A Plea for Logic

The single most cost effective approach to curing America's ills now follows

"The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny] are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes."

Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526

The modern English translation of this is "The smarter and more well informed the people are the more able they will be to resist tyranny."

Many people imagine themselves to be oppressed today, but when that was written Americans were actually struggling to survive both on a personal level and as a nation. They knew what true oppression was. Despite lacking many of the modern innovations which we have at our fingertips now and despite opposition from the most powerful military force on Earth at that time, our forefathers were able to teach and communicate the message of freedom far better than it is being presented today.

Our forefathers were probably the most intelligent group of individuals assembled in one place at one time in Earth's history. We have reaped the benefits for almost 250 years. It is up to us to honor them by teaching their philosophy* and restoring the first and last bastion of freedom on Earth. I truly believe that when freedom dies in America that the freedom of all humankind will be permanently lost, or at least until an armageddon-like event causes all governments to collapse.

One of the main problems for people today is a lack of trust. Much of that can be directly tied to a lack of logic.

"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."

Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:278

Modern English translation: if we believe that people are not smart enough to make their own choices they should be educated, not subjugated.

Why is it that both parties continually pay lip service to education but do not give the citizens the one thing that would most contribute to the progress and integrity of this nation?

Are learning facts important? Yes. Is knowing basic math functions important? Yes. There is something else that is far more important that we do not teach people at all unless they major in math or philosophy at the collegiate level. That subject is logic.

Wouldn't it be better for everyone if we allowed our emotions to be ruled by logic? We would no longer be able to be misguided into action by emotional appeals or faulty arguments. Why would our government withhold the most important and basic scholarly tool from the electorate?

Because our corrupt leaders want a stupid electorate that is easy to manipulate. This is why our state "leaders" left liquor stores and drug dispensaries open but closed schools, churches and gyms during the China Virus.

My goal is to champion the use of logic in all phases of our life.

National Implementation

1) Create a logic "General" who will be responsible for rolling it out to schools and parents. They will also make it available on the internet and promote the site heavily.

2) Unfortunately it will be necessary to teach parents and teachers the basic rules of logic first. They must have a firm command of logic before they attempt to teach it to kids. I know I received a lot of resentment from people who could not have a logic based argument with me when I was young. Adults and other authority figures do not like to be challenged, so they better learn to apply logic before the children and electorate do.

I believe I could teach basic logic to children as young as three. All teachers would be required to take and pass courses in logic. Any position that could not be proven by fact or valid logical arguments will be considered OPINION and will be taught as such, or even better, not taught at all.

Such teaching would have immediate and tremendous benefits for our society. No longer will people be able to be swayed by emotional pleas that defy all logic. They will be able to accurately predict the outcome of intended policies and actions; a skill that is miserably absent in our leaders and our electorate today.

By example: Anyone capable of using the most basic logic would have been able to deduce that printing an additional several trillion in cash would cause inflation.

A person using basic logic might have been able to realize that taking a "no abortions" stance and using an "all or nothing" abortion strategy would blow up in their face.

Anyone using basic logic would be able to predict the economic consequences of incentivizing tens of millions of unskilled illegal aliens to flood the country. Or the probable outcome if only 1/10 of 1% of those illegals are bad actors. They would know that we have allowed more than 10,000 terrorists into the country and be opposed to it.

We have seen the damage ONE bad actor can do over and over in this country. Only someone incapable of logic would support an open border policy. They would know that, even worse, the 99.9% of the people who AREN'T terrorists are still a huge drag on the United States economy and that their negative impact will continue to grow as they can't find housing, jobs or the future that was promised them by dishonest politicians manipulating the public for their own ends with emotion based arguments. This will lead to even more class and race warfare as well as an even higher crime rate.

A logical person would also have been able to figure out that giving billions of dollars to a terrorist state was a bad idea. They would have known the history of the middle east and the effect appeasement has had on Hamas and Hezbollah and been able to logically determine the likelihood that an Israeli cease fire would deter them from taking future terrorist actions.

Someone applying facts and logic would have known that masks were completely useless against an airborne virus, something so tiny that it could enter any gap in any mask available to the public.

They might have questioned putting an untested vaccine into people ON A MASS SCALE.

They might be able to detect those and many other logical falsehoods presented to them by corrupt leaders in society.

Our society would function better at the personal, local and national level if we could only get everyone to use this most basic tool, and I believe I can.

I can create a game show based on logic and children as young as three can participate.

Whilst I would like to have government programs in general eliminated, I believe that this one is beneficial enough to pay for itself in the long run, unlike most of the policies we have seen implemented.

An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.

Thomas Paine: Common Sense

Paine knew the power of ideas. He knew that walls can keep out armies but not ideas. I posit that ideas are far more powerful than bodies. It is much easier to kill a person than an idea.

The Chinese Communist Party knows this as well. They could never defeat us in open warfare so they are targeting our country by creating hatred and division at every opportunity, which is something our press and government leaders have also been happily doing for their own benefit, especially since Ferguson. They used to try to be sly about it, now they just cram it down our throats.

It was easier to defeat the Nazi soldiers than it was to erase the Nazi ideology, which still exists today. It exists due to emotion, not logic.

We eradicated ISIS, but the ideology lives on in the Taliban, etc.

Jihadists, Nazis and communist/socialist citizens exist because they are unable to use logic or because they were born into a state that was already totalitarian which controlled the flow of information. Americans do not have that excuse presently, but if they don't do something to stop censorship, socialism and terrorism they will soon.

We brought an end to the USSR, but not the beliefs and principles that created it. It lives on in Russia, and unfortunately America as well. Marxism in it's many forms is blatantly illogical and socialism would not exist in an logic-educated society.

Why is the second move by any totalitarian government to go after the people who are able to persuade others with logic? Could it be because anyone capable of using logic and possessing even the barest amount of facts about communism/socialism and human nature would know that it is simply impossible and that every time it has been tried its impossibility has been proven?

People would understand that is impossible to achieve the highest outcomes for humankind by dragging us all equally into poverty.

It is by a thorough knowledge of the whole subject that our fellow-citizens are enabled to judge

correctly of the past and to give a proper direction to the future.

James Monroe: second inaugural address

The ONLY people who benefit from socialism/communism are the leaders who have suckered the gullible public with irrational emotional pleas.

(side note: At what point did schools stop teaching Animal Farm, 1984 and Farenheit 451? Is it a coincidence that our country has gradually slid down the toilet since we stopped teaching the dangers of socialism and totalitarianism?)

Likewise citizens would have seen that Germans were not a master race, that they were pretty much the same as all the other peoples of Europe who were subjected to the same conquerors. On the other hand, Hitler could have conquered ALL of Europe and Asia if he had simply applied some historical facts and logic, so at least that had a positive outcome.

He would have learned from Napoleon that you don't campaign against Russia in winter, or that it was way too large to conquer in a single season. He would have logically deduced that he would have been largely unopposed in the rest of his plans had he used all his forces to take out Britain at the start of the war rather than opening another front with his then ally Russia.

He would have realized that a division of ME-262 jet fighters would have been far more valuable than any amount of Tiger tanks, he would have ruled the skies over England, and in all probability, been able to conquer all of Europe by the end of '43.

Everywhere we look, at any point in time, we can show how logic either did solve the problem, could have solved the problem or could have never solved the problem.

The future of freedom, and of mankind, starts with the application of logic.

*

Our forefathers were largely libertarian and believed in a plurality of worlds, which meant they believed there was life all over the universe. Somehow our country fell away from the belief in plurality of worlds until modern times and we have progressively moved away from the libertarian principles the country was founded upon.

The Bill of Rights was the libertarian playbook. Jefferson scholars know he had a lot to say about our future. Many of his observations about the human state and the overreach of government in the future have been one hundred percent accurate. Some of these statements were chilling at the time and have been proven to be true, which makes them even more chilling to people who still believe in freedom. I strongly recommend reading Jefferson, Paine, Monroe, Franklin, etc., etc. to see how they resolved their differences while keeping in mind the most important theme of all, FREEDOM.

I am aware that many of the forefathers were slave owners. They were born into it and they had no more reason to question it than people have to question why they have cell phones now. They had always had them.

I believe that slavery is abhorrent because I was raised in a country where I was taught that slavery was wrong. I am a "victim" of society just as the people who accepted slavery were. How many of you accept what you see and how many of you try to change it? I see a great mass of people who take freedom for granted and do not do the things that are required to preserve it. They are just as responsible for the current world as the people who accepted slavery were responsible for slavery. Going back to cast blame on people who had a different set of values is pointless at best and counterproductive at worst.

At least our slave-owning forefathers had an excuse, unlike modern leftists who support open borders, which enables increased human trafficking and slavery as well as reducing the wages of average Americans to where they will be slaves to the grind until they die at their jobs. Our forefathers had not been taught that slavery was wrong. Americans have been taught it is wrong for over 150 years. Today's leftists claim to care about slavery that occurred over 150 years ago but, in their typical hypocritical fashion, they do not prevent it from happening right now.

Slavery is always wrong, but societal change usually takes at least a few decades to occur. It is the most shameful period in American history, given our current beliefs, which were given to us by the same forefathers many spew hatred at now. You can't change the past, but you can create a better future. Work on building it instead of tearing down the past.

Scott Lineback 02/13/2024