In this episode, I am going to discuss an aspect of knowledge that many people these days are not aware of, yet it has immense importance for our political freedom, and our ability to argue for freedom. It can also leave us vulnerable to a serious logical fallacy, and affects our ability to truly understand the ideas we claim to hold as true. I am talking about the hierarchical structure of knowledge.

When this natural hierarchy is ignored, people believe in ideas that contradict the logical base of all human thinking and knowledge without seeing the logical fallacy they have fallen for. This can leave minds in a mess of unidentified contradictions. If we are truth seekers concerned for our political freedom, this is not good enough. We must be able to argue effectively for rights — which is the only means to freedom. If you wish to a spokesperson for freedom, and to think efficiently and logically, you need to be familiar with the hierarchical structure of knowledge.

Western culture is in deep trouble. Most people don’t know what’s going on, and those who begin to inquire, have lost the thinking skills to evaluate ideas effectively. In disregard to the hierarchy of knowledge people get suckered into believing great sounding ideas, such as “You can do anything, your thoughts create your reality” but people don’t see that this philosophical primacy of consciousness implicitly contradicts the concept of truth, and destroys any chance of freedom. I covered this and other ideas in Episode 160 of the podcast, Dangerous False Ideas.

It’s also common to find that people cannot justify their conclusions; they cannot fully explain why they hold an idea to be true. Although this sounds like a different problem, it’s rooted in the same failure to appreciate the hierarchical structure of knowledge, and thus the same failure to trace the ideas they hold back to their roots at the perceptual level.

This problem in our thinking is hardly surprising. For many decades now, since Emmanuel Kant in the late 18th century, our leading intellectuals and philosophers have been declaring that reality is an unknowable illusion, and that the mind is impotent. Yes, our leading intellectuals have for a long time, been practicing serious intellectual dishonesty by disseminating these ideas that deliberately violate the hierarchy of knowledge.

Most people do not genuinely understand the big issues of today that affect our political freedom, such as the alleged climate emergency and the alleged pandemic. They simply hold a set of inconsistent and contradictory beliefs. For example, being an advocate of freedom, yet thinking capitalism is evil. To genuinely understand the conceptual ideas you consider to be true, you must be able to connect them back to reality, to make them fully real and give them their meaning. This is what it means to understand an idea. It must be integrated without contradiction into the sum of one’s existing knowledge and connected to the facts of reality, in order to give it meaning. When this has happened, only then can the idea be explained to others.

The Foundations

All knowledge fits into a contextual structure that starts with the observation of reality, observing the world around us, and forming concepts of all the things we perceive. This ultimately includes concepts of existent things as well as attributes, actions and spatial as well as temporal relationships. Only when we have grasped the most basic concepts of individuals concretes, can further concepts be formed by observing the similarities and differences between those already formed.

All of our knowledge follows the same pattern as the formation of individual concepts. It builds upon itself, one step at a time. We learn the foundational things first, and we build on these foundations.  We can’t begin by studying for a degree,