The Four Worst Ideas in History and their Solutions

Copyright 2008 Roberto Diego. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the copyright holder. This book is being offered to publishers who might be interested in publishing it as a hard cover or paper cover book. If you are a publisher and would like to talk to the author about publication of this book, please contact by email robdiego@aol.com.

Bad Idea # 2 – Empiricism

The next mistake derives from what I call secular forms of religion. It concludes that ideas have no consequence in the real world and, as with religion, men should recognize that it is not possible for the individual to attain knowledge and values that are relevant to life. With religion we obtain knowledge only through God and religion has waged a centuries’ long war against science and this world. Likewise with Plato who heavily influenced religion, we know reality only through the realm of ideals. With empiricism we cannot attain knowledge.

Empiricism is a result of the dichotomy in religion between the spiritual and the real which we discussed in Chapter 1. Religious thinkers thought that ideas from the spiritual realm were purer and more important than ideas that related to this world which were considered inferior, impure and evil. The empiricist merely chooses to accept the real world as it is but holds that we can not learn anything about it. To this extent, empiricism is derived from rationalism though few empiricists would admit it.

The rationalist “spiritual vs. the real” dichotomy, was essentially a false alternative. The world of ideas, derived from Plato’s world of essences, is, in reality, derived from reality, from what we see in the world, not some essence in the backward reaches of our minds. Indeed, there is no provable realm of ideas. We know what is inside our minds and it is not a memory of a past life but what we learn about the world in this life. Likewise, Hume’s attempt to establish the importance of “empirical reality” over spiritual (ideational) reality catches him in the same trap as that in which the rationalists are caught.

David Hume (1711-1776) is considered to have been a hard-nosed empiricist who strictly adhered to facts. I submit that Hume’s empiricism elevated context dropping into common practice and led the world toward a dead end with devastating consequences. After Hume, there were few who argued that his method was wrong, that his logic was skewed and few even realized the real damage to real people that was to come.

Hume began his philosophical quest by attempting to examine the issues that relate to how man can develop certainty. Though most philosophers assume that Hume was led to his conclusions through rigorous empirical analysis, the truth is that Hume starts with the premise that there is something wrong with human thinking and then he builds his philosophy around that preconceived notion to conclude that there is something wrong with human thinking. He posits that man’s ignorance is created by the inefficacy of human memory. He says sensations are immediate, felt strongly, felt as real, but our recollection of them, our thinking, is fuzzy and this must be why people disagree; why they are contradictory and ignorant in the use of their minds. What he accomplished was to give skeptics the “certainty” needed to blatantly state that there was no certainty. The average man was left blind and incapable of thinking. And since man was incapable of reason, they thought, why should we even teach people how to think?

Hume revealed his view that we are basically fallible when he noted that his study was intended to provide a way for man to gain certainty but then concluded that there was only a fuzzy connection between ideas and impressions. He laid the foundation for an approach to induction that did nothing to advance induction or the acquisition of knowledge. Where scientists during his time, practicing scientific induction, were discovering whole areas of new knowledge and reaching new heights of understanding, Hume was saying that we could only look at concrete facts. While businessmen had the vision and intelligence to take inductively derived knowledge and create whole new industries and magnificent new inventions, Hume was teaching us that there is no necessity, no connection between cause and effect, because we can’t see it.

This conclusion came to him while he was involved in an effort to develop an impenetrable science that would rid the world of superstition. Yet, he provided us with a new form of doubt as the foundation of science and inquiry. Consider David Hume's views about necessity and the "inability" of man to understand reality. Hume held that there are no valid inferences in the jump from observed cases to unobserved cases, from observed specifics to generalization. Building upon his premise that impressions are superior to ideas, Hume uses what he thinks is “pure” empirical observation as a source of knowledge while denigrating the value of induction and conceptually developed knowledge. So science becomes arbitrary expressions of arbitrarily derived generalizations.

For Hume, because we could not see necessity, there is no necessity, there is no source of human knowledge; there is no human knowledge. The hard headed empiricist joins with the faithful rationalist. Hume:

“We must submit to this fatigue in order to live at ease ever after: And must cultivate true metaphysics with some care in order to destroy the false and adulterate….Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom.

It is remarkable concerning the operations of the mind that, though most intimately preset to us, yet, whenever they become the object of reflection, they seem involved in obscurity; nor can the eye readily find those lines and boundaries, which discriminate and distinguish them. The objects are too fine to remain long in the same aspect or situation; and must be apprehended in an instant, by a superior penetration, derived from nature, and improved by habit and reflexion. It becomes, therefore, no inconsiderable part of science barely to know the different operations of the mind, to separate them from each other, to class them under their proper heads, and to correct all that seeming disorder, in which they are involved….And if we can go no farther than this mental geography, or delineation of the distinct parts and powers of the mind, it is at least a satisfaction to go so far; and the more obvious this science may appear (and it is by no means obvious) the more contemptible still must the ignorance of it be esteemed, in all pretenders to learning and philosophy…”[4]

“Every one will readily allow, that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind, when a man feels the pain of excessive heat, or the pleasure of moderate warmth, and often he afterwards recalls to his memory this sensation, or anticipates it by his imagination.

These faculties may mimic or copy the perceptions of the sense, but they never can entirely reach the force and vivacity of the original sentiment…The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensations.”[1]

Hume’s method of deception is difficult to detect, but it consists of establishing a context for human understanding by setting up a false alternative between two non-essential concepts as if they were opposed essentials. The attack starts at the outset of his book A Treatise of Human Nature. In Part 1, Of Ideas, their Origin, Composition, Connexion, Abstractions, &, Section 1, Of the Origin of our Ideas, Hume writes:

“All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning; such as, for instance, are all the perceptions excited by the present discourse, excepting the immediate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion. I believe it will not be very necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction.”

Hume writes “All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS.”

The first question to ask: is this true? Are impressions and ideas really two distinct opposites or just two types of mental concepts among a number of other concepts? If one is going to postulate two distinct kinds of perceptions, one must have two distinct kinds, two very different concepts of consciousness.

An idea requires impressions, their interpretation and an understanding of their role in concept formation. Impression and ideas are not two distinct kinds of perceptions because they both derive from a starting point in perceptions. Because impressions lie at the base of knowledge how can an idea, which is a unit of knowledge that requires impressions, be distinct from an impression? Is it possible that Hume does not understand that knowledge formation is a process that requires both impressions and ideas?

One educational website says of a false alternative that the…“failure to consider a plausible alternative produces an incorrect conclusion.”[2] The same page also says that in order to show the existence of a false alternative you should, “1) state the two (or more) alternatives that are mentioned in the argument, and 2) say that there is another alternative that should have been considered, and describe that missing alternative!” In human cognition, the only valid alternative to an impression is a non-impression. Since impressions yield information that enables man to understand reality, a non-impression is the only concept that cannot yield knowledge.

Hume disregards the fact that knowledge and its creation is volitional. Man must engage a process of focus in order to learn. Yet, to Hume man is by nature out of focus, not because of incorrect thinking but because of the nature of ideas as such; because they are created by man. To Hume man is ignorant because he can only use ideas to gain knowledge.

To answer the question about false alternatives, there is no real alternative to an impression (except as I pointed out, a non-impression – everything that is not an impression). It stands alone as part of the process of cognition. An idea, as we will discuss, is not an alternative to an impression. It too stands alone as part of that process of cognition.

Perception is the second stage of cognition immediately after sensation. It is a basic process that does not involve ideational content; in fact, it is a “neurological process” that has enabled man to go beyond sensations toward the third stage identification and conceptualization. Without a perception of a thing, a sort of neurological identification of entities, conceptualization is not possible. However, it is clear that a perception does not produce a concept or idea; a perception is the step before ideation and is therefore merely part of the process that eventually results in usable knowledge.

Hume’s mistake is that he uses ideas as forms of perception and as we have pointed out, they are a merely different step along the continuum of knowledge development. An idea is not an inferior form of perception but is more accurately the result of a process that includes perception. And because ideation is not a polar opposite of perception it cannot be compared to it except in identifying its true strength; and that strength is that an idea is better than a perception because it is created by means of the materials provided by perception and it takes man closer to generalization. Ideas enable man to move beyond the mere concrete that is provided by nature.

To clarify further, let’s use an example. I am able to see (perceive) an object such as the computer that I am typing on. I see that it has a certain shape, certain design elements, certain functional elements, each of which is different but all of which are integrated automatically by my mind to make up the unit which conceptually, through definition, I identify as a computer. The computer is a concrete which I perceive but my mind integrates the elements perceived to form a concept of a computer and all the activities that it makes possible. When I look at a computer (perceive it) is my idea then a perception? Of course not. The idea is everything that my mind does with the perception after I have seen the computer.

Ask yourself if you were an animal other than human who had no idea what a computer was used for, what its purpose was, etc., what would be your “idea” of a computer? The obvious answer is that an animal does not have ideas, it only has perceptions and natural responses – for instance an animal might want to chew on the computer rather than type upon its keyboard. Does the idea that you and I hold to be a computer have any meaning for him? The answer, of course is no, an animal may see all the elements that we see that make up the computer, but he is not able to conceive of the idea of a computer. To him it is just a collection of perceptions, an entity that either does or does not satisfy his drive for survival, his impulse to eat or drink or hunt other animals.

To counter Hume, for man, the idea of the computer is not an idea that is more vague than the perception I have of it; in fact, it is much more powerful than my perception of it because I can also conceptualize the elements of a computer and learn how to use it to great benefit. I know conceptually that a computer can be used to help me organize my ideas, do my accounting, watch videos, etc. In other words, my idea leads to an understanding of how a computer can benefit my life; this is certainly not what Hume had in mind when he declared concretes to be more immediate than ideas. One cannot understand the deeper truths of a concrete but one can understand the deeper truths and benefits of an idea. In fact, Hume completely ignored the value for man of his ideas because he considered man to be an ignorant animal.

It is certainly true that we need to be able to perceive in order to be able to conceive but does that make the idea of a perception more powerful than an idea of what we perceive, and what would be the benefit of thinking so? We know that for Hume, thinking that ideas are categories of perception enabled him to draw distinctions between immediate concretes and our “impressions” of them; he is able to say that an impression is a perception that is stronger than an idea which requires thinking, remembering and abstracting elements from that memory. In effect, what it does for Hume is enable him to say that ideas are inferior to directly experienced impressions. The benefit for Hume and his followers is that this view gives them the ability to say that ideas are imperfect and that only concrete impressions of reality are important. It gives him the ability to (mistakenly) rationalize and validate his own contradictions about human understanding and it gives philosophers the ability to draw the most outlandish conclusions (starting with Hume), such as that only concretes matter, reason is imperfect, abstract thinking (except Hume’s) is impossible and there is no way to connect our understanding to the real world by means of ideas and therefore the only thing we can count on are our impressions (perceptions) (emotions).

In fact, all of the elements of thinking, which include sensations, perceptions, concepts, generalizations and logic are differentia of the broader concept of human knowledge. Instead of starting with “impressions” Hume would have learned more and been more honest had he sought to understand that knowledge is made up of. Had he done so, he would have seen that acquiring knowledge is a process and that no part of it can stand as an alternative to any other part. A proper perspective on this issue will only reveal that ideas are much more powerful than impressions.

David Hume created a crisis in the world of philosophy. If it was indeed true that there was no connection between action and reaction; if it was true that man could not count on what he took to be knowledge, then philosophy and human knowledge needed someone to solve this dilemma. The savior, presumably, was Immanuel Kant.

Kant took the foundation provided by Hume, and in an effort to save religion from the Enlightenment, taught that the mind created reality rather than just learned from it. For Kant, reality was created by a collective mind; in other words, the individual mind is not a factor in human thinking. This separated man from reality even more than did Hume’s ideas. Kant went further to claim that morality was represented by an imperative to duty where all moral decisions were to be based on the standard of duty and what is good for others.

David Hume and Immanuel Kant have had devastating influence on the ability of our young people to think. Their ideas have poisoned the inductive process and have turned thinking and philosophical inquiry into an undertaking that rejects virtually every concept known to man.

Hume and Kant’s views about ideas and their inferior status does its worst damage to philosophy. By ascribing an inferior status to ideas, all philosophers who accept these ideas become ignorant men. They sentence the entire field of philosophy to ignorance on the subject of human knowledge. The result is not merely ignorant philosophers but they also teach men that thinking is unnecessary and reason impossible.

For instance, whenever a person expresses what he considers to be a truism, a fact that is based upon his judgment of reality, the first thing he is told by people that have been influenced by Hume and Kant is that his opinion does not mean much. A host of arguments are aimed at the individual stating that certainty is not possible or that his ideas are merely theory and have nothing to do with reality.

You may think this is a minor issue but consider what it does to the individual who seeks certainty and who thinks it is possible to know. Once this foundation of knowledge is cut from beneath him, he has only confusion as his base. His entire life is sabotaged by uncertainty and self-doubt is all that he has left. He may even conclude that anything he does or thinks or chooses is irrelevant. Further, he is told that the only thing he can do in the state of not knowing is live for others; thereby ignoring what he needs to have a good life. This life can only become a boring drudgery where the individual can only pursue values for which he has no passion. He may accept the notion that the only thing we have is our feelings to go by.

The philosophies of Kant and Hume totally disarm you by telling you that your mind is inefficacious, by disconnecting your mind from the only tool you have which is reason.

What is the significance of basing one’s philosophy of life on the inherent fallibility of men? What kind of starting point does that represent for an intelligent individual? Wouldn’t such a person normally consider that other people are ignorant, imperfect and incapable of understanding reality even though you think that they make reality, that their perceptions are everything? Doesn’t this view amount to deep cynicism about man? Doesn’t this lead to a view of man that says one should only look for fallibility and vulnerability and that one should only operate upon that premise? It is a gangster’s perspective, one that says, since man is a sinner, the only way to succeed is to sell him his sins and exploit his ignorance. It does not say we should educate man, lift him up, teach him how to think and how to make correct decisions; it says that man cannot know, cannot act rationally and cannot make proper decisions – so make the best of it. This, I submit, expresses the soul of our age and exposes a key danger to our very survival. This is the state in which philosophy has placed man for the last few hundred years and explains why the 20^th Century was the bloodiest in history. Because of Hume and Kant, man has no ammunition for fighting back against their attacks on man’s mind and against the looters and killers that their philosophies have turned loose.

To say that sensation is superior to recollection is merely a way for skeptics to say that immediate experience is superior to thinking and therefore thinking has no value. This moves people to disregard the value and importance of thinking and to concentrate more closely on a false premise that all we can be certain of are sensations. Enter intellectual disintegration. Enter moral equivalence and political repression. Enter the state (government) of the modern world. Whenever you destroy the possibility of thinking, you also destroy the possibility of truth; all in the name of science and reason. You also destroy freedom because only thinking men know what it takes to establish a society based upon freedom. Only thinking men can fight for freedom. When there are no thinking men, anything goes and any lie such as those expressed by communists, socialists and fascists will find little opposition; not because they represent truth but because few men have the ability to challenge them.

Hume’s view, in particular, represents a failure to recognize that sensations and imagination are nothing more than different states of consciousness, not diametric opposites. Though sensations and imagination can be evaluated in relation to each other, such an evaluation can only evaluate the contribution that sensations make to knowledge and how the process of knowledge acquisition can be fostered. However, perception is a stage in the process of knowledge acquisition that includes a range of activities that move from sensation to perception to identification to concept formation to generalizations and principles. This is the process of cognition. There is no reason to claim that one or any of the elements along this continuum is inferior to the other because each step is used to create the foundation for the next step. With a proper inductive process, man’s knowledge can correctly reflect an understanding of reality.

With Hume’s incorrect view about human understanding, the door opens to Kant and Kantians – but also to anyone who wants to proclaim any outlandish idea in the name of science, such as Hitler’s racism, Marx’s communism, socialism and the resulting concentration camps, genocide and more – all are outgrowths of a so-called “scientific” revolution inaugurated by Hume’s empiricism. In fact, Hume began the proliferation of pseudo-science where every group that wanted to rule the mind of man determined that it could deceive men through a supposed “scientific” justification for its views. From every quarter, men were confronted with new scientific studies that “proved” one theory or another. Whether it was the superiority of Aryan blood, the historical inevitability of communism, the economic superiority of socialism or the economic inferiority of capitalism and a whole host of other so called “scientifically” proven theories, men were baffled by a plethora of non-expert experts who had a scientific solution to “social” problems. The result was the devastation of the 20^th century.

The result was felt also in the lives of everyday men and women who had no argument for this mumbo jumbo; people who had no choice but to dutifully agree with this pseudo-science. It was the philosophical children of Hume who told us that the Jews were an inferior race, that blood ruled history; that the slavery of socialism was superior to the freedom of capitalism and that capitalism was a theory of exploitation. It was pseudo-science that told us that capitalism was dehumanizing, that it enabled the rich to exploit the poor, that a “natural” man did not think but merely felt his way around, etc., etc., etc.

Many men have lost the ability to judge their leaders because both religion and progressivism have injected huge doses of collectivism into their bloodstreams. Collectivism means the sacrifice of the human being for the sake of the collective. To use the cliché, many people live lives of quiet desperation, never knowing that the source of their unhappiness, the source of their mediocrity, is collective joining and fear of the opinions of others. This is a devastating nightmare that millions suffer through today.

A socialist state operates upon the premise that the government owns all property. Socialism is a form of society advocated from the 19^th Century onward as a specific form of social organization that was supposedly intended to move society beyond capitalism to a state system that claimed to solve the inequities deemed inherent in capitalism. It amounted to force and control. Classical economists and others have convincingly argued that the criticisms of capitalism made by its enemies are unfounded. When you hold the premise that concretes are all that matter; men are not able to answer the key metaphysical and epistemological questions that would enable them to know that they were being fed lies and offered the end of a gun as an argument.

Hume’s principle that concrete experiences are superior to mental abstractions starts the crime. He viewed concretes (and therefore emotions) as more real while he relegated abstractions to what he considered mere memory. The result today is that men are taught to evaluate individual existents as concrete out-of-context entities that have no relation to the process of knowledge acquisition and/or reason. This establishes the premise that leads people to question and doubt man’s mental capabilities. This has the powerful effect of destroying the individual’s confidence in his own mind. It sends him on a false quest for understanding through disconnected concrete-bound thinking. His only choice is to repeat daily motions as if they were formulas for survival, with little thought for his own goals, ideas and desires; with only one duty to fulfill which is the duty to live for others like the masters have ordered them.

Put another way, holding concretes out of context in a world where there is only one reality has profound impact on peoples’ everyday decisions and sends each individual on a quest for concretes (concrete-bound thinking) without resorting to reason and contextual understanding. It destroys the ability of the individual to think because it elevates to importance the mere, out of context, brute fact. What you do with facts afterwards is essentially “anything goes.” The end of this road is savagery and barbarism, emotionalism and addiction, short-term and destructive pseudo-pleasures rather than long-term rational self-interest and pride; in short, socialism rather than capitalism.

Hume starts with the inability of man to think and then proceeds to “prove” his thesis in what can only be considered one of the most monumental examples of circular reasoning on record. You would have thought that he’d checked his basic premise before accepting the same view of man held by the Church; the view that man is imperfect. This is what the entire history of philosophy has considered to be “empirical.” Indeed, Karl Popper, who agreed with him, should have called Hume’s ideas reflexive and self-fulfilling.

It is accepted by most philosophers that David Hume has “shown” that it was impossible for man to possess knowledge of the real world because, in his analysis, ideas were imperfect mirrors of concretes accessed by human sensation; for Hume man cannot know with any certainty that any of his ideas are “true”. We are left only with what seems to work today, with such concepts as probability; and, most famously, the idea that what works today may not work tomorrow. Hume, and the skeptics, vandalized human thinking by saying to man, in essence, don’t be so naïve as to think that certainty is possible. They tell us that in order to be practical we must go beyond the idea of knowledge to bold action. How one could do that without going into the realm of pseudo-science they did not say. They were, after all, not focused on reality but on their mere impressions, they were the victims of their own misidentified concretes.

If we look at how progressives, skeptics and nihilists operate today, we find that their method of using knowledge reveals the consistency of their inconsistent views. You will notice that these people always argue from negative viewpoints that analyze specific issues out of context. For them nothing works including reason, morality and even capitalism. For them failure must be addressed by means of “experiments” that may work today but may not work tomorrow; but there is one thing certain: anything stated with certainty and conviction is naïve and to be dismissed out of hand. They accomplish their political intention, which is to ensure that people do not see the contradictions in their views, through a selective focus and selective arguments. As we’ve discussed above, this method is typical of the arch skeptics, Hume and Kant who both characteristically analyzed specific epistemological issues out of context. From these out-of-context discussions they both sowed confusion and then drew sweeping generalizations to the effect that man could not rely on his sensations, could not rely on his knowledge and therefore his only choice was to follow the dictates of religious leaders and/or dictators by practicing the altruism they demand. So we arrive at the only certainties: self-sacrifice, collectivism and force.

Let’s be clear, the purpose of both religion and skepticism is to reduce man’s mind to a malleable, reflexive and fallible state. Today’s politicians, radicals and dictators are merely opportunists taking advantage of Hume and Kant's life work; they are taking advantage of the fact that altruism and collectivism are foregone conclusions in the minds of most men who have been educated in Western schools. No one challenges them because they do not know that the result of skepticism was the destruction of their ability to challenge and question authority, they lost the ability to challenge with conviction the “social” goals of the state and the use of the gun as the arbiter between the average man and those that would steal his product for their own gain.

When a major philosopher develops an intellectual foundation that is essentially an “out-of-context” analysis of human understanding, the result is the establishment of out of context thinking throughout Western culture. We can see the outcome in subsequent cultural development. When Hume “established” as empirical fact that human beings were incapable of thinking, incapable of moving from perception to knowledge, the result is a general belief that people can only be led by people who have an ineffable ability to decide what is right for the people. The only place for individual men in this scheme is to acquiesce to that leadership, to worship it, to believe in it and to fawn over the men of strength and leadership not because they have knowledge but because their so-called knowledge is ineffable, powered by the universe and implemented by brute force.

This view influences other areas of the culture as well. In literature and the arts, whatever is presented to the public, no longer needs to respect the minds of people, it can be out of context, valueless, emotionalist and non-objective. It can be an attack on human values and anything that is created by free men in free exchange. When men lose interest in the arts because they speak only to the kind of people created by this philosophy, the loss of real values is blamed on rich capitalists who rely on objective knowledge.

In the sciences, there is no longer a need to analyze reality correctly or even to be rigorous in methodology. The only thing need is to garner millions of facts that support the views of the government’s brute. We need only start from the foundation of Hume that man is incapable of knowledge and then develop a psychology that holds that man is an out of context, emotional being, locking into a subconscious remembrance of his birth moment; that we can understand him only by looking at rats and that we can motivate him by reinforcing those actions we want him to take. The validation of this so-called science of psychology comes when we feed man a reward every time he does what we want and an electric shock when he doesn’t.

In the United States, we see the consequences of this view in the assaults made on the Constitution. This document was intended to establish the right of each man to decide what would make him happy and it established his right, by law, to pursue that action. So long as the individual did not violate the rights of others, he was free to do whatever he wanted, keep the product of his work and live without fear of restriction by the government. Rather than be the agent of control and restraint, government was charged with defending those rights and it was prohibited from being the chief violator of them. As soon as Hume and Kant became influential in the West, efforts were made to turn man, once again, into a serf of the state. Duty and collectivism became the new calls and the rights of man were seen as a violation of the right of the collective to assert itself and dominate people’s lives.

This out of context thinking has created intellectual and psychological disintegration and has led to the personal and moral disintegration of most men living. This is because the uncertainty and insecurity created by this mode of thinking leads to anxiety. Altruism and collectivism become the hallmarks of our society and men become viewed as draft animals who must do as they are told lest they be given the whip (government gun). Why? Altruism drops the context of how man survives (his mind) for the sake of a promiscuous out-of-context self-sacrifice to others (collectivism). Through this process, the collective imposes altruism on an entire society by dropping the context of freedom and free exchange and, as we have said, by introducing force as the arbiter of all social issues.

The problem with out of context thinking (especially with altruism and collectivism) is that it assumes that the individual’s goals, values, ideas and knowledge are meaningless and of no significance. Yet, a proper human life requires a consistent context (reality, values, action) and the ability of the individual to relate all of his actions to that context. The individual’s personal value context is the “infrastructure” of his life, the foundation that sets the terms of how he will act and what he will pursue. This personal “infrastructure” makes it possible for a person to correctly make all the decisions in his life especially the most important ones.

On the other hand, when the culture becomes dominated by out of context thinking, the result is the disintegration of living. It is not possible for people who accept this culture to live successfully; it leaves people with emotionless emotionalism and rationalizations that support short-term relief of boredom and anxiety, addiction and no understanding of the value of long-term life planning and freedom. For these people, there is no difference between short-term pleasures and long-range action. This is the state that Hume thought they were in when he started his studies. This is the state in which he left them.

To illustrate, look at the difference between the well-planned life and the poorly planned life. The person who has planned his life well, has considered and validated his values as actually being in his self-interest. He operates on the basis of his knowledge and the facts of reality; he has a strong impetus for making rational decisions, and more importantly, he has a strong disinclination against making decisions that harm or threaten his long-range values. Because he has a proper context for gaining knowledge in a singular reality, he is able to integrate not only his choices and experiences, but also his emotions around what he knows to be “good” for him. For a rational person, the finite nature of reality is the good and the infinite out of context world of David Hume is the evil.

As with rationalism, since skepticism provides no foundation for an understanding of a consistent reality or even a method for understanding reality, it leads to the opposite of what it proclaims which is polarization. Because there is no view of reason that makes it a valid method for ascertaining reality and developing integrated knowledge, philosophical, political and ethical issues are fraught with disagreements, various interpretations, floating definitions and differing opinions, each of which sounds as unbelievable as the other opinion. The victim of polarization is human understanding, lack of consensus on how to solve problems, gridlock in areas where cooperation is necessary and sometimes bitter anger and hatred of opposing viewpoints.

When a man cannot recognize that philosophers have lied to him, neither is he able to recognize the truth on key philosophical issues. And this is the sinister trap that Hume and Kant created when they propagated the notion (the lie) that what we see in the world is mere appearance and that reality is created by a collective mind. In this philosophical context, men are left as mindless dolts giving up their time and their lives to a mindless mystic who tells them the next lie that the height of virtue is to deny one’s desires.

From this false foundation, men only achieve the goals of monsters. Because Kant disarmed men’s minds and turned men toward a weak and subservient role, the world, the real world that he said did not exist, was turned over to the brutes of Nazi Germany, the fascists of Italy, the communists of Russia, China, south east Asia and South America.

As you can see, the evaluation Hume has made about human understanding is spurious; it is circular and means nothing. Hume has taken the relationship between perception, impressions and ideas out of context and he has changed the issue from one of analyzing how knowledge is developed to one that cynically concludes that knowledge is irrelevant.

By telling men that perception is more powerful than ideas, Hume leaves the individual with disconnected concretes as values. Life is engaged as if everything is a gamble, that we must act first then see how things turn out. Upon this foundation, there is only one thing man can do: elevate others to the position of authority over his actions.

The truth is that if there is such as thing as “empirical” evidence, it cannot be limited to the mere impression, to an analysis of a pure concrete. Indeed, a proper investigation would yield a different “empirical” (or rather an objective) truth and that is, as I have said, that consciousness is engaged by man volitionally through a process of knowledge acquisition. Had Hume been truly interested in learning why some men are contradictory, he would have engaged in a scientific analysis of this issue. Had he done so, he would have learned that sensations lead to perception, perception leads to the discovery of entities and these entities must be conceptualized correctly according to all of their characteristics, so that man can develop correct concepts, logical thinking, generalizations, truth and advanced knowledge – all founded upon the standard of what will foster man’s success on this earth.

Today, the only real antidote to Hume and the skeptics is for individuals to refuse to be disintegrated, to fight for the integration of their knowledge, by first learning how to integrate knowledge and secondly by practicing it consistently. The first step is to recognize that there is only one reality and that it is the same reality with which all other creatures are confronted. He must recognize that A is A, a thing is what it is and not something else, that all entities that he perceives in the universe exist and their characteristics are real. Every entity should be conceptualized and defined accurately and the process of conceptualization, the work of epistemology is what enables human beings to understand, to communicate and to act successfully. In other words, ideas are objective and it is the job of human consciousness to correctly ascertain the facts in order to survive. Once men gravitate to reason, once reason is the primary focus in the effort to understand reality, men can develop certainty and understanding.

A significant mistake made by skeptics is that they assert that man is incapable of knowing as if it were a statement of fact. This means that the skeptic admits that man is incapable of knowing facts except this fact that he is incapable of knowing. This is the major contradiction of Kant’s and Hume’s philosophy; it is not possible to assert a truism if you do not believe that man can assert truisms.

Kant’s philosophy is pervasive and even though you may never have heard of Kant you have absorbed him through other thinkers and through the mass media and modern culture. When these ideas get into you, they do affect you. You operate according to the idea that your own opinion is worthless, that your mind is incapable knowing and that others know better (when they don’t). You become a second hander and a doubter in yourself who then proclaims humility and love of others as a way out of the confusion. This is no way out.

[1] David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by I. A. Selby-Bigge (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1894)

[2] http://people.eku.edu/williamsf/HON102Web/falsec-web.htm

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