliteration of property rights is perfectly consistent with the collectivist agenda, and is about as blatant as you can get!
What we mustn’t forget, is that some men have been controlling other men all through recorded history, so it should not be surprising to observe it today. After all, slavery was a ubiquitous fact of human life until the mid 1800s. And today, the huge number of inconsistencies, contradictions, and easily disprovable claims in the media coupled with increasingly overt censorship, reveal the extent to which we can no longer assume that any “official” ideas we hear are true.
Political control can only be achieved in one of two ways, by the open use of brute force, or by deception. Since the collectivist agenda, properly understood, is so fundamentally undesirable for almost everyone, rational persuasion is not an option, people must be tricked into accepting it. When politically useful false ideas dominate the narrative, they are most likely serving political ends. The possibility of genuine error is disproven by the fact that the lies are maintained even as they are challenged, and while further challenges are silenced by censorship! No apologies are made, no re-examination of reasoning is exercised, no checking of premises is performed. Voices of dissent are simply cancelled and airbrushed out of the debate. We are witnessing systemic deception pointing towards the motive of political control.
In summary, we see four distinct characteristics of the current sociopolitical context of the western world. And if we consider their inter-relationship and give proper consideration to cause and effect, we can get a clearer impression of the bigger picture and the broader historical context. We can observe a political agenda towards a globalised collectivist system of governance being advanced by deception, in a deliberately created context of cultural relativism and disregard for truth, along with the inevitable and accompanying crisis in thinking across all levels, from academics and intellectuals down to the man on the street.
This is where we are today. This is the context that gives rise to the need for this book. There is a wealth of evidence that the media have long been co-opted and hijacked in order to disseminate propaganda and false ideas, and its reasonable to suspect that the source of ideas was co-opted and hijacked before the means of dissemination. The philosophers and intellectuals in any era, are the source of the ideas that ultimately determine its fate, so its most likely that foul play has occurred from the top of the intellectual pyramid, with false ideas sown with the intention to make the intellectual climate more conducive to the intended political outcome.
In this examination of the concept of truth, my broader purpose is to address the crisis in thinking, and shed light on its root cause. My intention is to help create an intellectual base that both supports and leads to freedom, peace, prosperity and flourishment. These concepts are all related, and the discernment of truth is at their root. This book is an attempt to revive the epistemology of reason and demonstrate that it’s the only means to discern truth and achieve knowledge with certainty beyond a reasonable doubt. Furthermore, because freedom can only be achieved by reasoned persuasion and rational argument, the epistemology of reason is the only means to identify and present a meaningful concept of rights as well as a water-tight rational argument for respecting them as the basic principle of all political discourse.
Most of us instinctively know that truth is important, but we have forgotten why. We must remind ourselves that truth is not an end in itself, but the means to all successful action, individual or political. It is the means to peace, to freedom, and to prosperity. In short it is the means to human flourishment. Truth is such an important concept that we must make sure that we clearly understand the fundamental ideas on which it necessarily rests, as well as the implications of their opposites.
It is the context of deception that gives the need to designate our activity as ‘truth seeking’. Without systemic lies and corruption obscuring and twisting the facts we could simply speak of acquiring knowledge, on the implicit assumption that information presented is largely true and correct. On the other hand, truth seeking, as distinguished from the normal acquisition of knowledge, presupposes either a context of deliberate deception and censorship, or the recognition of an unacceptable level of genuine error in the cultural pool of knowledge, or both. Truth seeking is the task of tackling disinformation that is systemic, or institutionalised; it presupposes a certain level of mistrust in the cultural conversation as a whole, and is practiced by a tiny minority of free thinking individuals who reject intellectual conformity.
I define truth seeking as, ‘evaluating contradictory claims in a context of orchestrated deception, to discern the truth to a level of certainty beyond a reasonable doubt.’
This book is offered in place of the epistemological method we all should have been taught in school. It is intended as a basic instruction manual on how to use your consciousness effectively in the process of validating ideas. You will be given the tools to identify how ideas relate to each other, and if they relate to each other, and most importantly, how they connect to reality, and if they connect to reality.
It’s aimed at thinkers, irrespective of age or qualifications. The core message, of reviving the epistemology of reason and encouraging thinking in terms of fundamental principles, is intended for thought leaders, academics and seasoned activists in an attempt to unite whatever passes for a truth movement, or freedom movement or health/freedom movement, on the only philosophical foundation that can deliver our commonly desired result of freedom and human flourishment. Part One challenges you to question the assumed premises embedded in your thinking, and change them accordingly, because they have a profound effect on how you approach the process of validating ideas.
Although the subject is necessarily complex, I have tried to keep the language and presentation as simple as possible so the work remains accessible to even the high school student, or any young mind that simply wants to know, and is prepared to think.
I necessarily assume some ability in logical thinking, not only because that is the way the mind must work in discerning truth, but also because only those still capable of some logical thinking can be reached, and can therefore, be in a position to contribute meaningfully to reversing the current trend towards a totalitarian global state!
In an era when the professional intellectuals have long sold out to corrupt and nefarious influences, the truth seeker is potentially what Rand referred to as the ‘new intellectual’ rising to replace the dinosaurs of the establishment.
I have no formal credentials, no university degree, and no affiliation with any mainstream academic institutions or the ideas they espouse in the fields of either epistemology or psychology. I offer this lack of formal training and affiliation as my primary qualification. Since I owe no allegiance to any one, or any group, I remain free to ask the forbidden questions, to consider the unthinkable, and to propose ideas at odds with the establishment view. Indeed, it is the establishment view that is the problem. I am identifying the fundamentals as an outsider, by necessity.
In presenting my case I appeal to reason and common sense in my audience. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage; an advantage because my case is reasonable, and reason is mans only means to know anything; a disadvantage because these days fewer and fewer people can be reached by means of reason.
Having been raised a catholic, and studied at the oldest catholic private school in England, I am familiar with the monotheistic forms of mysticism. At the same time, having worked as an airline pilot for 25 years I know how important it is to be guided by facts and logical reasoning. I speak from the experience of having used two contradictory methods to validate ideas. At work, the facts of reality were the standard to which all of my thinking had to conform in order to achieve certainty in my flight planning. Sensible flying protocol demanded a high standard of logic and certainty in making sure all phases of the flight could be conducted safely. And yet in other areas of my life, I was a mystic, which means I was accustomed to accepting ideas without evidence or proof, and I was OK with it. Like so many people today, I was unaware that I was using contradictory epistemological methods. Or, more accurately, I was using a method to validate one category of ideas, and happy with using no method of validation what-so-ever with another category of ideas!
My interest in philosophy in general, and epistemology and thinking skills in particular, has fuelled a decade of personal study to understand the method of understanding the world. Ayn Rand’s ideas have been a huge influence on my thinking in this respect.
Assuming you make it to the end of the book, you must decide for yourself if what I have to say is indispensable guidance with the power to rescue the thinker from the quagmire of relativism and subjectivism. I have been accused of being a shill, and yet I am offering you the very method to evaluate my message. I speak of the means to acquire knowledge and to know anything. Only you can judge if my message hinders you or empowers you, whether it enslaves you, or helps you to achieve knowledge, and therefore freedom.
I encourage you to consider this book as a thorough systems check for your mind, one that will give you the basic means to achieve personal sovereignty. In Part One, I will highlight the essential ideas that your mind must agree to be bound by, in order for you not to contradict yourself in the quest for truth. This process can be challenging to the extent that, like me, you may have held contradictory ideas all of your life without realising it, but this is the essential starting point. For the individual thinker to become fully personally sovereign, he or she must fully grasp the two epistemological options one has in validating ideas, and must consciously choose the one that leads to knowledge, while being fully conscious of the consequences of both. These two options rest on opposing ideas in the two most basic branches of philosophy. Furthermore, the thinker must be fully aware of at least two further specific fundamental issues, and the options available on each issue. Again, only one set of answers supports (and leads to) personal sovereignty and the achievement of political freedom.
Part Two focuses on expanding the fundamentals into the guiding principles of the epistemology of reason, and the process of achieving certainty to beyond a reasonable doubt. Part Three presents the method in detail, and Part Four covers the practical applications of truth in human lifestyles, such as honesty and the achievement of happiness.
Although you may infer my views on any given topic from various examples, this book does not presume to tell you the answers on any specific issue in the news narrative. It gives you the means to confidently arrive at all of your own answers.
I suggest you adopt the mind set of a private investigator, both in questioning your own fundamentals philosophical convictions, and in resolving the many contradictory claims you hear in the mainstream narrative. Not only will this approach predispose you towards the proper method, but it also makes it fun!
In a nut shell, The Truth Seekers Guide will help you acquire the means to become sovereign, and the ability to construct an accurate world view, knowing precisely which alleged crises are real and which are nothing to worry about. It will also help you to develop the skills to argue effectively for freedom. Sadly, it won’t help you win any friends. But in the long run, you will inevitably enjoy more meaningful conversations and deeper connections in the friendships you do find and retain.
If I appear to make bold claims and throw a lot of ideas at you in the opening chapters, be assured I will return to each of these with definitions and explanations throughout the book.
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