The Meaning of our 'Answers' are problems for 'Critical Thinking'

Do you understand The Grammar of Liberty?

In the previous two posts (here and here) I noted how much we've lost with those stories and histories of The West that we're no longer learning from today. And whether it's the case that we're only not reading & studying them, or worse, that we're reading them through a post-modernist 'lens' that is fundamentally opposed to what makes The West in general and America in particular so much better than the rest, either way their meaning is being lost to us, and that is what's leaving us blind to the very real monsters that we're facing in the world today.

That means that recovering the canon of the Greco-Roman-Judeo/Christian West's stories and histories, involves more than just reading those works, it involves being mindful that those works represent an approach to reality which understands that:

Real meaning is only found through recognizing what is real and true.

IOW: how you go about your reading, matters as much or more than what you're reading - how else could you be expected to recognize the many errors, and even evils (hello Rousseau!), that are present in the canon, and understand how to avoid swallowing and repeating them? Recovering the Western mind, rather than simply repeating its sometimes fashionable 'answers', requires developing its essential approach to reasoning about reality (which, despite appearances, is the same reality that our Founders faced) in the pursuit of wisdom, and that involves seeking to understand what is (Metaphysics), what that leads to and what follows from it (Causality & Logic), and what, if anything, should or should not be done about what it is that you do come to understand about aspects of the real world that you live within (Ethics).

If you're one of those who recognizes the problems surrounding what we no longer know or understand, and are wondering what to do about it, I hope you're not also one of those who complains when told what the solution to that is:

Open those books and begin remedying your own lack of familiarity with the canon.

And yet, because I've had experience with delivering this message over the years, I won't be surprised when those hearing this advice for the first time (first time? Really?), that many of you (not you, of course) will be thinking (or shouting):

"But Van, it'll take time to read those books!"

Yes, you are correct. It will take time and some effort on your part, to learn some measure of what you should have been taught to understand all along.

And?

Are you waiting for the Answer Fairy to leave some solutions under your pillow? Or to have A.I. 'somehow' do that for you? Do you imagine that you can 'fix' others, without 'fixing' yourself? That must be some mote you see in another's eye, if it's stopping you from seeing that this is exactly the sort of response that the Hydra's 'somehow' knows it can expect as "... an expression of the American mind..." from most people schooled in America today. Go figure.

I do, of course, get the aggravation behind the response, though. When I began this series of posts, I naively thought that I could just expose the central issues required to cauterize the stumps and approach the 'final boss' (which I'll finally name in the course of this post, and identify and dig further into it throughout this series of posts). Nevertheless, it's taken me five years of going through the history of 'Education Reform' in America (again), the equally forgotten (discarded) nature of Metaphysics, and what Epistemology is not (but should be), and the false & subversive ideology of 'Economic Thinking' (which is not philosophy or a substitute for one).

It turns out it takes time to get something done. Go figure. Recognize that evading this is just indulging in more of the wishful thinking we've all been filled up with since pre-school. Deal with it, and get on with the doing of it!

If you still resist doing so, is it because you don't realize that recovering some measure of those works, along with the deliberate intention of seeking to understand what is real and true, may be able to do for you some measure of what it did for our Founders in their era? If you don't think it can... why? If you do, but would rather use your time doing something else... what and why?

Or do you 'somehow' think that human beings in our modern world are so very different from those of our Founders' era? Do you imagine that their powdered wigs & horse drawn carriages somehow made them different from (or better than?) you? Or that having technology 'somehow' makes you different from (or better than?) them?

What seems more likely to you, that having electric lights means that we don't need to know what they understood to be necessary for living lives worth living and in liberty with others, or that something about our having electric lights has 'somehow' blinded us to the dangers of our own ignorance?

You should blink and take a moment. Then refocus, and think.

The only real difference between them then, and us now, is our respective familiarity with the canon, along with approaching it with the intention of gaining a better understanding of what is real and true and right to do, and doing so with a clear awareness that there are consequences to ignoring reality. The real difference between them then, and us now, is that our electrified society eases our thinking that we can 'somehow' get away with ignoring reality, in a way that wasn't possible with the hostile wilderness they faced.

If you want to do something to help restore The West, what is it that you imagine you could do that'd be better and more effective, than beginning to restore it within yourself first? If you doubt the value or effectiveness of doing so... do you not understand what that 'answer' means for the very issue you've admitted to recognizing?

Becoming familiar with the stories and histories that shaped their thinking, and the habits they practiced in thinking about them, will provide you with some measure of what led Thomas Jefferson to describe the Declaration of Independence, as being: "... an expression of the American mind...". Conversely, failing to adhere to a habit of reasoning that seeks to understand what is real and true, and lacking the canon which develops that habit, leads into the muddled state of mind that the Hydra's provocations are meant to distract us into, and 'Critical Thinking' plays a significant role in which mode it is that prevails for our students, and for the rest of us today, though... perhaps not in the way you might assume.

And again, No: getting 'answers' from your targeted research and LLM prompts will not provide you with the understanding that you should have, or save you much if any time in learning what you need to learn. What either is most likely to do, is to fill you with still more meaningless 'answers' that you'll be drawn into bandying about with the opposing groups from the Ideological Observatory, as both of you help the ideologs to spread their ideological churn further far and wide.

Don't do that. Learn something from history, instead. Stop complaining and start reading what you've missed out on.

• Questions that lead to Metaphysics, Causality, and the Logic of Ethics
• How the failings of our public schools trace back to our Founders
• How to step out of the Wizard's Circle of Economics, and return to Classical American Liberalism

And as you go about doing what you know you need to do, keep in mind that the point of engaging in this kind of learning is less about fetching items from a shopping list of The Bible, Homer, the Greek Tragedians, Herodotus, Aesops... Dante... Shakespeare, as if to acquire new possessions, merit badges, and support ribbons for displaying on social media, than to continuously learn more about what is, what follows, and how their integration enables us to better recognize the universal concepts and principles involved in better understanding what you know, and what should be done about that (and don't neglect your Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and Thomas Reid, who'll help you with getting more meaning and understanding out of those stories, and within your life).

The good news is that you don't need to 'know it all' (and you should know that you never will), and neither do you have to memorize long lists of facts and answers.

What really needs to be done, is what so many are avoiding: Doing the reading, and actively focusing on how to approach an issue, which is what enables a person to generate a sufficient force and heat of understanding that's needed to both sever and cauterize the hydra's many headed lies into lifeless stumps, and to understand that then, and only then, can it be safe to move on to attack the next provocation that's being waved in their face.

The Pro-Regressive doesn't want you to develop those habits - and they need for you to think that simply reacting, is a 'good idea'.

With that in mind, keep in mind that Pro-Regressive's (Left and Right) always utilize ambiguous terms in order to benefit from the shallow and premature conclusions which they know that you will assume they mean by their words (such as 'Left' and 'Right'), while unbeknownst to you, the inner-circle of TWKB (Those Who Know Best) have freighted them with misleading content and meaning which directly contradicts what you assume is meant by them.

Key Tools of Semantic Deception:
Paltering (n.) The act of using truthful statements to mislead or deceive, often by omitting key details or presenting facts so as to create a false impression.

Polysemy (n.) The coexistence of multiple meanings for a single word or phrase, where the meanings are related but distinct, often arising from a common origin or usage over time.

Equivocation (n.) The use of ambiguous language or expressions to mislead or avoid commitment to a clear statement, often by exploiting multiple meanings of a word or phrase to obscure the truth.

As we'll see in this series of posts, these tactics are nothing new, they come from the age-old art of Sophistry, which concentrates upon generating an 'everybody knows!' mask of unquestioned narratives which seem to have substance, and turns your attention away from looking beneath the surface for further arguments or deeper meaning. The sophist waves the flag of 'Only fools & fascists doubt ___!' to divert the rest of their audience into fighting against a slew of superficial labels in one rhetorical dead-end alley after another, while the revolution advances on around them and acquires ever more monstrous forms.

To be able to identify and expose the central neck of the many-headed hydra, requires our not treating what isn't real, as if it were real - that's what their illusions rest upon. That requires your being in the habit of expecting that the meaning of something, must mean that something is and can be understood to be true, something whose essentials are identifiable, and which integrate into the rest of what you know - before and after - without contradiction, and is not simply a floating 'fact' that is copy & pasted widely as the 'answer' whenever prompted.

What I mean by that, is that what seems sensible on the surface, may not have any real meaning in it. For instance, take the original syllogism:

Socrates is a man,
All men are mortal,
Socrates is a mortal man

, which is logically correct, meaningful, and true, but the fact that on the surface it is syntactically correct (it follows Logic's rules of distributed middle, etc.,), is not what makes this syllogism either meaningful or true. Aristotle's first rule of logic is that before beginning to construct a syllogism, you must first ensure that your premises are true, and that your terms are unambiguous, and only then do you go on to constructing a syllogism to logically demonstrate that.

It is only by understanding that the premise of what a man is ( human beings have a nature that is created to perceive reality and to use its reasoning faculty to guide its chosen actions to accord with what is real and true, and suffers the consequences of failing to do so), and that what the term mortality refers to (a living creature's life will end in death, and that every man, no matter how well they reason out their best laid plans, will someday die), and knowing who it was that the term Socrates refers to (an Athenian man, proven in battle, who thought that an unexamined life was not worth living, and who was put to death in 399 B.C. for publicly questioning his fellow Athenians and testing the meaning of their replies with his Socratic logic), is what makes it possible for the properly structured syllogism to demonstrate that it is both meaningful and true, but if either its premises are untrue or its terms are ambiguous, it doesn't matter how correctly the syllogism is structured, it's 'answer' can't be logically shown to be either or meaningful true.

...from Stephen Coughlin's Unconstrained Analytics

To better see the issue, contrast the 'Socrates is a man' syllogism, with one that is syntactically correct, but whose premises and terms are invalid:

Socrates is a tortoise,
All tortoises fly,
Socrates is a flying tortoise

The premise that all tortoises fly is a false premise that does not reflect what a tortoise is or can do. And while we recognize the name 'Socrates', because it's not being used to refer to the man that we typically assume it does, the term is being used ambiguously. Because the syllogism's premises are untrue, and its terms are ambiguous, it is not logical, meaningful, or true.

I can hear some thinking:

"Another swell story Van, but I'm not worried about what a tortoise can or kant do!"

Try this one on for size:

Healthcare is a human right,
All human rights are inalienable,
Healthcare is an inalienable human right

The absence of Context, often indicates the presence of Pretext

If you're in the habit of ignoring context and accepting answers where 'That makes sense', or what 'everyone knows' is correct, and are not in the habit of checking premises & terms, your agreement with or objection to this, will likely reflect whichever way the current ideological winds are blowing you in, each of which may reflect as little of what is real and true, as the other (See obamacare, or 'replacements' for it, for reference).

Note: you should also beware of those who'd say that something like the Tortoise & Healthcare syllogisms are 'logically correct, but technically untrue' (hi Kant!), for they too are utilizing untrue premises and ambiguous terms, to subvert your understanding of reality through the mis-structuring of logic, so as to escape the restrictions of what is real and true.

With the habit of checking premises & terms firmly in place, then you'll find issues with such 'arguments' jumping out at you, one after the other, such as:

• 'Healthcare' - What is meant by 'health'? Who defines and determines that, you, your doctor, or metrics on a govt regulated insurance form? Similarly for what is meant by 'care', does that mean choosing a service from those offering it, that you think are best able to provide it, or will you have to take what some other entity has determined that you're eligible to receive, according to how you are classified by it?
• 'human right' - a 'human right' is a collectivist term for what might be secured by pressure groups who desire to use political power to force others to act as they wish, and so such inhumane 'rights' are entirely constructed and fully alienable, by majority rule, and/or authoritarian dictate
• An 'Inalienable Right' is derived from what all human beings by nature are, and not from what some or all people yearn for - what is inalienable, cannot be alienated - separated from your nature - anymore than breathing can be made optional.
• I say again: There are no 'human rights' that are inalienable
• 'Individual Right' - is derived from the nature of what all human beings are, not from what some or all people desire . An individual right cannot be alienated from you except by force, such as imprisonment or execution, as penalty for violating the individual rights of others, and such individual rights can only be justly upheld and defended, within a rule of law that is dedicated to, and limited by, an objective respect for them (AKA: Liberty).
• Liberty or a House Slave - Whether your society recognizes 'human rights' or 'individual rights', determines whether you have a choice in your 'healthcare' being provided by those who're interested and competent to offer it, or have no choice in what will be given by those who have been compelled to provide it (AKA: enslaved), and competence will have little or no role in the 'care' you receive, or the 'health' you achieve from it.

Those who peddle 'answers' which have only the surface appearance of being correct, while urging you to accept their statements as 'obviously true!' without your grasping or examining their underlying meaning, are just as likely to 'argue' that you are a heartless fascist for even thinking of questioning what 'everyone knows!', as do both sides of the ideological "Healthcare is a human right!" battle.

Reminder/Hint: They want you to react to their 'answer', they do not want you to take a moment to understand what it supposedly answers, or what an actual answer would actually mean.

The scattershot banalities of 'everyone knows!' that surround phrases in everything from "Healthcare is a human right!" to "Heritage Americans are the only real Americans!", are waved about to lure you into biting on the enticing bait of isolated facts shorn of necessary context, by which they form the Semantic Deceptions needed for disguising their untrue premises and ambiguous terms. It's in that way that our own language is often used to play upon our assumptions, and if we fail to examine the premises & terms being used in the language that we habitually hear and use, then our own thoughts use of them can do grave injury to our understanding of far more than just what is being 'argued' in that moment.

That is and always has been the signature strategy of Sophists through the ages, and in all of their ideological stripes. It is how Pro-Regress is achieved.

Fortunately for us, these monsters, as all monsters do, have a fatal weak spot - they are untrue - which they can't help but hide in plain sight, which is why they live in a constant state of dread of an honest man with the sense and liberty to ask: "What do you mean by ___?". They are painfully aware of the real danger that they would be left facing if we don't take the bait of those distractions that they're busily thrusting into our faces.

Their weak spot is easily spotted, if you look

Whether it occurs on X, or Facebook, or face to face, don't engage with them on the level of their narrative and its deliberate provocations, for to do so is to implicitly accept their false premises. That is what happened during the "Healthcare is a human right!" push for obamacare, which was often advocated for with lines such as "What are you going to do about the 30% who lack health insurance?!", and the typical response from The Right was something like "First of all, it's only about 10%, and these people choose...", without ever realizing that by doing so, they'd implicitly accepted their pro-regressive premises, and effectively conceded the argument, and so could do nothing more than complain as their half of the ideological "Left! Right! Forward March!" cadence helped in marching us on towards our demise.

Stop taking their narratives as presenting either valid or invalid facts (what is obviously wrong, is a key means of drawing you into their ideological churn. AKA: Clickbait). Ignore their provocations and poke beneath the surface by paying less attention to what they've said, and more to what the premises for what they'd said must mean, what they're based upon, and what is likely to follow from, and be built upon, their being accepted.

Start looking at their narratives as a story that's being told to make you assume that they mean what they do not really mean (which typically involves evading a principle that's lethal to their narrative), which is how they sell what 'everyone knows', and inflict such damage by shifting our attention away from what is, to their narrative about it.

Doing this needn't be a complicated process, and doesn't require research projects, or position papers, it only requires you to question their narrative along the conceptual paths that they're evading, "...taking every thought captive..." so as to reveal and identify their unspoken premises & terms:

• When they say 'Black lives matter!', ignore the provocations that some lives matter and others don't, by questioning the premise it evades and denies: 'Why do any lives matter?'
• When they say that "The sexual organs you were born with don't determine your 'gender'!", question the premise they want you to presume is unquestionable, by asking "Then how does faking the appearances of having those sexual organs through costume, makeup, or surgical alteration, determine your 'gender'?"

• When they say 'America is only for Heritage Americans!', bring what they count upon you thinking that they mean, face to face with what they don't want you to realize that they mean, by pointing out the actual meaning of their words: "The motto of The Great Seal of the United States of America, finalized in 1782, is e Pluribus Unum (Out of many, One), and clearly proclaims the 1776 date (MDCCLXXVI) of  the Declaration of Independence and its proposition that "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." and so must be treated equally before the law, as the origin of and foundation for the United States of America. That is the meaning and heritage of being an American, so how can rejecting either of those mean anything other than opposition to our American heritage?"

Note that they cannot reply to those questions, without also acknowledging that the false premises and ambiguous terms which they are trying to evade, are the Achilles' heel (another lost story) of their assertions. Ask such questions not to 'own them!', but to turn the discussion away from their narrative, and back towards reality.

Some people (you too?) will say:

"But they'll never engage in conversations like that!"

, and of course that is the kind of conversation that the truly Pro-Regressive (Woke or otherwise) will never engage in - they'll recoil from such questions like Dracula from a mirror, and perhaps for the same reason.

Keep in mind though that most such conversations that you may become engaged in, are not for the (immediate) benefit of the radical you're speaking with (though you never know what time will tell), but for your own understanding, and especially for those who may be silently watching from a distance.

If we fail to demonstrate how to dig deeper into identifying what they're trying to distract us from, that can be as deadly to us, as their failing to distract us from doing so, is to them.

Again, don't react and try to 'own them' - that helps no one but the churning of the Ideological Observatory. The most effective thing you can do is to question their point calmly and cooly, not to get to a different answer, but to bring out a deeper understanding of the issue and their premises, and by doing so, pull them along with you as you pursue identifying what is - and is not - real and true about their 'answer'.

A Critical Language Alert
In short, the alternative to being led around by your ears, is your giving some meaningful thought to what underlies the terms of the narrative that they're attempting to entangle you in.

The best response to a narrative and its provocations, is to think through the meaning and implications of what they've said, and to test whether its assumptions and claims (entailing premises and terms), meaningfully reflect what you can understand to be real and true.

Most people today will feel an almost natural reaction against that - did you feel its tug?

It comes from a particular habit of thinking, and that is what needs to be identified, broken, and replaced with that which I've been describing here, and those who don't do that, will continue to find themselves being carried along on the surface of popular narratives, flopping about as they're skewered with one provocation after another.

The one thing you can be sure of, is that whichever ideological path that this habit of thinking is leading us all down, leads to a very real and inescapably anti-American system being imposed upon us all.

Remember Alinsky's lesson for training up monsters:

The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

The deeper problem with banalities of 'everyone knows!', and our eagerness for easy answers, and our acceptance of shallow 'logic', is that this pattern for arriving at their conclusions, has been repeatedly presented to us as being so sensible, and so obvious, and so alluring for a hundred years, that questioning the design pattern that generates this habit of thinking, doesn't occur to us. Popular opinion recognizes problems all around us, and enthusiastically calls for actions that can only bring still more of the same, and we do so, not because we want more problems, but because we're unaware that how we've been taught to go about our thinking, is the pattern that is furthering the purposes of the Critical Insurrection being waged against us.

What I'm getting at here, is that the thing that's defined our pattern of thinking, whose habits incline us towards seeking 'answers' from everything from narrowly targeted research, to those turning to A.I. for 'answers' as if having those answers is or could be a substitute for understanding the problem, which only then can appropriate solutions be sought for.

The thing that I'm pointing to as being the central head of the modern Hydra...

...the 'Final Boss', is...

...wait for it:

'Critical Thinking'.

No, I'm not recommending more 'Critical Thinking'.

What I am saying, is that in much the same way that 'Social Justice', 'Black Lives Matter!' and 'Heritage American', seek the opposite of what they advertise themselves as being concerned with, 'Critical Thinking' is not the cure for our problematic thinking, 'Critical Thinking' is the problem that has made our thinking so unreasonable.

IOW: The 'Critical Thinking' that we've been putting so much time and effort and money into forcing down our kids' throats as if it were the cure, is the very poison that's been making us all so sick. 'Critical Thinking' is the bad habit we need to be cured of.

The Munchausen Proxy folks in the Intellectual Observatory, have been careful to generate the impression that 'obviously' what 'everybody knows!' is meant by 'Critical Thinking', is that it is a scientifically valid method for thinking through the meaning and implications of what has been said, and for testing whether what you believe is or is not true. Unfortunately, as we'll see in excruciating detail in the coming posts, is that while they do intend to give you that impression, the reality is that the theorists of 'Critical Thinking' make artful use of semantic deception to formulate their materials and curriculum in such a way that they effectively undermine and subvert what every sensible person expects 'Critical Thinking' to mean, and to do for them. And this has been done deliberately, and remarkably openly (for those who bothered to look), for nearly a century.

What I'm pointing to here is not just another Ideology, it is not CRT (Critical Race Theory), or even any of the other 'Critical Theories'; what I'm pointing to is the monstrous many-headed hydra which those writhing necks of CRT, BLM, and 'Heritage Americans', sprout from, each time we attack any of them as if they were the central problem attacking us.

Even as I type this into the internet, I can sense the pushback from many of you against what I've just said (you too? Of course). And that's a good thing.

But it's worth your while to keep in mind another trope of monster stories, which is that the loudest denials of the monster's existence often turn out to be coming from either the monster in disguise, or from those who have been unwittingly aiding and supporting it ("The call is coming from inside the house!"). See our long and tragic history of Education Reform, and our very bipartisan calls for "We need more 'Critical Thinking'!" today.

And so, as we head into the coming posts, I'm not asking you to trust that I have the answers. I'm asking you to consider that you haven't been asking the right questions (such as What is education?).

I'm not asking you to trust what I present to you as new 'answers', I'm asking you to consider what I present, and to satisfy yourself that the premises and terms involved are sound and meaningful (theirs, mine, and yours), while being especially careful about the difference between those facts that you assume to be true ('everybody knows!'), and what you actually know, within the proper context, is real and true, and that you come to understand its meaning.

Towards that end, keep Solzhenitsyn's line from 'Live not by lies' in mind:

...Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me...

, and that:

"...The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world...."

There are few things that are more critically important to a sound mind, than that.

Do that, and then like Hercules & Iolaus, or even the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes, you may soon recognize what the old tales told us over and over, that few things burn the lie and its liar more hotly, than having their false pretenses publicly exposed to the truth.

Now all we have to do, is to do that to every last one of the Hydra's heads, and soon we'll be able to bury its body under a tombstone, and consider the immortal beast to be defeated.

For the moment.