Why is there a mental health crisis? You cannot have sanity without reason, responsibility and freedom. All 3 are dying.
Reason means that feelings are in the back seat; thinking is in the driver’s seat.
It’s not that thinking automatically leads to the right conclusion and feelings automatically lead to the wrong conclusion. Often, thinking will get to the truth sooner than feelings. However, in some cases feelings get to the truth first. But the question is: HOW DO YOU KNOW? You don’t know whether a feeling — or a thought — is objectively valid until you think about it. Thinking is not automatic; you have to work at it. And thinking is not guaranteed to be right every time. Your best effort at thinking will sometimes lead to a wrong conclusion, due to a faulty premise or insufficient facts. But erroneous thinking is self-correcting. How? Through more thinking. Knowledge and truth are works in progress — for an individual, or a society.
Man’s nature is as a conceptual animal. The way to concepts is through thinking. If you choose not to think — and thinking IS a choice — then you’re left with the undigested content of your subconscious. You’ll be worse off than an animal, because an animal at least has its instincts, preprogrammed to ensure sustainable survival. Humans cannot survive without thinking. You and I cannot survive unless we think — OR, in the case of taking charity or outright mooching, surviving on the thinking of others.
Thinking is under attack as never before. Intellectuals, media buffoons, celebrity airheads, and psychopathic despots are all around us. They attack thinking everywhere they can. If you listen to them, or try to emulate them, you will arrest your own thinking capacity. Unfortunately, most people are inclined to go along with what people in the limelight say. As a result, they’re losing their thinking capacities because they’re being led NOT to think. This leads to mental and emotional instability. Why? Because you can’t have mental stability without thinking.
As thinking goes, responsibility goes. You can’t be independent and self-responsible if you cannot take care of yourself. And you cannot take care of yourself with impaired or nonexistent thinking.
Freedom is the last thing to go. And it’s going. The reason freedom is going isn’t simply because the thugs and dictators in power are mean. Of course they’re mean, if not evil and satanic. But they only have power because the majority of us can or will no longer think. The politicians and unelected thugs simply cash in on our weakness. If we knew how to think for ourselves, and still did so confidently, a dictatorship would not have a prayer in America, or anywhere else. But we’re no longer thinking. If they say there’s an epic virus, despite a 99.9999 percent survival rate, then there’s an epic virus. If they say, take the vaccine and you’ll never get the virus again — and you still get the virus again — then, due to lack of thinking, we take them at their word that the vaccine is only not working because some people refused to take it. If they say the sky is falling and that the only solution is to repeal industrial civilization and return to the physical misery of the past (unless you’re an elite, of course), then we tend to assume … “Well, what the hell do I know?” It starts with recycling for no reason. It ends with handing over your car, and going back to heating your home with a fireplace, like Little House on the Prairie (unless fire, like gas stoves, gets outlawed too.)
As thinking declines, so does freedom. When thinking is gone, you’re left with mass insanity and total dictatorship.
None of what ruined America and the rest of the free world was ever necessary or inevitable. But so long as we refuse or remain unable to think for ourselves … this is what we get.
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