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Breaking the Matrix: How Abductive Reasoning Unites Reality and Truth

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Deductive reasoning, defined as starting with general premises assumed true and deriving specific conclusions—like “all dissenters disrupt order, so Jane, a dissenter, is disruptive”—often shapes how people perceive reality, mistaking their subjective lens for universal truth. This process can create a thought matrix, a rigid mental framework where premises from culture, authority, or personal experience dictate thought’s boundaries, defended dogmatically as reality itself. For example, someone shaped by childhood trauma […] Read more »

The Straw Man Fallacy: Reducing Depth to Shallowness

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The straw man logical fallacy—where an argument or character is distorted into a weaker, oversimplified version to be easily attacked—serves as a potent tool for misrepresenting individuals of depth and complexity. A person of depth, marked by nuanced ideas, emotional richness, and intricate reasoning, becomes a target for those with agendas or those too biased or dimwitted to grasp such complexity. Whether driven by malice or ignorance, these critics erect […] Read more »

Shallowness, Depth, Truth, and the Purpose of Force

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The angry mob, fueled by ignorance and prejudice, stormed the castle, their shallow understanding of the world reduced to simplistic labels and stereotypes, as they sought to destroy the monster, which they called “Depth” – a symbol of complexity and nuance that threatened to shatter their comfortable illusions. With each blow, they struck not at the monster’s heart, but at their own limitations, attempting to silence the whispers of doubt […] Read more »

Hades and the Alchemy of Pain: Transforming Hurt into Depth

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We live in a culture obsessed with positivity, productivity, and the relentless pursuit of “moving forward.” Yet, this constant push for superficial success often masks a deep-seated fear: the fear of feeling. The truth is, pain is an inevitable part of the human experience, and our attempts to escape it are ironically what keep us tethered to a life of shallowness. It’s time we re-evaluate our relationship with hurt, recognizing […] Read more »

Connecting the Character Traits of Pride, Humility, and Dignity Together

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Pride, humility, and dignity emerge as authentic virtues when they arise from an internal locus of identity, shaped by self-awareness and rational integrity. These internalized traits stand in sharp contrast to their externalized distortions—arrogance, pretentiousness, and a superficial mimicry of dignity—which depend on an external locus of control or identity for validation. Ayn Rand, the creator of Objectivism, extolled pride as a moral summit, while rejecting humility as a flaw. […] Read more »

From Instinct to Insight: Mastering Emotional Pain

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The Roots of Pain and the Power of Reflection Emotional pain often feels like an assault on our very being, a visceral signal that something is wrong with us or the world around us. But what if this pain arises not just from the event itself, but from how we identify with it? Consider the possibility that people—whether children, narcissists, or anyone in a prerational state—see their pain as a […] Read more »

Duality, the Garden of Eden, and Ayn Rand

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In the biblical narrative, duality emerges as a consequence of humanity’s choice to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, an act framed by me as providing the necessary “opt-out” from a higher harmony and morality, to ensure free will. Eating the “forbidden fruit” plunges existence into a polarized state, where good and evil are no longer integrated within a unified moral framework but are instead […] Read more »

Why False Accusations Are So Potent and Destructive

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Question: It seems that there is a dynamic where false accusations generate some sense of imagined or real power over others, where they are acting as the judge, lawyer, and sentencing authority all in one. For example, to accuse a friend or relative of wrongdoing without evidence and then punishing them for it by blocking all further contact, or by turning friends and/or family against them with dramatic certainty, but […] Read more »

The Power Over Others Game vs the Logocentric Truth Game: The Actual Evil vs Good

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I began writing this article back on July 31st, 2024 as I was starting to see a pattern of basic assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors that filtered into two major categories of relating to others, each having their own very distinct rules for playing, the “power over others game” and the “Logocentric truth game”. It was turning into quite a long article when my family and I had a massive collision […] Read more »

Bridging the Gap Between Theology and Philosophy

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I used to be a Christian theologian, or at least, somebody who loved studying doctrine and debating it, but I was also somebody who asked a lot of questions, and that led me through and out of Christian theology, and into psychology and philosophy. Along the way, I converted to Judaism and spent many years devoted to learning, understanding, and practicing it, especially since they valued psychology a bit more […] Read more »

Self-Abandonment, Moral Cowardice, & Abandoning Others

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The following was a series of Q&A’s that I performed with the Llama3.1:8B AI chatbot (see my AI Disclaimer) to learn more about self-abandonment, moral cowardice, intellectual and moral courage, and abandoning others. I have a saying that “those who would  abandon themselves will definitely play the [archetypal] harlot and throw others under the bus too. I will not abandon myself, therefore I will not abandon those I have made […] Read more »

Freedom, Safety, & Natural Law

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Natural law can be boiled down to two main pillars, the masculine self-defense principle and the feminine non-aggression principle (NAP), and BOTH provide freedom as a cause and they provide safety as an effect; it can be summarized by the saying “do no harm and take no shit”. The masculine self-defense principle provides freedom to myself to live my life free from external interference (as long as I stay within […] Read more »

How to Defeat Power-Directed Systems of Thought

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It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it […] Read more »

A Psychology Scholar Reacts to the “Persona” Video Games

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RE: slaying shadows within the collective unconscious rather than personal shadows, I will say that after I had done a substantial amount of personal shadow work over a 14 year period, I then started tackling a lot of collective shadows to better understand them, and from that I learned even more about myself, and found more personal shadows. My collective shadow slaying (integration) lasted another 8 years or so. I […] Read more »

Confirmation Bias as a Negative Strategy to Resolve Contradictions Through Pressuring Conformity

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I recently had a run in with a person who was very argumentative with my partner, but it turned out it was due to the contradictions and contrast my partner was providing to him about his own limited worldview, and in an attempt to restore the status quo, he looked up everything he could find that contradicted my partner’s viewpoint and confirmed his own. When one seeks only viewpoints that […] Read more »