I saw online that Leonard Nimoy's birthday was March 26th. Mr. Nimoy played the character of Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek TV series. The character's core value was that of pure logic. It made me think of all the hours I spent in my youth watching the show and contemplating the idea of logic, what it was, what it meant, and how to apply it in real life. It seems we are very short of logic in every day America lately.
Logic, by definition, is following facts to their most obvious and reasonable conclusion. This, of course, requires reason. Reason is the examination of facts as a definitive factor toward outcome. That leaves us with 2 other concepts to examine; facts and truth. You'd think these last two would be easy. How could reasonable person argue over the definition of facts and truth? But that is EXACTLY what is going on in the world today.
You're just gonna have to wrap your head around these things for the purposes of this article. The sane human mind depends on being able to observe, discern, and decide how to view it's environment and react accordingly. Being the world's most complex "difference engine", it's surprisingly easy to throw a monkey wrench into that machine to produce both expected and unexpected results. Without getting to far into the high grass, a difference engine is a thing that looks at a choice between two things and chooses A or B, zero or one, black or white, etc. The human mind is such an engine.
When presented with any choice, the mind chooses A or B, based on all previous input it has received. For instance, you look at a red hot burner on the stove. In an instant the brain says "Should I touch it or not touch it?". Choose A or B. The memory kicks in and says "The last time you did that, it hurt!". The brain then says, "I choose not to touch it". But why? Simple, because the brain chose to believe that the redness of it denoted heat. Heat caused pain. Thus, it opted for choice B. But what if you fooled the brain?
Such studies have been done all over the world. If you showed a person a picture of a hot burner and asked, "To touch or not touch?", the same choice is made. This same concept is used in constructing virtual reality (VR) simulations. The programmer simply creates an environment with cues that your brain recognizes and causes it to believe that what it's seeing and hearing is real. The brain then adopts this information as real and you feel like you are on a space ship, or in battle, or are just walking on a path near a lake. How does that relate to what I proposed earlier? Welp...
Going back to the hot stove, the brain excepted heat as a fact. It accepted the redness of the burner as an indication of heat, and thus a fact. The brain took those two facts and determined a truth that to touch said hot, red burner would be painful. See, it used reason to assemble the two facts to predict an outcome (heat + red burner = pain). Yes, I know this is an oversimplified explanation of how thought works, but for the sake of this article, it is sufficient. We are creatures that rely on facts and reason to operate in our environment. In this example, the brain accepted the idea of being burned as truth.
Facts, reason, logic, and truth and the human mind's ability to use them create the intelligence gap between humans and all other species. Don't think, for an instant, that the folks who I constantly refer to as the "power elite" missed that little bit of information. More to the point, they have taken the scientific understanding of how the human mind works and weaponized it to their own advantage. How, you ask? Easy. Just present the brain with false information, challenge reason, and dispute what is fact and truth. The inevitable result is confusion, distrust, and dismay. Add stress and turmoil to that mix and you get a population that is much more easily fooled, corralled, and controlled by any person or group that claims to own the facts and truth that will allow the brain to compute and feel safe.
I'll give you an example that virtually everyone can relate to. Think about your first day on a new job or at a new school. You didn't know the rules. You didn't know the geography of the building. You didn't have any preexisting relationships with anyone else there. Your brain was quite literally thirsty for any information it recognized to be able to process and react to. You didn't know the facts of the new environment. Fast forward a bit in time until you had been there awhile. Your brain acquired the needed facts. You found out whose coffee cup belonged to who. You found out where the bathroom was. You figured out who were the nice people who weren't. You figured out where all the classrooms were. These were the facts your brain needed to be able to reason out how to act. You went from uncomfortable to feeling more secure. So long as the facts on the ground, if you will, didn't change, your brain established a level of truth about the new situation.
Here's one that most of you WON'T be familiar with, fortunately. Soldiers, in combat, are constantly exposed to new factors of information for their brains to process. And because their minds were unfamiliar with these new "facts", their brains are forced to incorporate them and establish a reason pathway to keep them alive. Bullets are flying about. Explosions are happening all around them. People are being injured, dismembered, and dying near them. These are facts that normal people are not exposed to. The brain adapts. Survival is a primary driver to the human condition and supplants all other factors, including hunger, sleep, sex drive, etc. The brain acquires the new facts, uses reason to determine possible outcomes, and establishes truth. And while I'll leave the discussion of veterans for a future article, it provides a real and plausible description of how the human mind reacts to stimulus.
In the next piece of this article, I'll go into detail about how the manipulation of so-called facts produce new reason pathways and thus reactions in the minds of our fellow citizens. It just may allow for a pathway of understanding into why and how America finds itself in the unseemly situation we are experiencing today.
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