I’ll have more to say about logic in future posts as I slowly build my case, and I think what I have to say will be something of a fresh approach, and non-academic, and the purpose will be to help illuminate how we might address a central problem today: how to get people who assume that our government is basically sound (except for outliers like the Trump administration— or so they think) to understand that our government is deeply corrupted, and that the entire world is in great danger of an emerging, one-world, totalitarian government. For anyone who doesn’t understand that, I’ve written about this here. And here’s an interesting and informative “great reset for dummies” introduction.
I follow the substack essays of several people who are trying hard to wake the rest of us up, including those of Dr. Robert Malone, Mathew Crawford, Steve Kirsch, C. Bradley Thompson, Tessa Lena, Dr. Pierre Kory, and several others. So what I have to say besides what these luminaries say may be like using a peashooter to attack Goliath, but it’s my contribution.
I’m going to focus on logic, then, and see if that can help us to understand how to reach those who don’t understand what’s going on today. Many of us are overwhelmed by the firehouse of information that’s coming out, 99% of which is ignored by the mainstream legacy media. So this is also my attempt to get a handle on it.
I’d like to point out a few things at the onset that I think are important. Maybe the most important thing is that when we started on our Covid journey, few of us asked a basic question: what’s “public health”? What’s its definition, its logical identity? Here’s what the CDC says: public health is “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private communities, and individuals.” But, is this an accurate description of what the entity referenced by “public health” is? It leaves out everything regarding healthy social relations; it leaves out considerations of the economic health of society. Is a society that has healthy individuals but is fearful an example of “public health”? Is a society with “healthy” but unemployed individuals an example of “public health”?
Fancy word time: I’m looking for the being of “public health,” its ontological (ontology: the study of the nature of being) presence: its presence or being in the world as opposed to a mere definition. And I think that we might see that the CDC’s definition leaves out the idea of “the public” in its definition of public health, except that it considers “the public” as acting on individuals (see what happened there?) So in attempting a rough definition, I’d say that public health should mean the physical, social, psychological, and economic well-being of society.
Surely public health doesn’t include welding people into their homes or police beatings for not wearing a mask. Nor does it make sense that public health would include locking down all of society to ostensibly prevent overwhelming hospitals, when hospitals were largely empty (many videos testified to this, and I drove around to local hospitals to check.) Nor would real public health fail to recognize the blatantly obvious fact that the elderly were at vastly higher risk of serious Covid than were young people, who were at close to zero risk, and that those most susceptible due to age were largely out of the work force anyhow. Nor does it make sense that public health would mean 24/7 unrelenting fear porn shoveled out to society: that was the real being of the sort of public health that people like Tony Fauci gave us.
If we as a society had all stood up and asked, “what kind of ‘public health’ are we talking about?” perhaps most of what happened wouldn’t have happened because we would have seen the contradiction between “real” public health and what was presented to us. Identity and contradiction: basic logic. But, public health based on real ontological status, on being real public health. So what happened in our idea of public health that the CDC gave to us is that this idea ignored the fundamental health of society itself, and we can say that the definition the CDC offered us thus committed the fallacy of false ontology. I made that up but I’m quite certain it’s real (there are long lists of logical fallacies but I’m going by what I see.)
Logic resides in individuals; we can have all the watchdog agencies we want but if the public reason is lulled to sleep, anything can happen. And, the public has been lulled to sleep: aside from being given a confused idea of what real public health is, among other things it’s been given logical categories into which it can conveniently and easily put ideas that don’t fit the mainstream narrative, thereby avoiding thinking things through by comparing logical identities. And, incidentally, finding comfort in the groupthink of those who repeat the slogans. Here are some of those logical categories handed out to us:
‘cancel culture’ (don’t debate; just cancel)
‘stay safe’
‘science-denier’
‘conspiracy theorist’
‘granny killer’
‘flatten the curve’
‘following the data’ (what??? whose data?)
“Q” (this identity has been appropriated and re-defined so that even a hint of it is now dangerous.)
etc.
Snobbish academic reference: the above examples are a posteriori categories for understanding, as opposed to Kant’s a priori categories of understanding.
If I were an evil genius wanting to dull the public mind, I’d propagate categories for understanding designed to keep people from thinking things through.
I’ll do my best to make my ideas relevant and helpful. My thinking is that instead of asking to define terms in debate, we should (implicitly?) ask to define identities that refer to ontological realities. This, to my mind, brings out contradictions more clearly. We can ask to have ‘public health’ defined, but what we should be aiming for is the underlying reality that we can honestly call ‘public health.’