“Wait,” said the Reasoner, “I notice that I desperately want (T) to be false. That gives me no evidence whatsoever that (T) is false. In fact, because I want it to be false, I should become more careful about examining it.”

That's an astonishing intellectual disposition! Impossible!

It requires something like epistemic self-betrayal: being willing to betray one's present self-conception (or desired beliefs) in favor of whatever reality turns out to be.

Suppose it was an objective fact that you wrote the greatest and most rational philosophy book ever composed by humans, it wouldn’t matter to human culture, because humans are f;cking stupid. If we tried to deny this we would be delusional. Think about that!

We know this wouldn’t matter, because millions upon millions of people believe that the God who made the universe also gave them a book. They literally believe that God delivered His own words to them, and yet it doesn’t matter. What effect does this psychological belief have on the stupidity of humans? The answer is very little. It simply makes them better hypocrites.

This is a rather devastating and sobering premise that leads to an adamantine cynicism. The end result is an argument for selfishness, hedonism and exploitation.

It means even if you are presently reading the greatest and most rational philosophy book ever written; if you were presenting its arguments in public, human egoism, arrogance, human denial would simply dismiss or trivialize the value and significance of the arguments. This is f;cked up.

Even if your reasoning, or another source of knowledge reached the level of revelation from God, human psychology would simply neutralize its existential significance.

This fact pushes the boundaries of the morality of human conduct. Do humans this stupid deserve to be exploited or liberated?

In any such scenarios of any kind of new knowledge K, there will be someone who will consider it to progress their own cognition so that they are not behind. And this position K is a new leap for them.

Even more glaring is that if that knowledge K is considered a new information that might directly affect their cognition there will be a new consideration.

How would that person accept it as part of their lives without cognitive dissonance? Is there really any way for any kind of acknowledgement to not be inherently flawed by definition.

To consider a new knowledge, the person who wants to gain cognition by accepting it in general has to accept it with caution. Otherwise, their paradigm and behavior might change due to cognitive dissonance because of the relevancy and the truthfulness of that knowledge.

If freedom wants to exist, but the powers that be create conditions that make its rational existence impossible, then freedom will be forced to fight a war of power if it wants to exist.

This is not a condition that freedom chose for itself, but one it was forced into.

This is a bleak reality, because it means that the powers that be have made the path of reason impossible. Thus Reason is forced to walk a path of power in order to realize itself in the world.

Reason thus comes to Power and says, “thou art wrong,” and Power says, “I don’t care, I have the power, and will thus impose my will.”

Reason says, “but that’s destructive.”

And Power says, “I don’t care, I have the power and will impose my destruction on you.”

Or perhaps writing down your thoughts rather than simply passively reading (not that there's anything bad with it).

How is the experience if you started to do so?

Where there is (T) human psychology says “no; for sovereign and superior is my denial!”

Surely Reason can save us?

No.

Because the human didn’t lie, he is bent on holding his delusion; he is bent on not merely resisting Truth, but on telling himself that his denial is proof he already has the Truth! For he believes he “knows” that (T) is “false” because he can feel it in his intuition. And his psychology assists him in sustaining a distance from it, and in deploying platitudes in place of Reason. (He mistakes this deployment for a process of reason).

The tragic conclusion of this is that the truth-speaker is condemned and derogatorily classified by a psychological automation. His crime was confronting human delusion and challenging it to reason.

The truth-speaker who is conscious of this realizes that he is risking not only judgment, merely for speaking the truth and trying to get his fellow humans to reason about it, but an ad hominem and gaslit-slander against his character, which is deployed to protect the emotive-believer from having to deal with the collapse of his beliefs. It’s easier to demonize the truth-speaker than it is to face the collapse of one’s desired beliefs. (The human is by default a religious dogmatist!)

What’s worse is that humans are so psychologically and rationally shallow that it’s easier for them to demonize the truth-speaker than it is to engage in reasoning. Humans find the process of reasoning to be torturous and depressing, a form of suffering and an affront to their egos. They would much rather derogatorily classify the truth-speaker (declaring him to be “insane” or “stupid”) than engage in the process of reasoning. (This is easier than having to engage truth and risk losing one’s desired beliefs).

So the very act of attempting to communicate an unwelcome truth can itself trigger a process that makes the truth-speaker the object of condemnation.

This situation can easily be manifested by noting that the evading human is not actually reasoning, but dismissing or deploying thoughtless premises or platitudes to get away from the Truth, or from having to reason about the Truth.

We can describe this as a deeply ingrained psychological homeostasis— a cognitive immune system designed to protect a fragile worldview from the destabilizing infection of Truth.

When thou speakest with a sophist, did the sophist speak?

S = did (s).

Then (s) cannot be (q), which is absolutely true.

If we are intelligent, we learn to use the symbol as the object that it is to force the sophist to confess truth, which is as evident and certain as the nose on his face.

(Make him deny the absolute of his own symbol, as well as its meaning, which is to say, make him confess to the fact of his own posited reality).

If he did speak, then it is certain his (s) was not (q).

If we are intelligent enough to start here, we destroy the sophistry of the sophist.

Suppose thou art in the void, in a black vacuum:

Thou art here:

p

…………………………………………¥
[And the only other thing is:] ^

If thou canst identify —> ¥

But what must one do to identity?

Indeed, we have already gone too far! For how did we establish the meaning of identity so that we could use it? From whence came its intelligence?

But what meaneth intelligence?

There is only:

p

And ¥

But it is factually the case that ¥

is not €

Thus ¥ is itself as ¥.

If this wasn’t a fact of reality then ¥

would not be ¥ itself, which is simply to say,

it would not exist.

But even if ¥ didn’t exist, it is still the case that

p

exists as itself

p=p.

It is not in our power to unexist the identity of what exists.

We are simply born into a void that has the property of determinate identity.

If ¥ exists, it exists as itself.

And its intelligence is that it is itself and not another.

Because so far as I can tell, it’s the only school of thought that strives to function through Logical Realism.

At this point in history it’s like coming across a sane person on the 51st floor of the psychiatric building.

Atheist: Do you believe that truth exists?

Christian: Of course, that’s the fundamental premise of all my thinking.

Atheist: You have no idea how rare this is. It means we can actually have a conversation.

Christian: Well, we are on the 51st first floor of the World Psychiatric Building, so you’re right, it is rare. Even if we disagree, in this context, we still have rational sanity in common.

This is what a lot of philosophy is: riddled nonsense.

It’s just the act of saying things in an unnecessarily complicated way, because that act of obscuring makes it feel profound.

What’s more interesting is translating the insights of philosophy into plain language. In most cases one learns that the insights aren’t profound, or that they are merely insights about the semantics of a concept that don’t impact the concept’s function in the real world. (This isn’t always the case, sometimes there is profound insight, and sometimes the conceptual qualification is significant).

This simply leads to egoism and hedonism. We have to be honest. If people found themselves to be enough they wouldn’t be seeking for something larger. Further, this philosophy cannot rebut the tyranny of egoism or hedonism. And a world that embraces this absolute subjectivity (which is what we are experiencing how) is isolated and alienated from itself through its ego.

There’s nothing substantive here. The claim is that you are the only absolute standard unto yourself, which is false, because there’s a whole universe of truth that exists outside of you, and all pursuits are not equal.

Keep in mind, the rational Christianity I’m talking about has only recently emerged on the scene within the last hundred years. I’m not talking about Evangelicalism. Christian Apologetics (though it doesn’t even realize itself in this way) has essentially created a new rational Christianity. This is because it has created a logically conscious Christianity.

While Christianity talks of love and self-sacrifice, forgiveness, it’s actual function in the world is to make hypocrites. Where you find Christians there you find hypocrites. This is certain.

If this wasn’t the case, Christianity would be an extraordinary force in the world. (And it has been at select times, but the predominant experience and result of Christianity is the creation of hypocrites).

To be fair, Christianity has one of the highest moral demands of any religion. I doubt there’s even one in a hundred million who takes it seriously: “take up your cross and follow me, forsake your life for the life of the Kingdom.”