How logic opens up a new world for you

How logic opens up a new world for you

by Jon Rappoport

December 16, 2016

Note: My collection, The Matrix Revealed, contains a basic logic course for beginners. My collection, Power Outside The Matrix, contains a more advanced section, Analyzing Information in the Age of Disinformation.

When a person learns the procedures of logic, a new world opens up for him. Information no longer spreads out like a haze over a city. He doesn’t feel frustrated and blunted by articles that seem to have no pattern or internal connections.

Logic is the “inside game” for the mind seeking a rational approach. Logic is the study of the internal clockwork of formal arguments. What premises is the author or speaker assuming? How is he moving from those premises to a conclusion? What chain or line is he following?

What fallacies is he using to come to an unfounded assertion? What contradictions is he employing?

These are the basics of logic. This is the basic map a person can use to assess what he is reading or hearing.

Non-logic gives you a flat painting. Logic suddenly opens up space in the painting and you see dimensions and perspective.

The ancient Greeks—particularly Plato and Aristotle—took knowledge to a whole new level by examining the interior elements of reasoning. They stated that, in a society, open debate and discussion were essential to progress. Therefore, students should learn how to assess this process. No one in the West had ever put forward such an idea. It was revolutionary.

The Greeks believed in freedom to a degree never seen before. They recognized that logic was a necessary partner in that freedom.

Today, we can see the effect of freedom without logic—since the subject is no longer taught in early education. Students today are caught in the Big Drift. For them, information is an endless mall, from which they pick and choose what appeals to them on a superficial level. They find no particular connection between one piece of information and another.

They are unaware that an author is moving along a line of reasoning. They enter text like a tourist, hoping to find an item that pleases them for the moment—or offends them.

Teachers can get away with indoctrinating students in values, because there is no consciousness of logic.

Logic has an additional and vital implication. By extension, it generally sharpens the mind of the user. He examines details more closely. He spots sloppiness of thought quickly. He withholds final judgment until he can discover what an author is actually saying. He is confident when confronted with a group of data.

And finally, as a professor of mine put it to me many years ago, when you ground yourself in the study of logic, “you know what you don’t know.”

You don’t assume you know everything. You don’t assume you know nothing. You’re not blinded in either direction. You know what you don’t know, and therefore you can investigate and discover the truth.

That is a great gift.

It’s never too late to study the foundations of rational thought: logic.

Jon Rappoport has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for over 30 years. http://nomorefakenews.com/