There is a crisis in human thinking at the root of the alleged pandemic and the loss of freedoms across the globe. If vigilance is the price of freedom, then we can only expect our freedom to diminish. Because there is no vigilance being practiced by the populous in our culture. For the vast majority there is not even an awareness of the problem. Unconscious living dominates and freedom is taken for granted.

To make matter worse truth is discounted in modern western culture. This is the result of a philosophical trend that began with the publication of “A critique of pure reason” by Emmanuel Kant in 1776.

Jiddu Krishnamurti once said “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. While I disagree with Krishnamurti on many things I agree that western culture is profoundly off the rails of reality! This is a natural and unsurprising consequence of the philosophy of Kant that has been so enthusiastically promoted since 1776. The implication of which is that knowledge of reality is impossible and that no one can really know anything. This trend must be reversed. We must return to an age of reason.

I have been studying philosophy and thinking techniques for a few years now and it is clear to me that the more I learn, the more I see that what I have come to regard as basic thinking skills (such as logical deduction and inference) are beyond the cognitive ability of large numbers of people. This will have far reaching, disturbing, and profoundly negative consequences. Below, I outline a few examples of where I see repeated failures in thinking.

1 – You can’t prove a negative and it is irrational to attempt to do so

While discussing the existence or not a something recently with a friend I was told that the… “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. Let’s unpack this little mind bomb.

It is true that if you have no evidence of the existence of a thing, that you do not actually have any proof that it doesn’t exist. But what is going on here is an implicit attempt to prove a negative. While it is true that if you have no evidence you do not have evidence of absence, the point is that evidence of absence is impossible!

What does it mean to prove a negative? it means the attempt to ‘prove’ that something does not exist. For example, we have all heard some one say ” You can’t prove that God doesn’t exist therefore he probably does. Or the same for Proving that Unicorns don’t exist, or that Father Christmas doesn’t exist!

But it must be remembered that evidence, proof, reason, logic, only pertain to things that exist. The non-existent is nothing, the void, the zero. A non-existent thing cannot leave its mark on reality – anywhere. There can be no evidence offered in support of any claim regarding a non-existent thing.

Don’t be confused by the idea of proving you weren’t at the scene of the crime because you have an alibi. This is offering positive evidence to disprove a false claim by offering positive evidence of something. Similarly, I can offer you proof that my car isn’t red by showing you that it’s blue. This is disproving a false claim with positive evidence. The car exists and it has a colour. This is very different from attempting to prove that I don’t have a car, which would be attempting to prove a negative. What evidence could possibly be produced in support of a claim of non-existence?

The concept of proof rests the law of identity. A is A. And the concept of proof only pertains to that which exists.