Logic: The Student’s Edge, the Investigator’s Gold

Twenty-four-hundred years ago, in ancient Greece, something unprecedented happened.

Three men changed the course of the world by introducing the discipline of logic: Socrates, Plato, and finally, Arisotle, who codified the principles of reasoning in The Organon.

Since then, all the way up the present day, mathematicians and philosophers have added to that store of knowledge, through intensive research.

In many countries, logic used to be an integral part of secondary education. It was often presented as a series of fallacies or errors one needed to avoid while thinking through a problem or assessing an argument.

Now, however, like the dinosaur, it has disappeared.

Why has it vanished from secondary-school curricula? Perhaps for the same reason fewer and fewer students study Latin or Greek. Logic is deemed irrelevant. It’s “old-fashioned.”

We used to understand the formal meaning of the word “argument.” It was a presentation in which the speaker or writer aimed to move from a first set of ideas, along a specific, path, to a conclusion. In order to understand and evaluate an argument, one had to be able to spot departures from the rules of logic. More basically, one had to be able to follow the course of reasoning, like a stream, and not lose the way.

Today’s students are generally lacking in that tracking ability. They often don’t even realize an argument is being made. Rather, they read a chapter in a book and pick and choose what they feel are the most interesting bits of information. They drift; they founder.

They see themselves as consumers in a marketplace of ideas and words, and they buy the most attractive pieces.

This strategy breaks down the farther the student moves along the road of education.

As a former teacher, I have seen students who were, in fact, equipped with a background in logic. In every course they took, they possessed an edge that was enviable.

Logic underlies academic subjects. It is the rock on which those subjects are built. Physics, math, biology, history, languages are taught on the basis that a rational approach to the material is essential. And logic is the essence of rationality.

At best, students pick up logic piecemeal, haphazardly. The obvious step is to teach it as its own subject. If this is done, students suddenly are ahead of the game. They have an indispensable tool for thinking lucidly in any situation, in any classroom, using any text, taking any exam, writing any essay.

It is, so to speak, the difference between mapping a large area by haphazardly walking the land, and filming it from the air with high-resolution cameras.

Academic achievement, as the degree of difficulty grows, is all about mastering larger and larger quantities of information. This is the primary challenge. Armed with logic, a student can win this challenge, because he sees and follows the underlying architecture around which all information is organized.

A youngster can take apart an old clock. He can examine the pieces and figure out what each piece does. But then, if he comprehends the structure, the logic of the clock, he can go further. He can understand, more deeply, how all the parts combine to produce the clock that tells time. At that point, his knowledge is unshakable.

This is what the study of logic accomplishes.

Part Two

We not only live in an age of information, we live in an age of disinformation.

When concealment and deception are official goals, an outside person who is examining facts, arguments, premises, and lines of reasoning needs to spot patterns of propaganda, cover stories, intentionally placed distractions, and purposeful omissions of vital data.

In other words, these days we are routinely dealing with spokespeople and experts who are deploying all manner of anti-logic propaganda, in order to persuade audiences.

Never mind high schools; rarely will you find a good course of study on propaganda at any college or university in the world. I make that statement, because colleges are compromised from the get-go. They receive monies for research involving, for example, vaccines, medical drugs, mind control, climate change, advanced weapons systems, human genetics, pesticides, GMO crops. Propaganda and polemic on these subjects are everywhere. A real course on propaganda would expose the very colleges that teach it.

A professor who went full-bore on propaganda would be cut off at the knees by his administration. He would be attacked, defamed, smeared, hounded, and exiled by his bosses and his own colleagues.

Therefore, the study of disinformation falls outside the academic spectrum.

In my third Matrix collection, Power Outside The Matrix, I include a long audio section called Analyzing Information in the Age of Disinformation. It is based on my experience as a reporter over the last 30 years.

It all started with my first book, AIDS INC., Scandal of the Century. I was inundated with a flood of information on all sides. As soon as people became aware I was writing the book, they gave me their “best opinions” on the subject.

Those opinions ranged all the way from “virus produced in a lab” to “cosmic debris landing on Earth”—and everything in between.

At the same time, I was assembling my own discoveries re the illogical arguments government and university researchers were presenting about “the AIDS virus.”

I was standing in a vast muddle, because I had not yet identified the most basic premises inherent in the official scenario about HIV and AIDS. That was the real kicker. I didn’t see the most basic assumptions.

In other words, I was still unconsciously buying certain official ideas about HIV and AIDS. And given that, I couldn’t move beyond a certain point. I couldn’t take the thousands of pieces of data I had and see them from the correct viewpoint. I had part of the puzzle, but not enough.

Then I realized there was no such thing as AIDS.

The very real suffering, pain, and death that was being called AIDS was not one thing, not one syndrome, not one disease, not one condition. There were a number of causes, not one.

That was the first and foremost error (piece of disinformation) in the official scenario.

Now I could finish the book.

I learned a key lesson, which has stood me in good stead ever since. Go to the most basic of all the basic assumptions in the official scenario.

Check THAT assumption. Very carefully.