Don’t let the old man in…a video for my friends

Thank you. The video really resonates with me. I’ve had a difficult 5 month stretch health wise but an unusual spate of sunny, cold days here in the Great NorthWet has been drawing me outside and providing more healing than all the nostrums offered by the health care shamans.

“Don’t let the old man in…” indeed!

I am in hospice. My legal and final address is a hospital bed.
But I had an epiphany- and that gave me a mission.
I used to despair because you can’t cure ‘stupid’.
The explanation for that is it is a habit. Habits are virtually impossible to break.
One day I woke up to realize that while there may be no cure for stupid-
if one taught a child how to reason – at the very beginning of his cognitive formation-
THAT would also be a habit. And that habit of reason, equally unbreakable, could initiate and irrevocable renaissance.

The name of my project is Crown of Creation. It is meant to be used as a bedtime story- mother, father and child, together, solving puzzles to find a real treasure.
It is a leather bound book with pages of archival canvas and printed with ink of 200 year permanence.
It is meant to be an heirloom and serve a family for generations.
There are only 3 pages, besides the treasure map, each dedicated to one of the 3 laws of logic.
A child can learn them easily before he can read. He can name them explicitly and define then precisely.
Such a child would gain self possession from the start and never be owned by anybody else- never be fooled by lies. He would be immune to stupid.

This is an essay by a friend who understands the concept and wanted to put down some remarks:
First let us look upon the Treasure Hunt’s outer frame. The game’s enclosed within an embossed leather book, to be opened by a metal clasp, an interrobang. An interrobang to open it ?! And what is that, you’ll likely hear somebody ask. And here’s an answer by the maker of the game: An interrobang is a binding that ties a question to an answer, a ligature of ‘ what’ to ‘that,’ of ‘cause to an effect’ ?! An interrobang’s the drawn breath and exhaled exclamation of a mental revelation, the ahah ?! moment of Galileo, gazing through his telescope, when he first sees the moons of Jupiter, or of Darwin, aboard the HMS Beagle, as he examines those Galapagos finches’ beaks.

In every treasure hunt you’ll come across a villain. There’s one of sorts herewith, comes in the form of a message from the many casuists who like to tell you that the universe exists only to make a fool of you, no matter what you try to do. The interrobang’s a reminder, tying grapheme to a glyph, a reminder of those exalted moments you can feel to the core – that this simply isn’t so.

And now we’ll leave the treasure chest awhile, buried beneath the sands of some island hiding place, while we discuss some context on its genesis.

We are told by its creator that the players of the game will be three members of a family, there is a mom, a dad and their child, the nuclear basis of civilization, and in this game, which is a game of life, the parents will be helping the child to play the game, – but ultimately the focus is on the child, establishing first habits, what you do and learn is what you become, finding through play, answers to puzzles and the gift of rational thinking that will follow the child through life itself.

Concept behind the game. We sapiens are nature’s crown of creation, fitted through evolutionary development, large brain, complex language, conscious thought and dextrous hands, to uncover truths of nature in an interrobang opposing entropy, entropy that’s both physical and mental, which is homo-sapien’s enemy. Armed with nature’s gifts, what we do and learn we do become, that is our destiny.

What stands in the way and why this game? Humans live within a web of culture. Those individuals, who made those hand imprints on the walls of the Lascaux Caves were also part of a group, as we, members of tribes, associations, nations, live in societies with pressures to conform according to accepted rules and mores.

‘Nothing so outlandish,’ said rational pessimist, Michel de Montaigne regarding tyranny of custom, ‘that cannot be demonstrated in public practise somewhere in the world.’ And those customs, from some gentle beginning, unperceived, ‘unmask a furious and tyrannical countenance, against which we have no more courage or power so much as to lift our eyes.’

Through history, some cultures have emerged that are more enabling to rational thinking than others. Compare Sparta’s tribal society, where institutions were given taboo status as gifts of the gods, to 5th century BC, Athens’ emerging democracy, and its citizens who dared to question what and how? Being a member of a maritime society is helpful, observing many cultures and recognizing that institutions are made by man and therefore alterable … Greek dramatists writing drama about political and social issues, Socrates developing modes of critical argument, Aristotle developing tools of logic, ways of recognising and eliminating contradictions that hinder enquiry, these were major steps for human kind.

Man the debater, man the builder and discoverer. Builders of roads, bridges, builders of aquaducts and printing press, inventors of the wheel, paper, achievements in the arts, Shakespeare and thinking aloud, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Johan Sebastian Bach, the scientific revolution curious investigators, first harnessers of fire technology discoverers, Galileo, Isaac Newton, James Hutton and Charles Darwin …

Great movements in civilization but soon under attack. Enter your gurus who want to remake and control society to their own plan, and always an authoritative plan. Greek oligarchs and Plato, he’d use the democratic Socrates as his sock puppet, distorting his logical arguments on liberty and justice to artfully produce their contrary, processions of philosopher kings, religious shaman and kings who rule by divine right, right up to today, enemies of open society like George Soros and those authoritarian, globalist activists of the United Nations, ( producers of fnords, look them up if you don’t know what they are) who would rule us from afar. Technology, internet, universal education should be enabling to open society, but as in George Orwell’s dystopian ‘1984’ they’re being used by guru groups to propagandize and take us back to feudalism.

And that’s your broadest context for something valuable you’ll find concealed within that treasure chest still buried beneath sand on some unknown beach. And so herewith, let the game begin!

The game and the treasure.

And what we have in the Crown of Creation Treasure Hunt is a user’s manual for a child on how to become a rational thinker, based on Aristotles three powerful laws of logic – laws that eliminate the misdirections of contradiction in thinking and argument. Sadly the child won’t get this practice at school but now he or she will get it from mum and dad, in a game that helps the child gain self-possession and to become what nature has endowed him or her with the capacity to be: nature’s Crown of Creation. And the child will be able to explain it completely, as nobody has done for 2000 years…

In the user manual, the first law is the Law of Identity, A = A. A is not non A. Everything is itself and not something else. With that established, no way can you be persuaded by some Hegelian dialectic that slavery is freedom or justice is its opposite.

The next law is the Law of Contradiction. For any proposition A it is impossible to be both A and non A at the same time. So many ways to argue that ‘there’s no such thing as truth you know, I swear that this is true, the universe exists to make a fool of you.’

And then there’s the Law of the Excluded Middle. A statement has to be true or it is not true, it is a binary opposition, a statement cannot be some other thing. If it can’t be substantiated then it doesn’t exist. The null set is an empty set and therefore false. This eliminates the mysterious and the superstitious in one fell swoop.

And gone, too, all those tricky liar paradox arguments and apparitions of excluded middle that confuse, dehumanize and weaken you. Quest for truth, wielding your logic armoury, reaffirmation of reality enabling joy of discovery. That is the treasure!

How it works. Three puzzle sheets, images and verses, I myself did not solve the first, fell into a trap regarding the particular. Habits die hard, if at all. For adults who encounter difficulties there’s an accompanying cheat sheet text as guide to steps for solving every puzzle, and finally a treasure map where the words uncovered in the puzzles will tell you where to ‘dig.’

Artifact treasures are also to be found, the Darwin award for getting it right, a silver coin with powerful and positive imagery on either side that children will assimilate unconsciously, a ring to wear – one ring to free them all, embossed with the hand prints of the Lascaux Cave wall – hand prints of mother, father, child, and keys to reason. And for the children there are hidden sheets to be uncovered in free play, a bestiary of beasts, images and verses like Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, so that they’re imbibing protection, as they freely play, against the classic illogical spinners and fnords that sophists use to try and show you that you’re incapable of thought.

I end with a quote from a philosopher, Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence but rather because we act rightly these virtues are found in man by doing his actions, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act but a habit.

Logic habits are for making you unbreakable. That’s it!