Chapter 7: Freedom and Unity

Throughout this series, I’ve repeatedly put emphasis on two concepts in a scattered kind of way, but haven’t given them their own exploration. These are freedom and unity.

It has to be stated outright that the most natural starting point for the BADN philosophical discipline is recognising freedom and unity as central to everything. This is for the simple fact that the alternatives to freedom and unity are subjugation and division, wherein all manners of ideological, belief-oriented webs will be weaved in order to justify these man-made states.

In reality, freedom and unity don’t require such endless ideological justification, and offer each individual and society itself the greatest chances of living fulfilling, peaceful, meaningful lives, wherein greater numbers of people will be able to pursue the empowerment of their awareness and interests in ways that are more likely to raise them as contributors to humanity, rather than, as we have today, mere cogs in a machine of established institutions and perpetuators of psychologically-paralysing belief systems.


This is not a declaration of advocacy for a government that allows something resembling freedom and unity. It’s a recognition of our natural state; that we are born free and in an interconnected, unified state with the rest of our species, and the BADN approach is to recognise this fact as the best possible foundation for a philosophical discipline fit for the future.

While the primary concern is to reverse and otherwise overcome all of our social conditioning between birth and death that breaks this natural state, the BADN approach also utilises insights from our creative minds and the tools we’ve discovered, such as philosophy backed by the Scientific Method, to establish this state of freedom and unity as central to our philosophical discipline as a species.

When we are born, we are born free in the sense that we are not subservient to anyone else, and although we are highly dependent on the care of those around us, we are also free of all of the ideological conditioning that divides those around us. From here, our freedom can be protected and encouraged by those who raise us, or it can be conditioned for a multitude of reasons – usually indoctrination.

The core realisation is that the moment we begin to believe or disbelieve, our thinking is no longer free. The belief-oriented language of thinking is the socially-conditioned vehicle by which our thinking can be led away from any interest in truth or enhancing our awareness, and directed towards furthering traditional systems of thinking and belief-oriented agendas.

As a direct consequence of this, all the self-preserving, divisive aspects of thinking concerned with personal- and group identity-interests become active, essentially indoctrinating us out of our freedom along with the splintering consequence of breaking apart our overall unity.

The kind of freedom that BADN recognises as our natural state is one of the human mind being nurtured to seek insight, understanding and truth wherever it can – as opposed to being handed a preconceived worldview through belief systems – and is completely worthy of nurturing into adulthood when considered up against our man-made restrictive, divisive, corrupting alternatives.

As for unity itself, it’s as easy as recognising the mere fact that we are born into this life together – with the same biological needs, the same challenges to survive natural conditions, the same inclinations to find belonging, to forge common bonds, start friendships, raise families, to follow our interests, to develop new abilities and to gain new levels of awareness, etc. This simple recognition establishes a unifying bond between us all, and it is common to all of us until broken apart by our prehistoric social conditioning.

Over the past century and a half, perhaps longer, scientific exploration has flourished and technology has advanced to levels which transcend personal, local and national barriers. It has gone on to show that there are shared attributes in our genetic makeup and neural structures that span our entire species regardless of our socially-conditioned states. It has also made it possible, through advanced communication and transportation technology, to bring people together out of various degrees of isolation from around the world, laying the groundwork for a worldview that finally recognises that we are one species living in this world rather than splintered factions scattered through separate landmasses competing for power.

This, too, is a unifying insight, and when we realise that our entire existence as a species hinges on the integrity of everything around us, it becomes easy to see that overlooking this and opting instead to attain personal gain or group-ideological dominance despite that will only lay the foundation for a cold tyranny of self interest, resulting in states of detachment, isolation, insecurity, tribalistic fragmentation, etc.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.”
Charlie Chaplin
The Great Dictator, 1940

The breakdown of our unity through our social conditioning gives rise to an assumption of separation, and the conditioning and restriction of our freedom in order to preserve the established institutions and the ideologies of those around us often leads to an assumption that it is only natural to have our lives directed by a select few people.

These assumptions and conclusions are symptomatic of a natural lack of awareness which can now be rightfully challenged – not only by the philosophers of old, but by modern scientific findings which can be tested and from which we can gain feedback from nature as to their validity and the kinds of impacts they will have on the world around us and each other.

As harsh and as unforgiving as nature can sometimes be, it isn’t to blame for the cyclical cruelty of humanity evident through history, nor the ever-growing sicknesses of the human mind which make such cruelty likely – this is self-imposed, and is largely due to living in ways that are dominated by what people think rather than guided by our greater human awareness.


BADN requires recognition of these natural states and advocates them being accepted as fundamentals to the philosophical discipline for various reasons; for individuals, it will re-align the most divided among us with our natural unity while freeing the mind by encouraging the greatest freedom of thought and expression.

This shift in foundational focus will make it virtually impossible for divisive ideologies to take root, to grow and to flourish in our minds, and will also prevent the rise of that which tends towards divisive social control, the gatekeeping and censorship of truth, malicious psychological manipulation, and the establishment of institutions which seek to grant groups of people power over others in order to serve their own self-interest, especially when taking into consideration that the forming of such groups immediately creates an imperative towards the perpetuation of a tribalistic “in-group/out-group” dynamic.

This is a trademark of belief-oriented thinking, as it is intrinsically done in the language of division, but application of our natural unity to the language of our thinking prevents the majority of this division from occurring in the first place. It aligns us more towards recognising how we are alike, where the differences among us become opportunities to learn, to bond, and quite often to celebrate as differing strengthening characteristics of the human species as a whole.

Recognising how our common attributes and our various differences establish a symbiotic bond between us all is infinitely more practical than assuming that our differences separate us, given our historical fearful tendency to become angry and even to hate anything that seems different to ourselves.

Due to the conditions we emerged out of, we might be used to seeing each other as splintered, isolated fragments of a disjointed whole. Alongside that, we have built institutions on top of our divisive abstractions, standardising this assumption of separation based on our differences as just a natural part of the way the world works, leading many to think that because it has always been that way, it “should” always be that way.

The fact is, our prehistoric and ancient languages of thinking emerged out of a lack of awareness, combined with the natural conditions of scarcity and the constant need of defence against the ill-will of strangers, and that combination underpins the majority of our historical states of mind and the institutions they gave rise to.

The world today – not only the man-made world of institutions, systems, customs and so on, but also the natural world and how we interact with it – is unrecognisable up against how it was in the past. It’s time that our thinking adapts to these conditions and does so in a way that doesn’t disconnect us from ourselves, each other and nature, and no longer gives us reason to use our incredible technology against ourselves.


Since the birth of our species, we have developed many different features and characteristics that have been conditioned by the natural environments from which we emerged. Under a unifying language of thinking, this can be interpreted as giving us amazing advantages in different areas of nature, but under our historical divisive mentalities, this creates what are largely considered to be dividing factors.

In the past, these differences among us may have rightfully been seen as warning signs; something to arouse our suspicions, something that indicates potential danger, but in the present, despite the fact that the majority of cultures have become infinitely more civilised than our most distant relatives, we still struggle with how to frame and place these perceived differences due to being conditioned into viewing them through shallow, tribalistic and otherwise belief-oriented lenses.

This means we can spend countless years making painstaking progress bridging our differences, nurturing connection and common understanding and walking the path towards real unity, but that can be invalidated and reversed in an instant if a belief system divisive enough successfully spawns and is spread throughout the population.

The progress of civilisation is fragile so long as humanity is seen as a set of splintered groups rather than an advanced whole, as this is the psychological foundation necessary to give rise to various “us and them” mentalities which threaten not only the peace between perceived groups of people, but also the very foundational basis for civilisation itself.

This is especially pronounced here in the Western world where the so-called ‘multiculturalist’ lifestyle has been most encouraged. Where there has been successful integration, civilisation between previously conflicting communities and cultures has been achieved and has made incredible leaps in bringing people together in peace.

However, in recent years, with the introduction of still-conflicting cultures along with a repopularisation of severely divisive religious and political mentalities, this peace and the unity it fostered is now under great threat. And instead of realigning our focus towards peace and unity, the majority compensates for this newly-accepted division by coming up with concepts to try to rationalise its dangers, essentially voluntarily overlooking the problems in favour of an accepted ideological narrative.

We are fed notions of equality in vain efforts to establish the façade that the civilised peace we have sacrificed is still attainable despite our many cultural and psychological clashes, and our language is policed as crusaders of such notions seek to appear more enlightened and advanced than those who don’t see things the way they do.

In practice, patchwork political concepts such as tolerance and equality will not do to bring people together, as the language of thinking they inhabit inevitably leads to the tendency towards reducing people to their perceivable or ideological group identities, highlighting the surface-level differences between us and keeping them at the forefront of our focus.

It will not do just to change the words that we use in order to appear more understanding, empathetic, compassionate, insightful, whatever the case may be. There are many out there today who speak these words in order to conceal the division they sow and in an attempt to put across a certain image of themselves in the minds of others.

So, in the name of ‘equality’, more division is being wrought and more unity broken apart than ever before. For, if we recognised our natural unity, anything remotely resembling ‘equality’ will be taken care of as a result.

But – and this point can not be stressed enough – people have to be divided for the concept of equality to become relevant, whereas people can’t be divided when unity is at the core of our philosophical and social outlooks.

Therefore, so long as divisive tribalism is interpreted and accepted as a natural condition by dominant worldviews, and notions such as equality are promoted as virtuous, world unification is impossible and divisive belief systems will be endlessly generated in its place. This especially includes those that offer people the added bonus of allowing them to think that they are morally virtuous people, such as equality-hustlers, while at the same time allowing them to weaponise these ideas against those who fall afoul of whatever trending social narratives are at play.

In short, these ideas become nothing more than a means to profit and power, and allow the self-proclaimed morally virtuous people to behave in reprehensible ways towards those they deem to be part of the problem – which is an ever-expanding subset of humanity – while convincing themselves that their bitterness, intolerance and hatred is actually a force for good.

The simple fact is that ‘equality’ is an enemy of our natural unity, and will only create further resentment and division among an already struggling species.

In reality, any silent assumptions we make that our reasons for disliking each other actually make us separate are part of a grand delusion. When unity is recognised, the differences we once noticed about each other will suddenly seem a trivial part of the ideological world that humanity has superimposed over the natural world, and instead will start to be recognised as varying advanced features of a concentrated whole.


The theft of our freedom and the breakdown of our unity is politically, religiously, and economically informed – all of which are outgrowths of the belief-oriented language of thinking.

As a counter to this, the BADN approach is to cement freedom and unity into the building blocks of society to such a degree that, no matter what other systems we then build on top of it; political, religious, economic, etc., we can never again be led into thinking it’s the institutions granting us that freedom, and, as such, we will never again put them in positions to impose restrictions upon it.

Whatever our future world may look like, our recognition and application of our unity has to be protected in such a way that the concept of ‘togetherness’ can not be turned into an inherently divisive ideological weapon, as it has been in the current day.

As for freedom, it’s true that we are born free and capable of thinking anything, which means that we must all remain vigilant that such freedom can not be used against us by being convinced to think in ways that box us in and that demand that people think and behave in certain ways or else be accused of threatening the fabric of society.

The Believe and Disbelieve Nothing philosophical discipline errs on the side of nature showing us what freedom and unity are, rather than potentially compromised human thinking, and encourages awareness and educational exploration with advanced methods to reveal this to us in greater detail as time goes on.

We are one species in various states of fragmentation. Humanity is not a set of separate competing groups with no connection and who are destined to battle each other into non-existence until there is only one race, religion, class or nation left over – although we may sometimes behave as though it is.

Similarly, we are not all the same and should not be brainwashed into conformist states of mind regarding that under threat of social ostracisation or worse. We are one, but not all people and not all cultures are the same, and trying to force an entire species into such uniformity is the result of narcissistic utopian belief that is only likely to lead to misery, brutality and death.

We are a concentrated whole that has been pitted against itself, and as Carl Sagan pointed out, an organism at war with itself is doomed. Our best defences against this, according to the BADN interpretation, are freedom and unity, and the best way to preserve these natural states is to believe and disbelieve nothing.


Previous: Chapter 6: Future Thinking and Morality
Next: Chapter 8: The Revolution of Awareness