Argument by analogy is always dubious at best. No analogy is ever a perfect comparison, and your opponent may direct his response not to your thesis but to your analogy. He will expose the inevitable inadequacy of the analogy and then presume that in doing so he has demolished your thesis. The use of an analogy is effective only when you are attempting to clarify your thesis in the mind of someone who is trying to understand it. When your adversary is NOT trying to understand your position, but only to reject it, then the introduction of an analogy will be counterproductive.

If you want to communicate with dummies you will have to make allowances for the dummies. And you will usually find that the allowances preclude effective communication.

Anyway, I figure our ideas are so much better than theirs that if we get only 1/10 the exposure we'll win.

Criticism

In dealing with criticism you should keep clearly in mind the distinction between a denial and a refutation. A denial is merely a declaration of rejection. A refutation, on the other hand, is a logical proof that demonstrates an error.

The Scientific Method

The scientific method is an epistemological technique used to form scientific concepts. It is comprised of several elements:

1. Recognition of facts that appear to be related, but whose relationship is unknown.
2. Observation and experimentation to collect data about those facts.
3. Analysis of the data.
4. Formulation of an hypothesis that attempts to explain the relationship.
5. Testing of the hypothesis against all known evidence.
6. Continual testing as new evidence is obtained.

Propositions derived by inference from scientific data, and intended to describe a natural phenomenon:

• Assumption - something accepted without proof. It is incorrect to speak of an assumption as either true or false, since there is no way of proving it to be either. (If there were, it would no longer be an assumption.) It is better to consider assumptions as either useful or useless, depending on whether or not deductions made from them lead to a firmer grasp of reality.
• Conjecture - a speculative idea which, although backed by little or no evidence, can serve as a guide for further investigation.
• Hypothesis - a tentative explanation backed by too little evidence to support a firm chain of cause-and-effect. One formulates a hypothesis being guided by one's knowledge of fact. The hypothesis should explain the greatest number of, and/or the most fundamental, aspects of the phenomenon. Using the hypothesis, one next deduces how entities under certain conditions should act. Then, if one observes such action and, within the context of one's knowledge can account for it only by the hypothesis which predicted it, it follows that the hypothesis has been confirmed. But because we are not omniscient, that same context of knowledge might give rise to other hypotheses. This is why we need the process of experimental confirmation.
• Theory - a working model supported by a preponderance of the evidence.
• Law - a description that has been found to be always invariable under the same conditions.

Scientific knowledge (to be precise, the progress of scientific knowledge) is cumulative in nature. You start with a foundation and then you build upon that foundation. That's why science has progressed to such a tremendous extent during the past 300 years. If physicists spent all their time arguing about the validity of the First Law of Thermodynamics, they would never make any progress at all. And if mathematicians spent all their time arguing about whether or not 2+2=4 there would never be any progress in mathematics.

But you must always remember that one of the really important skills of a scientist is in knowing what things to argue about. Doubting must be VERY carefully selective!! Its improper application has sometimes been disastrous for the progress of science. On the one hand there is the impulse to regard almost NOTHING as being open to question. On the other hand is the impulse to regard EVERYTHING as being open to question. On the one hand are the "know it alls" and on the other hand are the "know nothings." Obviously neither position is true. Humans are neither omniscient nor totally ignorant.

Doubting is at least as important to the advance of science as is believing. Moreover, doubting is a serious business that requires extensive training to be handled properly. People without training in a particular field do not know what to doubt and what not to doubt; or, to put it conversely, what to believe and what not to believe. Undemocratic as it may seem, one man's opinion is NOT necessarily as good as the next man's.

A scientist MUST doubt. It would take much longer for valid theories to become established if overcredulity on the part of scientists led them to explore all the blind alleys indicated by newly-presented theories. Scientific manpower is too limited to investigate every idea that occurs to everybody. The advance of science depends on scientists in general being kept firmly oriented to the direction of maximum possible return.

Drawing the line between observation and interpretation is difficult. It's easy to lose track of your assumptions and fail to notice which "keystones" in the edifice of your theory are merely soft clay. The triumph of the scientific method is that over time, through collective effort, mistakes can be overturned. Science accepts error as something to be corrected over time.

In contrast to science, belief systems based on magic and religion do not admit the possibility of being wrong, or of anything being unexplained. Any question can be answered (however unsatisfying the answer may be to someone trained in scientific thinking) from within the totally closed system: Why did Grandma get run over by the cement truck? It was God's will. Or it was bad karma. Or her dog was having a triple critical biorhythm day. The essential constraint that separates science from the mystical is experimentation - a phenomenon notably absent from magic and religion.

Most people act as if the scientific method were disconnected from their daily lives, and yet a wider awareness of that method of thinking would help greatly in framing current social debates. Other fields of study should construct the rigorous ladders of inference that have made scientific fields so successful. But such intellectual behavior would be suicidal to many fields.

The Military Staff Study

1. Statement of the problem: One problem only, isolated and precisely stated; not merely a description of a "bad" situation.
2. Assumptions: Make only those assumptions which are necessary and justified. One assumption must not conflict with another; if so, prepare a different study for each.
3. Facts bearing on the problem: A fact is a statement of conditions known to be true. Don't mix fact and opinion.
4. Discussion: Produce a logical and orderly critical analysis of the problem through the integration of the facts and the assumptions. If the facts and the assumptions are shown to conflict, then you must change the assumptions.
5. Conclusions: Must not be merely a continuation of the discussion. They must point directly to the need for certain actions.
6. Recommendations: The actions which, if taken, will solve the problem. They must not pose alternative courses of action, and must be susceptible to simple approval or disapproval.

Notes on the Significance of Intellectual Context

In such a discussion, most people quickly reach a point where they are not able to respond even when they have the discussion in front of them in writing. This is because they have reached the boundary of their intellectual frame of reference and they cannot cope with the questions without the mental flexibility (or the willingness) required to expand that frame of reference so as to encompass an area which contains the answers. They are prisoners of an inadequate reality assessment, and it is usually a waste of your time to engage them in discussion, simply because they will find your presentation to be quite literally incomprehensible.

This helps explain why the average journalist cannot get a sentence straight if it is phrased more subtly than his own mind can make phrases. It explains also much of the unresolvable controversy in the field of social science. The assumptions shared by most contemporary social scientists restrict their analyses to relatively minor consequential details. Questions dealing with fundamental principles are outside their pale. Their analysis takes place within an institutional context that is itself taken for granted: the framework of government control. This profoundly affects how their questions are framed, and thus studied and answered. This thinking procedure renders social scientists incapable of questioning much that is fundamental to their fields, and creates an intellectual barrier which is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the furtherance of libertarianism.

This phenomenon has an obverse side also: I have sometimes been so befuddled by a question or proposition that I had to stop for a while and figure out why it seemed so "out of whack." The answer lies in the fact that its underlying premises are so disparate from mine that it is not at all amenable to a direct response. I can't answer the question, because it is overflowing with assumptions that I reject. There are certain questions that must be themselves questioned - challenged at their root - because they consist of attempts to smuggle false premises into the mind of of the listener. "Who created the universe?" is one example. "Have you stopped beating your wife?" is another.

Ayn Rand had a keen eye for the shared premise underlying false alternatives. For example: Beneath modern philosophy's false alternatives of rationalism and empiricism, she recognized their shared assumption that abstract knowledge of reality cannot be validly derived from perceptual experience. Her ability to identify fundamentals is what gives Objectivism much of its intellectual power.

Faulty Thought Processes

When I was about 15 years old I subscribed to the Readers Digest. A year or so later I let my subscription lapse when I came to realize that I was reading essentially the same sort of stuff over and over again. Five or ten years later I picked up a another copy and found it to contain just what I had read when I had been a subscriber. Although I had been growing and maturing intellectually, developing more powerful cognitive processes which enabled me to better deal with the problems I faced, the magazine had remained on the same intellectual level - dealing perpetually in the same way with the same problems.

An attribute of a small-minded person is that he does not progress intellectually. This applies equally well to magazines and other social institutions. If they are not progressing, once you have had a year's worth of exposure to them, that's all the useful stuff you're ever likely to get. Any further exposure will be essentially repetitious. Like the Readers Digest. Or like the Libertarian Party, which today is still struggling to cope with the same problems it faced at the time of its inception in 1972. As of March 1995, there were 84 people registered to vote as Libertarian in Wyoming. That's all the progress the LP had made in 23 years, and yet it still considers itself to be presenting a viable political alternative.

The hallmark of a fool is not that he makes mistakes, but that he is making the SAME mistakes today that he was making ten years ago.

We all know that correlation does not imply causation, but is this true just because we haven't got powerful enough search techniques for sifting through large statistical databases? No. Mere correlation can never be proof, because if you don't know what the underlying cause is you can't know that it will continue to operate. However, this does not mean that statistical evidence should be ignored. Statistical evidence IS evidence, and at very least, it can be a basis for hypothesis.

In any argument between two people who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins. The inconsistent person will present his ideas in a weak and contradictory form - and thus will create in the minds of the audience an impression of incompetence, evasion, or cowardice, while his adversary will appear to possess greater honesty and courage. (See "Anatomy of Compromise" in CAPITALISM THE UNKNOWN IDEAL.)

Argument is futile when it is directed not toward general principles but merely toward the specific phenomena which are consequences of those principles. Perhaps the best examples of this are debates about legalizing drugs. They usually devolve quickly from a brief and superficial consideration of the principles underlying the anti-drug laws into a dispute over the specific means by which the drugs would be distributed if they were to be legalized. Thus the principles themselves are never fully examined, and the subjects raised are merely attempts to dilute the agenda of the discussion.

A disagreement that does not challenge fundamentals serves only to reinforce them. If, for the question: "Do you want slavery?" your opponents manage to substitute the question: "What kind of slavery do you want?" then they can afford to let you argue indefinitely; they have already won their point.

Consider a Determinist (or a Solipsist) versus an advocate of Free Will. The Determinist, to the extent that he adheres to his principle, will be disinclined to engage in any great mental activity. His motivation to do so is undermined by his belief that the result of such activity is not subject to his volition. The free will advocate, however, suffers under no such handicap and will not thereby be deterred from making the fullest application of his intellectual faculties of which he is capable.

People who believe that definitions are arbitrary, or are to be accepted or rejected according to their authoritarian backing, are people for whom there is no hope of meaningful intellectual interaction. They are in the same category as the Determinists - but whereas the Determinists believe that cognition is absolutely fixed and unalterable, these dummies believe the obverse: that cognition cannot be firmly tied to an objective reality.

Reason is not automatic. If men were the automatons that behaviorists claim they are, the behaviorist psychologists could not have invented the amazing nonsense called "behaviorist psychology." So they are wrong from the start.

To argue against such persons as Determinists, Solipsists, Behaviorists, those who claim human beings are not rational, or who claim there is no way to choose between good/bad or right/wrong, is to apply to them a premise they spend all of their effort disproving: that reason is involved in their theories. There is little point in replacing mindless bigotry or dogma with mindless acceptance, so you should consider those people only long enough to expose the specific nature of their irrationality. Those who deny reason cannot be conquered by it. Leave them alone, for they are in a mysterious mental state which is too lunatic for serious consideration. They have made a conscious choice to remain ignorant. You should make a conscious choice not to waste your time on them. Just because they choose to close their eyes doesn't mean the sun has been turned off, it only means that they are stumbling blindly in the darkness.

"There are certain demands of the ideal, certain claims that a man cannot put aside without hurt to his soul." ....Ibsen

There are moral issues that are beyond debate and discussion. There is a point beyond which a man cannot go and still maintain his dignity and self- respect. There are things a man cannot do without risking damage to his own soul.

You can do violence to your soul by arguing with someone who asserts:

I have learned never to argue with such people. Such debate imbues a false sense of significance. If you debate with him, he acquires a fraudulent sense of importance in his mind, but his ideas acquire a REAL importance in YOUR mind.

Thus do the principles one chooses have a considerable influence on the efficiency of one's thought processes.

Piagetian Operational Stages

Piagetians contend that nearly 50% of the adult population never adequately learn how to use the capacity for formal operational thought. Half the population is often bound to the reality of the moment, impotent to imagine how things might be under different circumstances. Just imagine yourself at a cocktail party and ask the person you've been randomly thrown up against, "What if there were no local zoning laws?" and you'll likely get a blank stare. Press him with, "What if there were no minimum-wage laws?" and you'll be getting rather close to his threshold of irritability. The ways of the economic world are pretty uncomplicated for this guy. When he thinks gasoline prices are too high, he wants someone to MAKE them lower. When he thinks his salary is too low, he wants someone to MAKE it higher. He has no notion of conceptual analysis, and is a walking example of what survives when a mind becomes a victim of infant mortality.

Someone who does not think in principles tends to rely by default on social customs, and thus does not function independently in practice. The collectivist ideologies have a concrete model they can use to exemplify their view of society: the model of the family. Liberals stress the nurturing role of the family - its unconditional support for every member. Conservatives stress the authority of the parents in teaching virtue and enforcing standards of behavior. These aspects of the family are understood by preconceptual children, and can be grasped in a primitive form by non- conceptual adults. But there is no comparable form in which it is possible to grasp the concept of individualism, or any other of the principles of a free society, because those concepts presuppose the need of adults to function independently. To those who do not think conceptually, only what is immediately seen is real. At the level of principles, no ideology can be understood, much less consistently advocated or practiced, by those who function non-conceptually. This is why anti-ideological pragmatism is so popular.

The Use Of Emotions As Tools Of Cognition

There is no alternative to reason as a means of knowledge and no supplement to it. If you attempt to give emotions such a role, then you are not engaging in a process of cognition at all. On the contrary, you are subverting the integrity of your mental processes and invalidating them - by introducing as their guide non-objective elements. An unanalyzed emotion, i.e., one whose intellectual roots you have not identified and validated by a process of reason, is merely a subjective event of your consciousness. It may be compared to a floating abstraction - a higher-level proposition which you have not reduced to perceptual data. In other words, it is a mental state disconnected from reality, a state whose relation to fact you do not know.

If you seek to think rationally, you must grasp, then deliberately implement, the distinction between reason and emotion. You must learn the difference between thought and feeling - between logic and desire - between percepts and concepts on the one hand, and hopes, wishes, hatreds, loves, fears on the other. By a continuous process of volitional decision and self- monitoring, you must ensure that in all your cognitive activities, feeling is set to the side and is not allowed to direct the course of the inquiry. A rational inquiry is one directed not by emotion, but by thought - one which accepts as evidence not any species of passion, but only provable, objective fact.

The above is not an "anti-emotion" viewpoint. Emotions play an essential role in human life, and in this capacity they must be felt, nourished, respected. Without them man could not achieve happiness or even survival: he would experience no desire, no love, no fear, no motivation, no response to values. The epistemological point, however, remains true: the role of emotions, though crucial, is not the discovery of reality. I cast no aspersion on eating or breathing if I deny that they are means of cognition. The same applies to feelings.

Objectivism is not against emotions, but emotionalism. Our concern is not to uphold stoicism or to abet repression, but to identify a division of mental labor. There is nothing wrong with emotion that accompanies or follows from an act of thought; this is the natural and proper human pattern. But there is everything wrong with emotion that seeks to replace thought by usurping its function.

(The following material is extracted from Lecture #6 of Barbara Branden's PRINCIPLES OF EFFICIENT THINKING.)

Instead of storing conceptual integrations and evaluations in their subconscious, these people store specific memories of concrete events along with the emotional responses associated with those events. Then any new phenomenon which is perceived to be similar to (i.e., has an accidental resemblance to) the aggregate of stored memories will evoke the associated emotional response, and thus will be formed a judgment of the new phenomenon on the basis of associational connections rather than conceptual integrations. Notice that this process is based on irreducible concretes, and that no classification according to fundamental distinguishing characteristics is involved. That aspect of any phenomenon having the most striking emotional impact is considered to be its defining characteristic.

Ideas are also stored as concretes: as memories of something heard, read, or thought. These concretes are not integrated with other concretes, but are stored as slogans. Conclusions about any subject consist of the memories of events, plus the corresponding emotions, plus the remembered slogans. People who function this way are typically unable to define their terms; for them, the meaning of a word is a jumble of memorized examples, emotional associations and floating images.

Their primary focus is on the emotional connotations of phenomena. If a presentation does not arouse strong emotional response in them, it will have very little effect on them at all. Ideas themselves will have no motivating influence on them. They will respond not to the cognitive content of an idea but to the emotional content of its presentation (it is this response that gives demagogues so much of their following). They do not judge the truth by its correspondence to reality - they judge reality by its correspondence to their feelings.

They are psychologically set to grant primacy to their emotions, which set and direct their perceptions. When necessary, their perceptions are distorted to fit the emotion, or simply ignored. Only what fits the emotions is permitted entry into consciousness. Thus they become intellectually self- blinded.

They make no distinction between emotions and thoughts - they "feel" their thoughts simply because the thoughts are non-conceptualized. What they do not do is INITIATE a process of conceptualization. Theirs is a passive, not an active, consciousness. The end result is the explicit, open reliance on emotions and the rejection of conceptualization, which, in their minds, has become a meaningless process.

This is the reason why some men jump to conclusions irrationally. They do not identify principles, but just act on an emotional response. This also explains much context-dropping. Without a principled basis of firmly-held concepts, it is impossible for them to hold an ideational context and relate specific concretes to that context.

Introspection

(These ideas on introspection were originated by Edith Packer.)

All emotions are derived from some type of cognition; they have no independent existence apart from the thoughts, conscious or subconscious, which underlie them. Emotions are not in conflict with, but are a product of, the evaluations which underlie them. Emotions are psychosomatic responses to a perceived object, event, or situation, identified and appraised in accordance with the perceiver's knowledge and value-judgments. As these statements imply, every emotion presupposes perception, identification, and judgment.

The ideas you hold in your conscious mind are fed into your subconscious mind and act as instructions for its functioning. The emotions that result from this functioning can reveal its nature to you. Armed with this knowledge, you can "reprogram" your subconscious by changing the evaluations made by your conscious mind. Thus the ability of a person to identify and understand his emotions is crucial to his happiness. Emotions are an essential means by which we experience ourselves and respond to our evaluations of the world around us. Emotions are the single most important signal indicating the nature of our subconsciously-held value-judgments. Understanding your emotions enables you to get in touch with what is uniquely you: your individuality.

Life can be experienced to the fullest only if you know yourself, and you cannot know and understand yourself without a definite commitment to a conscious policy of introspection. Introspection is a cognitive, intellectual process directed inward, focusing on and identifying the internal processes of your consciousness. Just as extrospection is a focus on the various aspects of the exteral world, so introspection consists of an awareness of and focus on your intellectual and emotional life. The requirements of mental health include both: knowledge of both external and internal reality.

It is important to be aware of the difference between actual introspection and what is often mistakenly believed to be introspection, namely the continuous defensive observation of one's behavior and feelings (usually of anxiety) in anticipation of real or imagined disapproval. Such a neurotically self-conscious focus amounts to asking "How am I doing?" during all of one's interactions with other people. This cannot be considered introspection, because introspection seeks answers to the questions of "What am I doing?" and "Why am I doing it?" but this process seeks an answer to the question "What do other people think of what I'm doing?"

The Six Steps of Introspection

1. Identify the type of emotion or emotions which you are experiencing.
2. Identify the generalized (universal) evaluation underlying each of those emotions.
3. Identify your personal evaluation - the particular form in which you hold the universal evaluation.
4. Determine the correctness of the underlying evaluations you have made, both universal and personal. Discover whether your evaluations are true or false in light of the facts.
5. If the evaluations underlying your emotions are incorrect, identify the problems which led you to make the incorrect evaluations.
6. Consciously reinforce correct evaluations in order to correct the inappropriate thinking methods that arise from your psychological problems.

Step 1

Identify the type of emotion or emotions which you are experiencing. Good questions to ask in order to figure out what type of emotions you are feeling are: Am I feeling positive or negative emotions or a combination of both? Do my emotions concern other people or just myself? It may also be helpful to make a list of the different emotions that you are experiencing and what you think each is a reaction to. Even people who are completely inexperienced at introspection will be able to name some emotions if they try. Do not worry at this point that you do not know all the emotions you may be experiencing. You will probably discover others as you proceed.

Step 2

Identify the general (universal) evaluation underlying each of your emotions.

It is important to know that each emotion has at its base an abstract evaluation which is the same for everyone who experiences that emotion. As a result, emotions can be classified on the basis of the kinds of abstact evaluations that underlie them. Once a person makes a particular kind of evaluation, the die is cast. From that particular type of evaluation, only one general type of emotion can follow, and the type of emotion will never vary from person to person or from time to time, nor does it matter whether the person undergoing this emotion-generating process is aware of it or not, or whether the evaluation that gives rise to the emotion is based on facts or is completely incorrect. The essential relationsbip between the evaluation and the emotion which follows remains.

For example: if a person consciously or subconsciously concludes that something in reality poses a threat to his well-being, he will automatically feel fear. Thus, the man who sees a speeding car bearing down on him will feel fear. And so will the man who jumps at the sound of a truck backfiring on a city street, if he thinks it is the sound of a gun which is being fired near him. The emotion will be of the same type: fear. Only the concretes on the basis of which the evaluations were made will differ. Thus, the value- judgment underlying fear will always be something to the effect: "I am in danger. Something is threatening my physical or psychological safety."

Similarly, if a person concludes, "Some injustice was done to me," he will automatically feel anger.

It is important to understand clearly that once the appropriate evaluation is drawn, anger will inevitably follow. Or, conversely, if a person is feeling anger, he has to realize that at some time in the past he came to the evaluation, "Some injustice has been done to me."

If you have difficulty identifying the evaluations underlying your emotions, due to repression or lack of experience in introspection, I recommend that you ask yourself such questions as: "Do I think some injustice was done to me?" "Do I evaluate myself as unworthy?" "Do I think I can never achieve this or that particular value?" If the answer is "Yes" to all three, then you will know that you must be feeling anger, self-doubt, and depression.

Step 3

Identify your personal evaluation - the particular form in which you hold the universal evaluation.

A good way to distinguish steps two and three is to remember that the universal evaluation is the abstract evaluation; the personal evaluation is the concrete form it takes in the case of any particular individual.

For example: individuals differ in what they consider unjust. Suppose that two people both experience the universal evaluation that some injustice was done to them. As a result, they both feel angry. But obviously there are many ways, based on many different concrete experiences, of reaching the identical universal evaluation and therefore the identical emotion - in this example, anger. Ms Jones' personal evaluation may be: "My next-door neighbor, whom I liked and respected, drove her lawnmower through my flower garden." But Mr. Smith's personal evaluation may be: "My best buddy asked my girl friend out for a date and is stealing her away from me." Thus, the personal evaluation will differ from individual to individual, but the generalized perception of an injustice - and the subsequent emotion of anger - is the same for all.

A person may have identified the type of emotion he is feeling, and may even be familiar with the corresponding universal evaluation which underlies it, but this does not imply that he knows what concrete event triggered it.

What you need to do in step three is to identify the specific experiences and thoughts that led you, in your individual case, to make the universal evaluations. Go over the specific events of your recent past and the types of things you have been thinking about. Even better: write down all the details in the form of a monologue. Your personal language may lead you to discover emotions that you had been unaware of. For example, your monologue may include words expressing hopelessness about your ability to cope with the world. If you identify this, you may be able to realize that you are also feeling depressed. If you have written down all the details, such an identification will be MUCH easier.

Suppose Mr. Smith wakes up in the morning and feels anger and a nagging feeling which he identifies as self-doubt. He is aware that he is concluding that someone did him an injustice and that his self-worth is threatened in some way. But he has no idea what particular concrete triggered these feelings or why he feels the way he does.

Suppose he discovers that the only unusual event he recalls was that his boss praised his co-worker, Mr. Lamb, enthusiastically. He can then ask himself: "Did I think this was an injustice to me, and did this cause me self-doubt?" As a result, he may come up with the following personal thoughts: "Yes, that praise of Mr. Lamb was outrageous. I happen to know that Mr. Lamb wastes hours during work talking about baseball, while I work my head off. No wonder I feel anger and self-doubt. If this can happen, there must be something wrong with my boss and with the world, or with me for not knowing how to deal with it. I can't find justice and will never find it." As you can see, Mr. Smith has discovered not only what concretes triggered his emotions, but also how he personally interpreted those concretes, and how his personal evaluations led to his feelings of anger and self-doubt.

The identification of personal evaluations may be of great help to repressed people who do not experience varied and deep emotions. Technically, emotions as such cannot be repressed. What is repressed are the evaluations that produce the emotions. Remember, an emotion is a consequence and cannot come into existence without the underlying cause: your evaluations. A represser evaluates, but his subconscious does not allow his evaluations to come into conscious awareness, The result is that he does not know what certain facts mean to him. He may feel some general discomfort, or a vague unpleasantness, but in general he will not feel strongly about things and will not be able to identify the type of emotion he is feeling.

A represser should go over carefully his written account of his recent past. Then, if he finds anything out of the ordinary, he should ask himself: "What do I really think about this fact? What do I think an unrepressed person would feel under the circumstances?" If he does this, he may be surprised to discover that he in fact leads an active inner life of appraising concretes which he cannot allow himself to acknowledge, given his fear of experiencing emotions.

In such a case, a good technique to use is to pretend that each emotion has a voice, a voice that expresses the thoughts which underlie it.

I hope you can see the importance of discovering your personal evaluations. It is step three which shows most directly your individual and personal way of making judgments based on your values and your general psychology. Therefore, it is crucial to spend sufficient time on this step to squeeze out every possible concrete detail of the thoughts underlying your emotions. Knowing your detailed personal evaluations is a prerequisite to succeeding with step four: judging the correctness of your evaluations. There is usually much less subconscious resistance to identifying personal evaluations than there is to admitting their possible incorrectness. Thus, the more thorough you are in step three, the less chance you will have to sabotage step four. And most people do try to sabotage step four, whether they do so consciously or subconsciously.

I must stress the need to work hard at step three, because even individuals who often introspect will have a tendency to rush through it. Most people do not believe that their personal evaluations have to be spelled out in detail. In addition, many individuals often sabotage the introspective process by immediately damning themselves for emotions they do not approve of. Evaluating yourself on the basis of what you FEEL is unwarranted, and it does not help you to change the unwanted emotions. Such disapproval of your emotions serves only to undercut your further progress in introspection.

Step 4

Determine the correctness of the underlying evaluations you have made, both universal and personal. Discover whether your evaluations are true or false in light of the facts.

Up to this point, the process has been limited to understanding emotions in terms of the evaluations that underlie them. We did not question whether any of these evaluations were correct or not. But it is obvious that a person can easily make a mistake or misinterpret facts. Usually he can point to some objective facts supporting his evaluations, but often other important facts will have been left out of consideration, or filtered and distorted due to mistaken basic premises. Other neurotic problems can be operating as well. For example, most people are compartmentalized to some extent. The most brilliant person, who in his work applies a rigorous policy of testing his objectivity in evaluating the facts, may apply a totally different method of evaluating the facts of his personal life. In testing the correctness of your evaluations, it is important to be aware that you may feel resistance toward making an objective assessment of the facts. Such resistance is not a matter of deliberate evasion, but can result from subconscious feelings of hurt and anger that may cause you difficulty in seeing the facts objectively.

To check whether your evaluations are true or false, ask yourself such questions as: Do the facts I have considered support my evaluation? Did I leave out facts which would be germane to my evaluation? Am I aware of facts which, if considered, would lead me to draw different evaluations? Am I resisting acknowledging any facts which would lead me to draw evaluations opposite to those I have drawn? Are the connections which led me to arrive at my evaluations logical?

Of course, the more you know about your personal method of thinking, the more successful you will be in discovering the particular type of question you need to ask yourself. It is very important that the questions be tailor- made to fit your specific psychology.

In addition to formulating questions tailor-made to your particular psycho-epistemology, you should also be inventive in finding solutions to bad thinking habits you become aware of.

You can prepare for step four of introspection by constructing a table of concretes you view as threats, with each threat rated on a scale from one to ten in terms of its seriousness. Then, each time you wish to test the truth of your personal evaluations of these potential threats, you could ask yourself: Am I rating this concrete as a ten, when it is in fact only a two, which I really do know how to handle?

Often, when the problem is not pervasive, relief from negative emotions can be achieved right at this step. If you can conclude that there is in fact no threat, your fear and sense of being out of control may subside immediately.

Step 5

If the evaluations underlying your emotions are incorrect, identify the problems which led you to make the incorrect evaluations. (Of course, if you discover that the underlying evaluations are correct, after you have checked all the relevant facts, you would stop with step four.)

Step five can be the most difficult one of all. And success in carrying it out will depend on many factors. More than anything else, it will depend on the extent of your knowledge of your psychological processes. The more familiar you are with your core evaluations, and the type of defense mechanisms you use to counteract your self-doubt, the easier it will be for you to discover why you have made inappropriate evaluations. (Core evaluations are basic evaluations that are held subconsciously. They are fundamental judgments about three areas of everyone's life: self, reality, and other prople.)

Suppose a person with genuine self-esteem finds himself feeling self- doubt. He should then ask: "What did I do that I do not think is worthy of me?" And, having discovered the action he disapproves of, and corrected his evaluation, he will be able to endure the anxiety until it passes. He will not permit defense mechanisms to spring into action. Such a person will also be able to avoid any repetition of the action he judged to be unworthy.

In contrast, a self-doubtful person who discovers an inappropriate action would be inclined to conclude something to the effect: "Of course, I did this unworthy thing. It is par for the course with me, given the kind of person I am." Or, even more likely, such a person will automatically initiate some defense mechanism, in order to avoid the self-doubt, thereby inadvertently perpetuating it.

If you know very little about your psychology, then at this point you may have some real difficulty. You may need to deeply examine your whole psychology and life-patterns because you need to understand better how you function and why. You may discover that you are not actually reacting to your present problem, but to some painful event in your distant past. It may be that your first love, after a long, close relationship, inexplicably left you for another man. You may discover that as a result of this painful experience you made a number of subconscious conclusions, such as: "I'm not desirable as a man. It's not safe to be in a close romantic relationship, because it causes me pain and self doubt. I can avoid such suffering by being in romantic relationships in which I unilaterally set the terms." Thus you compensate for your masculine self-doubt by continually trying to prove to yourself that women find you attractive. Any rejection makes you re- experience the loss that devastated you in the past.

Another example: let us imagine that Mr. Smith is aware of the fact that in his childhood he concluded that his parents always favored his brother, and that on this basis one of the core evaluations he developed is that whenever people have a choice between him and someone else, they will automatically favor the other individual. Knowing this, Mr. Smith could say to himself: "This situation probably reminds me of the past painful incidents with my brother, where I felt pain, anger, and self-doubt. My evaluations in the present situation are based on my subconsciously held core evaluation that I automatized a long time ago. I can see how that core evaluation influences my present interpretation of facts whenever the situation appears to be similar to the old, painful one with my brother."

How much you can accomplish at this point will depend also on how important the issue is to you, and how much time you have available. Obviously, you cannot spend the all the time needed to unravel every insignificant or minute emotion and its causes. Sometimes, too, the reason why you made the error in evaluation will be clear to you before you ever get to this step. For example, you find out later that the friend who kept you waiting did so because he got into an accident and had no way of notifying you. In such a case, you would know that you were justified in your evaluation, but that you were unaware of all the facts.

Even if you are not successful at step five in the beginning, by persisting at introspection you will gather a lot of factual data which will at least show you how your psychology operates. And, hopefully, it will lead you to some explanation of why it operates in that manner. If, during the course of your life, you have kept a written journal of significant things that have happened to you, and your responses to those things, you will find these notes enormously helpful in the process of introspection.

Step 6

Consciously reinforce correct evaluations in order to correct the inappropriate thinking methods that arise from your psychological problems.

I have emphasized that the kind of emotions you experience are the result of the type of universal evaluations you have made. From this, it follows that if you change these evaluations, the emotions will change. Thus, if you become convinced while introspecting that no injustice has been done to you, your feelings of anger will disappear. Your subconscious will automatically arrange this change for you.

This can happen because your subconscious operates on the basis of a program established by your conscious mind. Your subconscious does NOT have the capacity to re-program itself. It is only the conscious mind that is able to check the appropriateness of the program, and it is only the conscious mind that can do the re-programming.

Step six is designed to do just that. You should say to yourself at this point: "I programmed my subconscious inappropriately in this area. It operates inappropriately and causes me great suffering. I am hereby adopting a different policy, which will take the place of the incorrect one." You can say: "I have to accept the responsibility of consciously judging each separate situation based on the facts."

If you persist in doing this, you can eventually re-program any aspect of your subconscious.

Probably many of you have had this experience: you realize that your evaluations of the facts are mistaken, yet even after having understood the correct evaluation, the old evaluations may subsequently resurface and you find yourself again in the grip of the resulting inappropriate emotions. Don't despair. Simply go over all the facts again; reinforce the correct evaluations by re-asserting your knowledge of the actual facts. If you do that, your subconscious mind will eventually get the message and the unwanted emotions will then disappear permanently.

It is important to remember that reprogramming your subconscious mind is rarely, if ever, an instantaneous process. It takes time, maybe lots of time, so be patient with yourself.

I might add that repressed people, as a rule, have to reinforce their commitment to experiencing emotions. They have to convince their subconscious that there is no need to fear emotions, and give their subconscious an order to allow its appraisals of concretes to enter conscious awareness.

Closing comments

Do not judge yourself on the basis of the emotions you feel. It is your evaluations, which underlie the emotions, that you should be judging. If you are damning YOURSELF for the emotions you feel, you will change nothing.

Further, be careful not to judge yourself at times when you are overwhelmed by negative emotions. If you do, you are in the position of being in the hands of a drunken juror deciding a life and death issue concerning your life. The fact that you may FEEL you are no good, does not mean you are no good in fact. Your behavior, not your emotions, is the deciding evidence. Thus, make sure that your standards for judging your worth are the standards of a rational and cold sober juror.

Introspection is very difficult for most people. The process has to be learned. Unfortunately, we were never taught how to do it when we were young, and now, as adults, we have to teach ourselves. But introspection is difficult only in the beginning. The more you do it, the easier and less time-consuming it becomes. If you persist you will get the hang of it. If you do, it will pay you wonderful dividends. You will get acquainted intimately with the person that you are. You will discover your good qualities and will be able to see which qualities you have to change. It will give you a greater sense of control over your life, because knowing your emotions will help prevent you from automatically acting on them. A conscious, consistent commitment to introspection will give you freedom from self-doubt, and you will become a happier person.

Orwell - Newspeak - Brainwashing - Prolefeed

This is the most prophetic book of the 20th century. Orwell's concepts of Newspeak and Prolefeed are indispensable to an understanding of the development of American culture during the latter half of this century. A thorough knowledge of Newspeak, as it has been implemented in America, is the best means by which one can avoid an immense quagmire of faulty thinking.

Newspeak

This is done partly by stripping undesirable words of unorthodox meanings. For example: The word "anarchy" still exists but it can only be understood as meaning a completely lawless and chaotic state of nihilistic destruction. It cannot be used in its old sense of "a social condition from which the institutionalized use of coercive aggression is absent" since politically such a condition no longer exists even as a concept, and is therefore nameless.

Another example is "inflation." What people today call inflation is not an increase in the quantity of money substitutes, but the general rise in prices and wages which is the inevitable CONSEQUENCE of inflation. This semantic innovation is by no means harmless. First of all there is no longer any term available to signify what "inflation" used to signify. It is impossible to fight an evil which you cannot name. You no longer have the opportunity to resort to a terminology accepted and understood by the public when you want to describe the financial policy you are opposed to. You must enter into a detailed analysis and description of this policy with full particulars and minute accounts whenever you want to refer to it, and you must repeat this bothersome procedure in every sentence in which you deal with this subject. Second, those who wish to fight inflation are diverted in their struggle away from the fundamental nature of inflation and are forced to direct their attentions to the consequences. They end up snipping at the leaves of the weed rather than hacking at the root.

An especially corrupting abuse of language can be seen in the ambiguous use of the words "think" and "feel." This use equivocates cognitive assessment with emotional response, and leaves the victim unable to discriminate between his thoughts and his emotions.

The special function of Newspeak words is to destroy meaning. In Newspeak it is seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it IS heretical; beyond that point the required words are nonexistent. It would be possible to say, "government is unnecessary," but this statment could not be sustained by a comprehensible argument, because the requisite words (such as "anarchy") are not meaningfully available. An example of a phrase designed to destroy meaning is in this suggestion, made by a proponent of international trade barriers: "A more accurate name than the persuasive label 'free trade' - because who can be opposed to freedom? - is 'deregulated international commerce.'" If accepted, his proposal, that his adversaries use this mouthful of multi-syllabic obfuscation as the name of their political goal, would be the first step toward destruction of the concept "free" in the minds of his opponents. And in the minds of their audience.

Nowhere is this semantic deception more blatant than in the government's dishonest descriptions of its own activities, in which words are used merely as tools to manipulate the social environment.

In 1993, Congress required the Dept. of Health and Human Services to examine the feasibility of shifting some biological weapons research from the army to the National Institutes of Health. Thus, under the direction of the Dept. of Health, the National Institutes of Health will now be engaged in germ warfare. Orwell was right - "War is Peace" or, more appropriately, "Health is Death."

Perhaps the most long-lasting and widespread manifestation of the government's use of another of Big Brother's slogans ("Freedom is Slavery") is the "selective service."

In Newspeak, certain words are deliberately constructed for political purposes - words which are intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them and to make it impossible for him to hold any contrary attitude. This is the explicit goal of the "Politically Correct" movement.

What a Newspeak user acquires is an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped "false gods." He did not need to know what these gods were, and probably the less he knew about them the better for his own orthodoxy. This sort of orthodoxy was explicitly fostered during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, when accusations of "communist!" were thrown around indiscriminately while no one, neither the accusers nor the accused, had any idea of what a communist is. Nor did they dare ask publicly, for fear of being labeled a communist merely for making the inquiry.

Thomas Szasz coined the very useful word "semanticide" to designate the murder of language. Semanticide is the ultimate goal of Newspeak.

Many words, such as "freedom," "patriotism," "liberty," etc. have been appropriated by wanna-be tyrants (especially by Right-wing political Conservatives) who use those words to designate the opposite of their historical (and cognitively correct) meanings, thus leaving the majority of people with no way to distinguish libertarians from our totalitarian enemies. Conservative zealots claiming to speak in the name of libertarianism have fomented a dangerous agenda that is corrupting our most cherished ideals and deceiving others about our fundamental principles.

The only way I can see to combat this dismal situation is to attack it not on its surface - by making futile attempts to persuade people of the correct definitions of those critical words - but at its roots, by renouncing epistemological relativism and asserting the idea that DEFINITIONS ARE NOT ARBITRARY. Unless your audience realizes this, any argument you engage in will be merely a verbal battle of wits with your adversary - the outcome dependent on who can make the most clever use of phrases that are meaningless in the minds of the audience.

The result of Newspeak is boastful inarticulateness on the part of those who haven't anything to say, and helplessness on the part of those who have.

"Those who cannot carry a train of consequences in their heads; nor weigh exactly the preponderancy of contrary proofs and testimonies may be easily misled to assent to positions that are not probable." ... John Locke People who can't analyze and dissect their language cannot separate meaning from words and thus cannot perceive an existence separate from the words used to describe it. For those people, the Law of Identity is quite literally meaningless.

Brainwashing

Get your victim at your mercy.

Take away his ordinary inputs - his accustomed environment. Isolate him and deprive him of social support, to develop an intense concern for himself.

Deprive him of all opportunities for self-expression.

Control his perceptions, with darkness or bright light, or by creating a barren environment and restricting movement, to fix the victim's attention on his predicament and to eliminate distractions. Inundate him with strong and novel sensory experiences.

Subject him to physical degradation, by prevention of personal hygiene and imposing various other humiliations, so as to reduce the victim to concern with "animal values."

Induce debilitation and exhaustion, by semi-starvation, exposure, sleep deprivation and induced illness, so as to weaken the victim's physical and mental ability to resist.

Demonstrate omnipotence, to suggest the futility of resistance. This is carried out by such techniques as pretending to take cooperation for granted or demonstrating complete control over the victim's fate.

Issue threats, to cultivate anxiety, dread and despair.

Enforce trivial demands, to develop a habit of compliance.

Perform occasional indulgences, such as unpredictable favors and unexpected kindness, to provide motivation for compliance.

Prolefeed

There is nothing unethical in attempting to induce people to purchase your products, but the techniques the advertising industry has used in pursuing this goal have had unforeseen results which are psychologically and intellectually devastating.

Advertising, both commercial and political, has resulted in a merciless distortion of authentic human needs and desires. The victims learn to substitute what they are told to want for what are in fact their objective needs. By the time they reach adulthood, their authentic feelings are so well buried that they have only the vaguest sense that "something" is missing from their spiritual life. Having ignored their genuine needs for so long, their souls are empty, but the emptiness is continually denied. It is far easier, in the short run, to listen to the commercials, which are always beckoning, always promising, always assuring that this time, with this product or this candidate, it will be possible to fulfill the heart's desire, than to take the initiative of making difficult personal judgments.

Prolefeed is a format of radio and TV programming whose result is intellectually debilitating. It is a format of information presentation which, by inducing detrimental psycho-epistemological programming and deprogramming, results in severe inhibition of cognitive efficiency. The cognitive debilitation results, in part, from continuous exposure to unceasing repetition of phrases or melodies which contain just enough cognitive content to possess a minimum of intelligible meaning, thereby distracting the mind from self-generated activity, without giving the mind sufficient content for significant externally-induced activity. Observe, please, that it is not the CONTENT of the input that induces the debility, but the FORMAT of its presentation.

Consider a common phenomenon: there is a radio playing in the background at the place you are working. In order to concentrate on your work you "tune out" the radio - you make an alteration in your mental functioning which renders your conscious mind unaware of the sounds of the radio. Since your ears (unlike your eyes which can be physically closed to sensory input) are continually feeding signals to sensory receptors in the brain, all the sound that enters the ears is transmitted into the brain. Thus there is a part of your mind that is always aware of this sound. The only way you can "tune out" the background noise is to erect a barrier between your conscious mind and that area of the subconscious mind that receives input from your ears, a barrier that prevents the awareness from getting through. The psycho- epistemological programming that erects these barriers is one of the most pernicious aspects of Prolefeed. Not just because it produces the psychological self-alienation of a divided mind, but because it goes further by inflicting a profound impairment of judgment, an impairment resulting from the conflict of the subconsciously acquired prolefeed information with consciously derived value-decisions.

Frequent instantaneous shifts of subject matter - e.g., interrupting programs with commercial messages - inhibit the mental function of integration and diminish the attention span of the victim, thus promoting schizophrenia. Such interruptions immediately following an information presentation can inhibit the victim from consciously evaluating the information. Thus he will be more likely to subconsciously accept it as truth, and will be left in a condition wherein the ideas in his mind have not been critically examined. Without firm awareness of its truth value, he will experience a nebulous state of uncertainty regarding his knowledge.

We're bombarded with advertising, so we learn to tune it out. All that advertising is like a steady chattering noise in our eyes and ears. In order to function, we have to make ourselves deliberately blind and deaf to that part of our environment. The advertisers know that we do this, so they increase the size, color, intensity, volume, and repetitions of their ads. They give us more, better, and different ads. And we try even harder to tune them out. Commercials are designed to catch your attention and instill remembrance, an increasingly difficult process because its effects dampen its effectiveness. The din eventually gets painful because it is cumulative. People unable to hear one another speak raise their voices - which encourages their neighbors, who can't hear themselves speak, to shout - which makes their neighbors, who can't hear themselves shout, scream. Eventually we are so tuned out that we can no longer see the sky, the stars, the souls of our lovers, and the reality of the world we live in.

Such programming causes severe value heirarchy distortions. It does this by presenting mundane things as having supreme importance. Consider an advertisement showing a man about to bite into a hamburger. His facial expression clearly and blatantly portrays the idea that this hamburger is the greatest thing ever to enter his life. One wonders how he contemplates his wife when he goes home from work at night. After he has displayed such an attitude toward a hamburger, what could he have left to display toward her?

Being continually bombarded with the notion that each product - whether it be a hamburger, chewing gum, the latest model chevy, or a political candidate - is a sine qua non of the utmost value and importance, is a process that severely distorts, and even destroys, any rational value heirarchy and leaves the victim in a judgmental vacuum, lacking a sensible means to evaluate the phenomena which are IN FACT important to his life. Years of value-depravation crush all emotions, all hope, leaving the victims with eyes that have stopped seeing, ears that have stopped hearing, and souls that have stopped living a long time ago. It is truly the twilight of the gods.

(Personally, I don't watch TV because I know that someday I'm gonna drop dead, and when I do I don't want my last experience on earth to have been a TV commercial.)

But while you are contemplating lugubriously the weltanschauung of Orwell's book, keep this in mind: the world Orwell depicts can have only a limited actualization. For this reason: the men in the white coats KNOW what is real. They HAVE to know. Without those men, there could be no technological civilization - there would be only barbarism. NO society rises above barbarism except by recognition of the Facts of Reality by someone who is instrumental in the conduct of society. This is why no matter what the State decrees, someone HAS to know reality: the scientists who conceive material wealth; the engineers who translate those conceptions into existing mechanisms; the mechanics who maintain this technology. These people have to be in cognitive contact with objective reality. That cognitive contact is an unconditional prerequisite to the existence of a technological civilization, and it is a continual barrier to government omnipotence.

And here you can see one of the major contributions of Objectivism: Rand has made philosophically EXPLICIT the function of the men in the white coats (who are only briefly and tangentially referred to by Orwell). This explicit depiction carries within it the seed of destruction for Statism.

Hallmarks of a Cult

They believe that Armageddon is nigh - that profound, revolutionary, world-shaking changes are about to occur.

They believe that the road to Salvation lies only through their belief system, and are excruciatingly jealous, often reserving their worst invective, not for their real enemies, but for those with whom they essentially agree save for minor ideological coloration.

They have a completely unrealistic expectation that their unknown and/or unpopular ideas will shortly triumph in society.

They over-emphasize their significance and greatly over-exaggerate the effects of their activities, claiming that what they're doing has revolutionary importance for society.

This mindset does not change over time. They are still saying today the same things about pending Armageddon and the imminent social acceptance of their ideas that they were saying 20 years ago.

What happens to a cult over time?

• 1) It preserves its ideological purity, but to do so it must become rigidly dogmatic. But then perceptive people eventually become aware of its flaws and withdraw from participation. The cult gradually becomes comprised solely of narrow-minded, inward-focused bigots. This is what has happened to the Randites.
• 2) It dilutes its ideological purity in the attempt to acquire more adherents. But then it eventually becomes indistinguishable from other belief systems, and stops attracting new recruits. This is what has happened to the LP - it is becoming merely another variant of political conservatism.

The Philosophical Chameleon

The name I apply to this syndrome is neither "Stockholm" nor "Hearst," however. I refer to it as the "Philosophical Chameleon" syndrome.

Most people have no firmly-fixed principles of their own but merely "adopt" the philosophy of whatever "significant other(s)" are most influential in their immediate social environment. I do not fully understand why people behave this way, but I have no doubt that what Nathaniel Branden described as "social metaphysics" has a great deal to do with it, and that it rests ultimately on what Branden identified as the failure to choose to think.

Its occurrence, in a rather milder form than that manifested either in Stockholm or by Ms. Hearst, is actually quite widespread. The milder form of chameleonism (milder, because it does not involve one's fundamental philosophical principles but merely his superficial behavior) can be observed quite frequently - when people do things for no other reason than that somebody suggested it without their noticing the suggestion. For example: in handing out leaflets to students, you will observe that if one of them passes by you and refuses the printed sheet, and makes a little gesture of negation, then the next person walking along, if he or she has noticed, will do the same thing. Whole strings of people will, one after the other, make virtually identical gestures and pass by without accepting the lealet unless you take some action to break the chain, such as turning away briefly, or rearranging your papers for a moment. Or unless a more strong- minded person comes along and breaks the chain of behavior with her own actions.

Notice customers at the counter of a fast-food restaurant. If the first one up just asks for, let's say, "a Whataburger", most people behind her will likewise order a generic item from the posted menu. But let one individual qualify her order, and say something like: "Oh, yeah, could you hold the mustard and give me extra pickles on that Whataburger," and every single customer behind her will make requests for custom changes in the menu item as well - all without consciously realizing why.

Apparently a large amount of human behavior is carried out with only partial involvement of the higher centers of judgment, and while this has no sinister consequences most of the time, when people "choose" their religion, political parties and candidates, beliefs about race, or stands on freedom, they are unfortunately very likely to be behaving like a chameleon. Thus you will see a man assent to conservative ideas while he is conversing with a Republican, and then just a few days later avow quite the opposite liberal principles while in a discussion with a Democrat. But no deliberate deception is involved - the man is merely taking on the political "color" of his immediate social environment.

(See * Social Metaphysics in the DICT file.) See reference