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In the world today we see the proliferation of bad ideas! Ideas that are false because they contain some aspect that is not true, that does not correspond to reality.
I have been researching across a broad range of topics for the past 10 years, and I have found bad ideas in almost every subject I look into: In science, in medicine, in politics, in climatology, in philosophy, and in the thinking of ordinary people.
Bad ideas, or ideas that are false, cannot lead to anything but failure and suffering. So it’s imperative that we identify any false ideas that we believe to be true. We must consider them, evaluate them, judge them, and reject them.
Ideas affecting values and choices
The most dangerous false ideas are not ones that point to events and things, out there in the world, but those that affect our thinking, our values, and our choices. Meaning, the ideas that affect the way we live. These are the fundamental ideas that, if false, lead to many other downstream or subsequent ideas that are also false.
For example, in medicine, the evidence that contradicts the cherished theory of the cause of disease (germ theory) is ignored. Such evidence reveals that the idea is false. Consequently, no one is looking for a theory of disease causation that is not contradicted by the facts of reality – i.e., the one that is true, because the question has already been answered – if falsely. Remember, all consequent actions based on a falsely identified cause, will, a) not work, and b) cause suffering. (And this is what we see in medicine and health care systems across the world.) The same principle holds for all the bad ideas out there in every field of study. In other words, this is a widespread cultural problem extending across the board. When you uncover something false in the mainstream narrative, it is not an unfortunate isolated incidence. The root problem is systemic!
My purpose in this podcast is to share with you some of the most fundamental false ideas I have identified, so that you too may consider them, and if you hold them to be true, that you may perhaps reconsider them.
There is one specific category of ideas that should be at the top of your list for questioning. These are all the ideas that pertain to, and reflect, the thinking of men. These are usually of a philosophical nature, because philosophy IS the study of fundamental ideas that effect the way we live. These ideas are not at all obviously false, because they are quite abstract, and removed from the observable facts of daily life.
It is the results of such false and fundamental ideas that manifest in the institutions of men, such as in the realms of politics, economics, science and technology, health care, etc.
Some ideas are very powerful because they motivate us and effect our values. The most obvious example is the recent idea of a pandemic, with a scary disease-causing pathogen sweeping the planet changed the behaviour of billions of people! As opposed to an idea of where to have lunch.
It’s worth noting that We very rarely deal with ideas one at a time. They come packaged together in bundles with some component ideas appearing more obviously than others. These complex ideas must be unpacked. For example, the alleged climate emergency issue implicitly makes human beings the problem. Since human actions, from breathing to all forms of energy use, release CO2. If we accept that human caused carbon dioxide is a problem for the environment, we implicitly accept that human activity is the problem.
Let’s look at a couple of examples, that a lot of people hold to be true.
Number 1 – Unconditional Love
This is held up as some kind of wonderful ideal to be aspired to. But what does it mean? It means to love someone for no reasons whatsoever. This means, you should be just as willing to love an evil child molester, as a caring and benevolent parent; You should be just as willing willing to love a double-crossing liar as an honest and trust worthy person. And you should love a thieving lazy bum, just as much as a thinking person who is productive and generates wealth.
Not only must these examples all be loved, but according to this idea to love them would be the highest form of love! Remember that the idea holds that unconditional love is the highest form of love. Can you see the utter perversity of this idea when you scratch beneath the surface? Who benefits from it? The scoundrel, obviously. Only evil benefits from this false idea of loving unconditionally.
To love is to value. This idea divorces love from values. You are not supposed to value anything, but love anyway. What is love supposed to mean in this context?
Number 2 – To be logical is to be cold and miss the essential quality of being human
This idea was dramatized by the famous characters of James T Kirk and Dr Spock in the 60s sci-fi series STAR TREK. It is 180 degrees wrong. Logic will serve you every single time you are wise enough to use it because to be logical is to be rational.
Logic teaches us not to get burned by fire, to not listen to liars repeatedly giving them the benefit of the doubt, and which bathroom to go into depending on what sex we are. Ask yourself when has logic failed you if you applied it consistently?
When human consciousness functions it uses reason and logic. When we are faced with potentially poisonous berries, or walking a dangerous cliff edge, logic is always your friend. In truth seeking and discerning what is real logic is always your friend. In understanding your feelings and the complexities of the human psyche, logic is your friend. In knowing reality, logic is your friend. In operating within reality logic is your friend. In choosing a life partner logic is your friend. In choosing a career logic is your friend. In choosing morality logic is your friend.
I trust you are persuaded that the idea that being logical is to be cold and to miss the essential quality of being human, is entirely false. Nothing about following logic undermines the values of emotions, it simply means that we do not take them as a means of gaining knowledge or to inform action against logic telling us to do otherwise.
It matters enormously which ideas we act on. You must act on ideas that are true to succeed.
Number 3 – Reincarnation, or there is no death!
Without evidence to support it, beyond here say and spurious unsubstantiated claims, this idea serves as a huge disincentive to live, in a great many respects. Once again, we can see how hidden ideas can lurk beneath others implicitly – if this is true then these other things must also be true.
This idea implicitly destroys the need to value one’s body, the vehicle of experience. If you get a new body each time around, and there is no death, then there is much less incentive to value one’s body as one should, if you only ever have one!
Reincarnation serves as a disincentive to take serious care of oneself and one’s interests across the generations in the broadest sense. It rests on the unwarranted assumption that there is another reality somewhere else that is superior to this one, and this is where we really all live, and we just come here to learn lessons and have experiences in a kind of ‘spiritual boot camp’ before graduating back to the other ‘superior’ world.
Not only does it implicitly undermine the need to manage your life wisely in every respect, but it also undermines the concept of an existential threat, such as tyranny and the collectivist state. If it is held to be true, then implicitly, there are no existential threats because reality is not real and you ultimately live somewhere else, in some realm better than this. So, any alleged existential threats, or problems that people are trying to get your attention to solve, have diminished importance, they take on the status of a mere illusion. You needn’t worry about them as much. However, back in reality, the existential threat is real, you are being exploited and politically controlled.
If you adopt this idea, you avail yourself to a lifetime of procrastination and non-action. Reincarnation is a disincentive to act NOW, TODAY. The reality of ‘Death’, on the other hand, is a huge incentive to act NOW, to make your life better TODAY. It motivates us to value every single day since soon we will no longer exist! When we accept the inevitability of your own death or non-existence, for which there is overwhelming evidence, we have a powerful incentive to live your life NOW!
Number 4 – we are all ONE
It sounds wonderfully reassuring on the surface if we consider that we are ll connected somehow through consciousness. It counteracts loneliness and feelings of isolation. It invokes a sense of feeling that we will all look after each other, so the one holding this idea will be ok. It implicitly assumes that we all be looked after, because we are all part of the same thing. Why wouldn’t the collective (thing) look after all the parts of itself?
It is psychological or spiritual collectivism. There is no objective evidence to support the idea. People just feel it, and it feels reassuring, it feels good. It undermines a sense of urgency to look after one’s self independently of the crowd. However, there are plenty of self-evident reasons to conclude that we are separate from each other. The unit of humanity is the individual, and this idea is a concealed attack on individualism.
But consciousness has identity, like everything else, A is A. You are you and I am me.
If you hold this idea in spirit, if you hold that we are all one consciousness, then it is only a short step to convince you to also hold that political unity is desirable too. It is a step towards preconditioning unsuspecting people towards political collectivism. Which is the removal of your freedom.
Ideas inform our values and therefore motivate us to behave.
Number 5 – the idea of believing in things without reasons – Mysticism
This idea is perhaps the mother of all false ideas. And this is because, in accepting this idea, you have to specifically reject your human form of cognition, your faculty of reason. It is therefore the idea that is responsible for countless other false ideas being held as true.
Not only is mysticism the practice of believing in things without reasons, but worse still, it is believing in things in contradiction of reasons not to! This corrupts and undermines any capacity for logical critical thinking. It is the suspension of the human faculty of reason in judgment of truth or falsity. It is the belief in an alternative means to knowledge that requires no effort or understanding. And it amounts to the destruction of your capacity for knowledge. Thus, it undermines your capacity for certainty.
To the mystic, anything can be true – no matter how absurd! miracles and impossible things can happen. A fairy story can be believed in no matter how much it contradicts the directly perceivable facts of reality.
The appeal of this idea is that you get to believe in anything you are told to believe in, or anything everyone else believes in. And for those who wish to mislead, dupe and con other people, mysticism is the dream ticket! Because you can tell any lies safe in the knowledge that your victim will not be able to identify the lies, because they do not require reasons, proof, evidence.
But, the cost of practicing mysticism to the individual mind, of conceding to buy into a make-believe universe, is that you can never be certain of anything. Accumulating reasons in the form of evidence and proof, is the method of achieving certainty. An idea that could potentially become knowledge moves from the possible, to the probable, and then to certainty in the context of an accumulation of supporting evidence (or reasons). Generally speaking, the more evidence (reasons) you have, the greater your degree of certainty. If you have no reasons then certainty is impossible. All you have is a blind belief that you must cling to, no matter what.
To be a mystic is to eject yourself from any and all rational debate about an idea. if you are happy to accept things as true without reasons, then what reasons would persuade you of truth in a competing argument? How would you evaluate the logical strength of any evidence? How could you explain your belief in terms another can possibly understand? How could you ever weigh up your belief with an opposing one? You have already renounced reasons, so you have no means to compare one idea with another – other than how you may feel about it.
And of course, why would you bother to weigh reasons? According to mystics who hold ideas as true without reasons, reasons don’t matter. If reasons are not what convinced you into a belief, how could they convince you out of it?
Furthermore, once you concede to believing in things without reasons, where do you draw the line? If you don’t require reasons to hold ideas as true, then implicitly you must accept other ideas similarly claimed, such as ghosts and demons. On what grounds would you not believe in these other false ideas? The mystic necessarily lives in a ‘haunted house’ universe. On the premise of mysticism, you place yourself in a terrifying predicament. You cannot possibly know what is real and what is true, or how to know anything, or what crazy shit will happen next. This is NOT a basis on which to manage one’s life.
To believe in things without reasons is to destroy the concept of truth in your own mind. To the mystic the idea of anything ‘correlating with reality’ is meaningless. What is reality after all? It cannot possibly be a fixed absolute according to this idea. The concept of truth is emptied of meaning by the idea that mysticism can be a means to knowledge.
Mysticism is not all about God and church. More broadly speaking the concept of believing things without reasons can apply to any claim to knowled. If one has a tendency to ‘not require reasons’, one can be fooled into believing almost anything, on any topic. A logical fallacy will be sufficiently persuasive, especially if it appeals to your emotions.
These days secular mysticism is all over the place. Tragically, it has become culturally acceptable to not need reasons for your beliefs. Belief in climate catastrophe, boogeyman terrorists, evil little germs that cause disease, are all held as true for the apparent reason (i.e. the say so) of being declared as true by some authority figure, or by everyone else.
Mysticism is like a computer software bug. Even if, superficially, it is not noticed. It still wreaks its destructive effect hampering the possibility of certainty, undermining the capacity for rational argument, and opening the door to a nightmare universe.
Mysticism has been with us all through our history, but this does not mean that we should hold on to it and cherish it – quite the opposite!
Mind control
Mind control is only possible on the basis of people believing in things without reasons, and that means identifying logical fallacies as pseudo reasons. If you reject all forms of believing in things without reasons and evidence. In other words, if you reject mysticism, you are potentially free from mind control.
Mind control is simply planting ideas into the heads of those who decline the effort of scrutinising the ideas they hear and subsequently rejecting or accepting them as appropriate. Mind control is simply feeding ideas to lazy undiscerning minds.
Beware of buying into any of the fear mongering of claims that minds can be controlled by any external means other than direct torture, such as electromagnetic waves, or beaming something at you, or nano technology or any other claimed form of technology. It’s all nonsense. You can easily be immune from any control of your thinking. First by rejecting the false idea of mysticism as a valid means to knowledge, and then by getting into the driver’s seat of your mind. Take control yourself, then no one else can! In the same way that no one can drive your car while you are in the driver’s seat.
Identifying the false
Identifying the false is generally easier than confidently identifying what is precisely true. This is because it is relatively easy to find evidence in reality that contradicts a claim and therefore falsifies it. This is why the famous detective character Sherlock Holmes said in the novels by Arthur Conan Doyle, “First rule out the impossible. Then, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the truth.”
But it takes work. You must think, unpack ideas. This involves a lot of question asking. You must ask yourself what assumptions must be in place, and what implications follow. When you have stripped away the false, then you can more easily see the truth.
Join me again, in episode 160, for part Two of dangerous False Ideas.
Wow, so much to unpack here.
Some really good points. You explain the false ideas well, and also their effects on our lives. Although I have no proof of it, I get the impression that these false ideas (at least the ones listed here) are consciously created to make a more malleable, subservient, accepting population:
1. love your enemy (unconditional love)
2. don’t think too much (or you’re cold)
3. don’t worry about your life too much (you will reincarnate)
4. don’t be egotistic (we are all one)
If I wanted to eliminate or abuse a group of people, those would be some good ideas to implant in them.
Then there’s this statement:
> Identifying the false is generally easier than confidently identifying what is precisely true.
I really need to give this more thought. In a recent other comment on one of your posts I said the exact opposite! I think you make a good point here, when you find anything that is not in accordance with an idea, this can be used to disprove it. Also the Sherlock Holmes quote makes sense.
Let’s take a concrete example here, the question on whether nuclear weapons are real or not. Here are some points that give me the impression that they are not real, but do not prove it:
1. no nuclear weapons have been *used* in combat since WW2
2. nuclear chain reactions seem to balance themselves out (i.e. a critical mass of radioactive material becomes hot, perhaps melts, but does not explode)
3. none of the meltdowns of nuclear reactors have resulted in a nuclear explosion (Chernobyl, Fukushima)
4. much of the nuclear blast footage is fake (filming the sun, enlarging regular TNT explosions, etc.)
5. The more recent nuclear tests are underwater and low yield. (For example the underwater tests of France. These have very good footage, but they do not prove that it was a nuclear explosion.)
6. It’s hard for us to know for certain if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit by a nuclear weapon, or if they were firebombed like other Japanese cities. There is no good proof for the nuclear explosions there.
Even though, in my world view, all of these points together make it very unlikely that nuclear weapons exist, they do not prove it. So how hard is it to disprove something? At least in this case it seems to be pretty difficult.
Achieving certainty of the falsehood of a particular claim is easy because you only need one known contradiction to do so. If you know one contradictory fact with certainty, the claim is false.
But the more important point here with the example of nuclear weapons, is that you can’t prove a negative, and you don’t have to. One cannot consider and evaluate the nonexistent. There can be no existent evidence for something that doesn’t exist. The burden of proof is always on the one asserting a positive. This means that the thinker can only consider evidence put forward in support of a claim, and remember to do so in the full context of everything else you know.
To continue with the nuclear weapons example: Given that you can’t prove that nuclear weapons don’t exist, all that you can possibly do is evaluate the evidence offered that they do exist. Given that all of it is dodgy, to put it mildly, we can hold the claim in serious doubt. That means we can not believe it to be true, even if we cant prove that it is false.
Then, if we observe full context, we can bring to bear other things we know that very much support the conclusion that they do not exist. We know that the institutions that claim they do exist have repeatedly lied! We know that the idea of their existence is immensely politically useful. We know that those who have lied to us, also have political agendas that are advanced by the widespread belief in nuclear weapons being real! If you listen to the testimony of Galen Winsor in this video, https://youtu.be/EQAejQifrmk even more doubts arise. Although to be fair, these cannot be assumed as true.
But the point is that you end up with a weight of evidence in a specific context that points convincingly to the conclusion that they cannot be true. This is not certain, but the weight of probability is easily sufficient to inform confident action. In other words we proceed on the basis that the claim is false. This is the only logical thing to do in the absence of any evidence that proves that they do exist.
Interestingly, the very probable conclusion that nukes do not exist, must also be factored into our subsequent thinking. In other words, we must not proceed on the assumption that they exist, with all the attendant implications. We must proceed on the assumption that they DO NOT EXIST. This is what it means to proceed on the basis that the claim is false. I refer to this as mentally updating all files. All our thinking must be re-jigged in the light of each conclusion we arrive at.
Nigel
Excellent analysis. Thanks so much for taking the time to respond, this really clears things up. As well as showing your analytical skills. Impressive!
> But the more important point here with the example of nuclear weapons, is that you can’t prove a negative, and you don’t have to. One cannot consider and evaluate the nonexistent. There can be no existent evidence for something that doesn’t exist. The burden of proof is always on the one asserting a positive.
Since this holds true for all non-existent ideas, this also applies to the epistemology of faith: it is impossible to disprove imaginary things. This is then also why it is so hard to persuade ‘believers’, as we cannot disprove their ideas.
Yup, you cant prove that unicorns don’t exist. You cant prove that God doesn’t exist. You can’t prove that gremlins don’t exist.
I wouldn’t say it applies to an idea though. All sorts of crazy ideas exist. As long as one person holds an idea it exists. Whether or not they have the ability to communicate it in a meaningful way is another matter.
Yes, people who believe things without evidence cannot be persuaded about anything by definition. If you ain’t been reasoned into your belief, you cant be reasoned out of it! (lol)
> I wouldn’t say it applies to an idea though.
I agree. This is also what I have been realizing the last few days. There has to be a distinction between real objects, and ideas.
Wrong ideas *can* easily be disproven by thinking, or by observing reality. I.e.: I hold the opinion/idea that John is the murderer. But by looking at evidence from the murder scene it is shown that this is not the case. The idea is disproven.
Imaginary *objects* or *things* cannot be disproven.
Although these imaginary objects are still valid ‘ideas’, they are not rooted in reality, and thus useless. The logical way to recognize these ideas as most probably false must lie in the complete absence of proof/evidence. In other words, all *proposed* evidence for imaginary objects has to be false.
After thinking about this a bit more, I believe the following distinction might be correct:
1. ideas which are connected to reality by standing on evidence (or absence thereof)
2. ideas which are completely disconnected from reality.
I believe it is important to make this distinction because of the different approach that is required for these two categories.
Ideas from category 1 can be proven/disproven by analyzing their connection to reality. Ideas from category 2 cannot be disproven, only their lack of evidence can be investigated.
Imaginary ‘objects’ by definition belong to category 2. There are probably other examples that we can think of that are completely disconnected from reality.