The Year of Logical Thinking

Introduction

To survive this place—for your sanity to survive it anyway—is to play connect the dots. Too many dots! most say. I don’t know which dots are real! many say. This game sucks! we all bemoan. So the majority don’t play. But then we get what we get. A passive dissonance. A colossal misunderstanding of the environment we exist in. From this restricted perspective, our particularly high levels of pessimism regarding the future are predictable. If we don’t understand how we got here then we can’t fully grasp the reality of where we are, and so don’t have the clarity to accurately pursue the way forward. You don’t avoid the losses by not participating in the game—quite the contrary.

There is plenty of writing that shines a light on the senseless and evil rationale of this world and the dirty dogs who are running it into the ground. I’d like to steal some of that spotlight away from them and shine it directly at ourselves. To illuminate where we have been just as senseless and therefore so tragically complicit in the evil perpetrated upon this civilization. For all the malevolent deeds I’ll speak to rely completely on We The People to prevail. THEY have not modified any of their behavior in our lifetime. They haven’t needed to.

We live in a broken world. And yet it’s been great and beautiful. It’s also been heartbreaking and difficult. Our existence is to resist and overcome, which we are equipped to do. We have the capacity to live in peace and we have the power to love anyone. We were additionally given a unique bonus ability, arising out of human rationality and sociability, to surmount the constraints placed upon us by nature. We have the potential genius to create new things, which means that we also have the competence to continually evolve towards a higher good and thrive. There are currently billions of happy people on planet Earth. And that’s the good news.

The theory of Natural Law says that humans possess an intrinsic sense of right and wrong that governs our reasoning and behavior. It is an ethical theory that claims there are universal moral standards (derived from Eternal Law) inherent in mankind throughout all time, which should be the basis for a just society. Under this law, everyone is afforded the same rights, such as the right to live and the right to happiness. “Do unto others…” and principles like love, justice, compassion, and honesty are the components of our democracy. They are the particular elements successful civilizations share in order to collaborate toward all kinds of progress and cultural advances.

The bad news is: Every human also has the capacity to do something terrible to another human. We can’t deny it, since we’ve seen it done a trillion times. There is opposition to all that is good in this realm, those who pay no regard to Natural Law and so have no moral issue with breaking every rule of fairness and decency, those who allow themselves to disregard innocent lives. They do as they will. This is the opponent we play against—the enemy of our human nature. The trick is to stick to humans who resist whatever terrible potential lurks inside them and to stay far away from those who have lost this fight of resistance and are now broken themselves. Because once they have been overcome by their brokenness, sadly, they will forever try to break you.

Our progress and prosperity has always been under attack on this land. It will always only be an active, rational and strong moral character which prevails. We are eternally aware of this universal struggle as it is the theme of every fable and scripture and action movie since man began telling tales. Good vs Evil, Light vs Dark, Luke Skywalker and the Resistance vs Darth Vader and the evil Empire. It is the story of our time and our mission here, to battle darkness whenever and wherever it tries to diminish our light.

For the last 100 years, the strategy of the opposition has been not to beat us in a fair fight, but by default. They are still riding the wave of their last great triumph. This was successfully transforming our character from strong and active to weak and passive, and our thinking from rational to irrational. We are still waiting on humanity’s response, to undo this spell.

These days, it takes considerable effort to be active and rational, in our thinking. We are seemingly very active, since we are so busy, our days filled with a lot of activity. But the more activity we fill our days with can often mean less time to put effort into deep thinking—serious logical reasoning. It takes dedicated focus and intention and spared time to actually think things through. With personal problems, when there is an issue that needs our attention and we keep ignoring it or burying it under the load of our hectic schedule, we sometimes have to make a deliberate attempt to get “space” in our mind to think about it—a long walk or drive, a trek into nature, getting a weekend alone somewhere. We go to these lengths for pressing personal matters, but don’t consider this step nearly as much in dealing with our collective issues.

We’ve strayed far, or been led astray, from fundamental methods of self examination. What are our core beliefs? Are they so rooted and well-defined that we can immediately recognize misalignments with any of our actions or inconsistencies in any of our arguments? The problems of society and the pursuit of the common good really require our undivided attention and a very determined and active approach to this inquiry.

The tragic complicity we could be accused of does not come from an ignorance of the evil perpetrated upon this civilization, but from an ignorance of the mechanics of our own psychology and how all that influences our response to the acts of evil.

Nearly two-thirds of adults say they always or often feel exhausted when they think about politics these days, and another 25% sometimes feel exhausted. The exhaustion comes from trying to make sense of it all, because there’s really no way to make sense out of crazy nonsense. Attempts to make sense of it all only restrict our efforts to continue making sense to ourselves. When we then feel like we are failing at both, we can end up in a very handicapped state of cognitive dissonance. This is the psychological discomfort we feel when our conflicting beliefs or acts contradict our values. The situation is so prevalent in politics because when we align with a certain party, candidate, or cause, we so often oblige ourselves to also align with any undesirable behavior within those factions or personalities. While the term may be getting overused in these times, we seem more and more impaired by it. And this shaky footing is not a good position to face the complexities of 2025. But, ready or not, steady or not, we all know we have huge issues to address.

We only have to look at the current horrors in Gaza to understand how perilous inattention can be. Any remissness on our part is not because we lack concern but because certain inconsistencies in major arguments remained buried for too long and because the conflict between our true values and the actions of our own nation has not been resolved properly.

We’ve gone from Oxycontin opioid epidemic to Fentanyl opioid epidemic with no solution, only an increase in overdoses. We’ve gone from Epstein sex crimes in 2006 to Epstein sex trafficking in 2019 to Epstein sex trafficking blackmail ring in 2025, with no investigation or disclosure. We’ve gone from bombing Iraq in 2003 to bombing Iran in 2025, without changing a word in the justification used, even though these words were proven false. We are at the tipping point of our dissonance, disconnect, and disempowerment. It is time to reel in our irrational thought processes. It is most definitely not time to stop thinking about matters all together.

The majority of us have been trying to persevere through the chaos without completing an essential step. An army on the battlefield under attack from thousands of arrows will get massacred if they carry no shields. After burying their dead and tending to their wounds, would they return to the field to fight the same arrows, again without shields? At some point, no matter how long it takes, we have to pause to craft some sturdy armor for ourselves before we enter the next battle. Without that, we will get slaughtered again.

A major setback in this endeavor is that we don't identify our enemies correctly, and/or don’t target them in correct hierarchical order. So, not only do we re-enter the battlefield unshielded, but once we enter the fight we spin around in circles wildly shooting off arrows in every direction, exhausting ourselves and our ammunitions, but barely affecting our main opposition who is able to continue firing away at us with extreme precision. If we can't zero in on the precise point where the deadly arrows are coming from, our fatalities will keep increasing.

We’ve been under extremely heavy attack these last years! We can’t expect ourselves to respond constructively to all the turmoil we’ve experienced until we honestly process what went wrong with our previous responses. And to deny something went wrong there is to claim that we’re satisfied with the results of where we ended up. The emergencies have not slowed down in any way and we’re all feeling overwhelmed. But if our argument to keep moving forward on the field without reinforced protection is that there are more arrows now than ever —we are not making sense.

My father had Parkinson’s which grew worse over time, including the onset of dementia. For years, he could still keep up with most tasks, including driving and running errands around town. Until one day, with my mom in the car, he got confused and turned the wrong way into oncoming traffic. They survived without a crash, but my mom was pretty freaked out. As a solution, they decided from then on he would only drive to the Safeway and Walgreens. (This is where I’d insert the emoji with eyes bulging in dismay). She knew that taking away his keys and calling it for good on his driving would be devastating for him and their dynamic. She was willing to risk his safety, and the safety of anyone he might potentially drive his van into, to keep the status quo of their life going for just a little longer. Psychologically, she was trying to balance conflicting needs to be safe and to be happy, and had to rationalize that it was okay to be partially safe to maintain the happiness. She also waited quite a while before she told me and my sisters any of this, for she subconsciously knew that if she kept from saying it out loud to others, the issue could stay hidden and unthreatened and she could still tweak the reality of their situation when needed. She was aware of his dementia, but she ignored a certain percentage of her awareness when it became too uncomfortable or inconvenient. My sisters and I had to talk her through some indisputable logic to get her to face up to the gaps in hers.

We all do this. In Hollywood, writers call it spackling—when they need to get past a plot hole that doesn’t really hold water logically, they do some clever or distracting literary chicanery to patch over the implausibility. The mind does this for us also, just to keep the story moving. Hollywood also has a name for the moment after the movie is over when the reasonable mind, once it has calmed down from the barrage of images and sounds, identifies the incoherence. It’s called a “refrigerator moment”, that flash you get later that night in the still of the kitchen when you open the fridge for a snack and it hits you—hey, they never really explained that one part? In the heat of all the action the mind can breeze past the hole quite seamlessly. And most of the time we won’t stop and scan back over the whole plot and think it through once alone in the quiet, we’ll just go to sleep.

We have a responsibility to examine each of our actual experiences and our reactions to them, to make sense of some of it, enough of it, to correct course and not be exposed targets going forward. This is a basic requirement for participation in a citizenry that adheres to Natural Law and defends itself from those who don’t, and in doing so also protects the vulnerable ones not able or of age to defend themselves.

The task is to take a clear look at the life events we have in common which brought us all to this point on the timeline. A calm and quiet scan back over the whole plot so we can give our intuitive logic a chance to say, “Hey, that part didn’t actually make sense. I think I may have just skipped past that plot hole.” When it happens in the theater we can say “oh well, dumb movie”. When it happens in real life and the result is the degradation of society and its health, we actually need to carefully scour the narrative for inaccuracies. We must learn and memorize the precise craft They use. Not the craft of writing a plot so brilliant we can’t detect the transgressions, but of making sure we never get to the quiet refrigerator moment and put in the effort to name them. If we can’t identify the logical errors in real time, the plot just continues on and on and we get the same dumb endings over and over, dumber and dumber.

"Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

I think I first heard this quote from James Baldwin when I was a teenager in college and it’s helped me so much to prioritize things in this order for the rest of my life. The first step in overcoming any challenge always has to be squarely facing the problem and analyzing it thoroughly.

So, that’s what we are doing here—completing the thoroughness part. And it won’t be a slog, I swear! It’ll be super interesting and better for you than any over-the-counter brain boosting supplement. Unresolved situations and unanswered questions only add to our mental anguish. Getting closure on them restores our sanity. (Relatively speaking!) Once you see the patterns of Their chess moves, you quickly become a formidable opponent. You become active—in your thinking.

We will lay these patterns over our shared history and then you can lay them over your personal slice of that history. And, of course, you can choose to not look back on any of this—you have free will. And you can disagree with any of the analysis—you have conscious reasoning. What would be unacceptable, if you also claim to care about the future of our civilization, is if you choose not to look or choose to disagree and you cannot sufficiently articulate why.

THE MATH:

If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault + …

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We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….