There are many things in life that can lead people to the impression that the entire history of humanity is nothing more than a set of cyclical behaviours that we are almost certainly bound to repeat.
After all, as we learn to think, we establish patterns within our thinking. As time goes on and our identities develop, these patterns create a filter through which all new thinking is conditioned and interpreted, and we habitually “lock in” certain aspects for reasons such as comfort, familiarity, consistency, the preservation of our past interpretations, etc.
Depending on how we interact with our thinking, what we think can, at best, go on to further our insight and empower us as individuals, or, at worst, through the establishment of belief systems and rigid, self-preserving modes of thinking, close our minds, paralyse our ability to gain insight, and block us from new considerations.
Our societies function in a similar way; as we moved from scattered, wild living to organised settled life, we developed patterns, systems and cycles of conduct which aided us in meeting the needs of day to day life. Out of these patterns, institutions arose to oversee the preservation of this conduct, seeking to keep things running as reliably, as predictably, and as easy to manage as possible.
Many of these institutions exist for objectively important reasons and fulfil essential roles, such as those related to health and medicine, the production of food and clothing, construction, education, and so on. These institutions, when uninhibited and uncorrupted by other institutions, serve the well-being of people, improve the quality of our lives, and have an intrinsic value which requires no ideological persuasion or belief-oriented conditioning.
But, on the other side of the aisle, there is an establishment of highly dominant institutions which are primarily self-serving and self-preserving, often to the point of putting them at odds with the vast majority of the populations they claim to benefit. As named earlier, these are the political, the religious and the economic institutions – all of which are heavily grounded in belief about how the world ought to be, and which seek to centralise, restrict and direct our life-choices often with their own best interests prioritised over our own.
These institutions can be seen as a social equivalent, and perhaps even manifestation, of the establishment of self-preserving belief systems within our own minds, where the primary focus is on perpetuation of the system itself regardless of the personal and social costs to the people who have been raised into becoming a part of them.
For better and for worse, the self-preserving mechanisms within our thinking and our world not only seek to direct the ways we navigate through life, but also to define it through their influence. This is due to their constant need for validation, since validation equals assumed relevance, and to assure that there are adequate numbers of people who remain dependent on them in one way or another.
And when we are being loose with our abstractions of reality, we might be led to boil the story of human history down to the actions, movements and functions of these established mechanisms at risk of overlooking that which doesn’t conform to these cyclical operations.
As stated before, the history of the conscious human mind can be summed up as a long, drawn-out battle in striving for awareness, and its number one obstacle has always been the devices of its own thinking and their social manifestations.
Therefore, if we want to gain true insight into the tumultuous development of our awareness and encourage it in future generations, we first have to do away with our false grand notions of human history and take note of how our emerging awareness has constantly had to battle with them.
The End of Weaponised Narrative History
Napolean once said “history is a set of lies agreed upon.” This can be considered true when we’re defining history along the lines of the rise and fall of governments and empires, of the establishment of nation states, of the swinging pendulum of political ideology and the varying tendencies towards dominance of religious dogma, of the movements of large financial interests, and of the emergence and disappearance of the hierarchies of leaders and tyrants.
After all, this seemingly endless cycle is bound to be saturated with lies and narrative, as, as it has been said, “history is written by the victors.” This was undoubtedly the case when the so-called victors maintained a sufficient stranglehold on the flow of information within relatively confined areas and with established media and educational institutions ready and willing to put forward their desired versions of events. In modern times, however, with the advent of the internet and the fact that everyone is now walking around with devices in their hands with cameras and the ability to connect them with global audiences at the push of a button, this old truth is being challenged.
Consequently, the old definition of ‘history’ is undergoing a gradual yet thorough change, not only due to the fact that everyone documenting reality and submitting it to the public record can be considered to be doing the work of a historian of some sort, but also by the fact that we finally see there is a lot more to life than the age-old restrictive definitions of history would have us believe.
When we look back through the history of the human species, we see a clear pattern of the empowerment of individual people through overcoming outdated concepts and socially-conditioned ways of thinking, and the unification of the species through advanced technology and greater human awareness. Each of these gives us more effective ways of relating to the world around us and gives us greater strength in defending against manipulation.
It is these aspects of our history that the BADN philosophical discipline wants to reconnect with our broader perspectives, since not only do they shine light on how we got to be the way we are and reconnect us with our roots, essentially making life more interesting, but they also price in the reasons within ourselves and in the world around us as to why the development of our awareness has historically faced such oppressive challenges.
The traditional view of history; the stories of governments, empires, leaders, wars, the stealing of land, the subjugation of people, the self-censorship of our own language and thinking in order to not be ostracised and cast out from the group, etc., can arguably be seen as never-ending attempts on part of the vested interests of belief systems to capture, to co-opt and to resist the expansion of our awareness and consequent liberation of humanity for the purposes of their own relevance and their institutions.
As an outgrowth of this, governments around the world have historically seized the luxury of appropriating the vast majority of all new technology, resources and scientific insight for their own self-serving purposes, as virtually everything anyone could discover and produce would first have to go through the channels of credentials and licensing before it could be applied to society in any meaningful way.
This gave them the means to make sure that they could either acquire or control all new advances, and if that failed, then they could at least take their ever-increasing cut through taxation.
In the final years of the pre-digital modern world, while the institutions still had a stealthy yet slowly weakening stranglehold on information and technology, humanity generated such great awareness and technological ability as to raise the standard of living to such levels of comfort that it allowed for increasing numbers of people to abandon manual work altogether – which had been a defining feature of all societies up until that point – essentially leading to the creation and expansion of, as Thorstein Veblen termed it in 1899, a leisure class.*
Along with these new levels of awareness and technological ability came some radical changes across the board, namely that the internet and mobile phones have become so common as to allow people to communicate and share information with such ease that any Narrative History (including outright lies) that the institutions attempt to impose on people can be scrutinised and critiqued in real-time, and governments, financial powers and religious leaders around the world have been forced into a state of damage control because of this.
The grand realisation is that, throughout history, our growing capabilities have had massive influence in terms of how they can shape our lifestyles and how our minds work, and since we are still in the early days of the advancement of technology and the fine-tuning of human awareness, there is no telling what great changes will come next or how much more liberating these new technologies and states of mind will be.
Aside from the fact that these capabilities have always been captured and appropriated for the benefit of a select few at the expense of all the rest, they nevertheless exemplify that our awareness doesn’t just show us how things in the natural world work, but also that it gives us greater levels of influence in how humanity works in the natural world.
So, the old adage that “history is written by the victors” may have, up until recently, allowed the so-called victors to drown the stories of our past in narrative, myths and lies, but our accelerating awareness has not only uprooted the positions of advantage on which they stood – it has transformed the face of the planet and given us ways of shining brighter light onto the darkness in which they operate.
Narrative history can only be accepted as valid when it is sheltered from the broader human story, and it only holds up against demands for truth when linguistic manipulation goes undetected and the self-serving, self-preserving institutions are enabled to reign freely with their attempts to impose censorship and oppression.
Now, due to a combination of the speed at which information is being shared along with large numbers of people who are taking on a newly-ignited active interest in the way things are, we are witnessing how the historical narratives, empty philosophies and subjugating social ideologies that the institutions are desperately pushing are failing in the wake of increasing awareness and the proliferation of advanced communications technology.
People are simply outgrowing the need for them. New ways of living are being are being sought and developed, and the institutions, rich and as authoritarian as they may be, call out like echoes from the past, desperately using every tactic they can to draw people back in to their sphere of influence.
The New History
When we become aware of that which traditional narrative history has kept concealed, empowered by states of mind no longer restrained by the overbearing impulses of belief systems, it becomes clear that no motion, no movement, no social cause or solidarity with any belief, has ever or will ever be allowed to flourish in the public consciousness without first assuring the preservation of the dominant institutions.
This is, in large part, why the political institution, for example, seeks to reduce all social concern to political ideology and process, for if institutions rooted in what we understand rather than in what we believe were allowed to take the floor in problem-solving, the levels of awareness they would influence may very well threaten the perpetuation of the traditional establishment as a whole.
“Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavour to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.” – James Harvey Robinson
In the past twenty, thirty, forty years, our capabilities have been growing with such rapidity that they are becoming increasingly difficult for establishments to lock down, and in turn, what we are capable of now leads us to such higher levels of self-empowerment and awareness that our traditional institutions are scrambling in desperate attempts to regain and maintain whatever little dominance over human thinking and behaviour they have left.
Their reliance on pushing tribalistic ideology, the endless corruption inherent in the establishment, the growing need to maintain social control over everyday people that distant bureaucrats have, their willingness to lie, to gatekeep truth, to drag populations into irrelevant wars, and the ongoing campaign to convince people that “everything is political” – these are just a few aspects of our traditional systems that lay constant assault to the human mind that not only seeks greater awareness, but is now in a position of such technological advantage as to enable it.
More and more people each day are beginning to notice the huge disparities between what we are capable of and what is being drip-fed down to the majority. In the past, people had to rely on their governments and trusted news sources to get their information. Now, not only are there more ways than ever to get information, but there’s also a greater demand for truth than ever before.
Unless the establishment manages to lock down advanced communications tech as a whole, the new history will be defined by information and the formation of movements that happen in spite of the traditional establishments. This means that humanity will no longer be dependent on a history written ‘by the victors’, but that raw truth that has not been tampered with will be directly available to us, and any and all attempts to wrap that up in narrative will eventually be automatically looked upon with suspicion.
Just as disruptive technologies can cause radical changes to the cycles within society, disruptive awareness is beginning to challenge the age-old languages of thinking that the majority of humanity has become accustomed to. This type of awareness doesn’t fit in to the established moulds – first, because it can’t be contained, and second, because it doesn’t function in cycles; it takes time and moves in a somewhat linear fashion, from ‘unaware’ to ‘highly aware.’
This has everything to do with every single one of us alive today.
If we take on new views of history and modern humanity that no longer merely consist of the stories of establishments and nation states, and instead find ourselves observing a real-time struggle for our own growth and awareness as a species, it becomes clear that every single one of us, no matter how small a part we think we play in the grand scheme of events, each have real influence, either by our action or inaction, in how things move forward.
This influence begins with a choice – do we allow ourselves to become so absorbed in the thinking of those around us and the self-perpetuating rhetoric of the established institutions, unconsciously echoing them and volunteering ourselves as sacrifices in order to repeat the endless cycles of narrative history? Or do we seek to become fully empowered individuals, guided by our greater human awareness, free and finally united as a species, into a future of untapped human potential?
“If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.” – S I Hayakawa
Revolutions of Awareness
As time goes on, it is inevitable that our abilities to think and to speak will go through various stages of growth and maturation. What may once have been primitive functions of basic co-operative survival, limited by low-input and undeveloped function, have now become highly advanced forms of cognition and communication. We are able to navigate through, and indeed create, highly complex psychological structures. We are also able to understand and to innovate, combining our technical insights in such a way as to allow the creation of everything from everyday items to advanced mechanical objects.
We may have spent most of our history with communication wrapped up in superstition and fear – the fear of clashing against dominant voices, etc. – but the kinds of advanced communication we are capable of today, along with the high levels of awareness, insight, understanding and wisdom that it called for in order to be recognised, should not be overlooked, understated or underestimated.
This is a critical, central pillar of what it means to be human, and it has undergone a great number of radical changes throughout history.
While it is true that we’re having to deal with greater levels of attempted oppression alongside the consequences of our own immaturity in handling our new technological capabilities (the hollow vanity encouraged by competitive popularity on social media, for example) we are still learning as we go, and there’s no reason past pessimistic thinking to assume that we won’t mature out of this childhood phase in the future.
Throughout history, some advancements in our ability to think and communicate have been genuinely empowering, but a great majority of them have been conditioned by dominant institutions, individual fear, and ego and group-identity interests that sought to control these advancements, essentially gatekeeping and stealing our opportunities for further maturation.
However, given the fact that we can’t just go from natural ignorance and incapability to mastery in one click of a finger, along with limited insight into how things work and the fact that we have to go through things in order to overcome them, this struggle was historically inevitable, and still is, to some extent, to this day.
Nevertheless, as is often pointed out in certain subcultures, it only takes a minority of influential people to bring about change in the world around us.
It is Margaret Mead who is quoted as saying “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, they are the only ones who ever have.”
No matter who this quote or general sentiment can be attributed to, it is clear throughout history that there has always been something of a struggle between those who wish to further our psychological states and those who are content to live under the socially acceptable conventional wisdom of their ages.
All things considered, the majority of the human species is right to be wary of those who wish to bring about great changes; after all, there are worlds of differences between those who wish to see humanity mature and reach our next stage of evolution and those who wish to control the species and bring about the kind of restrictive, destructive changes that would allow them to assume some form of authority over others.
The fact is, throughout history, a great deal of our own conditioned thinking has rejected new information in favour of outdated states of mind just as our social institutions have rejected human flourishing in favour of social control. But, since raw truth, awareness and understanding transcend what we think and function regardless of our preferences and social conditioning, efforts from regular people and established institutions to reject, to suppress and to contain them have always eventually failed.
With the recent rise of the internet, along with various other factors, there is a much larger percentage of the species today who are focused on using our abilities to think and to speak to improve our abilities as a whole, raising the standard of expectations in order that we might reach our next stage of maturation without assuming that we can just leave it to the establishment to lead us there.
So long as people can no longer be convinced, conditioned and brainwashed into living in ways that uphold cycles of institutional conduct, there is no telling where our awareness will take us next; what levels of maturity, awareness and capability the human mind will reach, nor what kinds of life-improving technology and other creation the future will hold.
What we can be sure of is that there will always be some level of internal and institutional resistance to changes that might liberate people from their dependence, and unless humanity wishes to resign itself to being nothing more than a cog in the machine, we need to determine the best ways to enable and to empower the expansion of our greater human awareness through those who take it the extra mile, while also freeing ourselves of the psychological noise that reduces us to life as little more than pawns of our ancient states of mind and the institutions they spawn.
This falls to each one of us, and calls for us to make the sufficient changes.
Believe and Disbelieve Nothing
The central point of the BADN philosophical discipline is this: if we, as a species, want to be in a position where our awareness, insight, understanding and wisdom can evolve naturally and uninhibited by the creations of our own thinking while also encouraging the greatest freedom of our thinking, then the only way to enable this is to believe and disbelieve nothing.
To put it bluntly, the function of ‘believing’ is a natural emergence out of a period of time where we had almost nothing in the way of insight about the intricacies of nature and life itself, and where relying on thinking defined by nothing but yet more thinking posed no great risk to our survival, and indeed was the very thing that gave us an edge over the challenges of life in nature in the first place.
Now, in the age of complex thinking, global connection and advanced technology, the simple fact is that it is belief, with its divisive, self-preserving, restrictive and subjugating functions, that threatens the personal integrity of every individual on the planet along with nature itself.
When someone finally understands something; for example, that one of their personal judgments has been wrong, or an innovative insight that can be put to use in the creation of a machine, whatever it is that has been understood will function regardless of whatever anyone might otherwise be inclined to think and believe about it. To put it another way, awareness in action will withstand the criticism of human thinking and transcend that which we might opt to believe or disbelieve.
As living, thinking, communicating beings, we are right to cherish our advanced innate abilities, but it would take what some might consider a typically human kind of egotistical naivety not to recognise that our mistakes, our misplaced thinking and our beliefs as a whole can stand in the way of our natural flow of understanding.
In the wake of functional insight and real understanding, there is simply no more room for belief – and in cases where belief is in the driver’s seat, the chances of gaining that insight and understanding will be diminished.
The notion that people can ‘believe what they want’ and the silent assumption that our thinking requires us to either believe or disbelieve it has become so all-encompassing throughout the species that there are more confused, lost, despirited and brainwashed people than ever before. Belief-oriented languages of thinking force us to sacrifice the greater awareness of humanity, our freedom, and our overall oneness as a species in order to take on various group identities and to go on spreading whatever it is we might believe, and this is what detaches us from one another and what we are capable of becoming.
In a world where people’s thinking has been captured and has become so absorbed by belief for various reasons, people are continually led down a path of trying to find the ‘right belief system’ to adopt and to think through.
In reality, it is this pre-ancient language of thinking as a whole that is holding us back and must be outgrown. This can be done by learning to doubt our own thinking and scrutinising it in order to gain awareness of whatever truth it may or may not point to, and when there is nothing there or when people reach a point where they simply don’t know what to think, not to default to the age-old tendency of filling in this gap with a belief of some kind.
It is okay, albeit sometimes troubling, not to know something, but we have the ability to use our thinking and our communication to gain insight and to find out what it is we’re missing. Yet, when we hide our ignorance and cover it up with belief, we trade in our opportunities for genuine discovery for false certainty that only conceals our lack of awareness. From there, we are likely to find our identities growing more and more absorbed in our false certainties, and might even be able to notice that our thinking is developing vested interests in remaining unaware in order to preserve itself.
To reject this awareness in favour of any belief system is to serve only our personal and group egos, and is to voluntarily do the entirety of humanity a disservice, as the matter of whether or not a person will be indoctrinated into a belief-based language of thinking is a matter that will affect almost every single person on the planet at some point or other in their lives. From isolated individual beliefs to entire belief systems, everyone will, at some point, be asked by someone else or will be led to ask themselves, “do I believe in X or Y?”
Therein, often without any critical analysis as to whether “believing” is a sufficient way of handling these matters, the blind tendency of humanity is to go on asking themselves the same question while the subject of the belief varies.
The whole process of believing has become so replete throughout the species as to become the default way of approaching many things that actually have nothing to do with belief, and everything to do with technical insight about how nature works.
When people reduce their awareness to belief and disbelief, no matter how obvious and agreeable these beliefs may seem at first glance, and when they carry no substantial insight about the subjects themselves, their beliefs become little more than psychological pillows upon which their believers can rest their heads, which at the same time silently lay the foundation for the emergence of opposing beliefs. After all, for every belief, there is an opposition.
This is particularly dangerous when it comes to people saying things like “I believe it is wrong to deliberately hurt people”, or “I believe it is wrong to kick dogs,” and other similar casual examples.
To put it simply, these are not matters of belief – they are matters of fact, and the facts are that inflicting this pain will set off a series of negative, undesirable consequences for everyone involved, human or otherwise, and that’s despite whether or not they believe it to be so. Cause and effect.
There are just not enough people in the world with awareness of the range of potential consequences, everything from psychological to physical, to assume that it’s just fine to reduce these matters to casually-spoken belief.
For simplicity’s sake, and so long as a critical view can be taken on the phraseology, it might be fine to summarise these undesirable consequences by saying “I believe it is wrong to kick dogs”, but unless that critical view is priced in to the expression and understood by both the speaker and the listener, not only do we run the risk of inadvertently giving rise to the belief that it is not wrong to kick dogs, but also that just about anything can be reduced to “belief” so long as there’s enough justifiable reasoning.
When we reduce what little awareness we may have to belief, we only inadvertently increase the risk of contributing to the conditioning of more people who hold opposing views to our seemingly-peaceful beliefs.
The fact is, when we reach a point where all relevant technical insights are already priced in to our philosophical disciplines and psychological frameworks of interpretation, or we are at least raised to grasp for them rather than cover up our lack of them, then there is no longer any need to reduce the subjects to belief. Indeed, we would immediately recognise that no belief can possibly be adequate. As a result, there is far less chance that a potentially dangerous opposing belief will begin to form.
In order to enhance our own capabilities, it’s essential that we Believe and Disbelieve Nothing. This will be a great unifier in a world where the species is split due to the creations of its own thinking, and realign people with a force greater than belief could ever become – awareness.
It is not the intention to raise humanity to an imagined ideal or a utopic vision of the most educated species, but, rather, a species that is responsibly free due to its high level of awareness. This is possible, and more importantly, it’s practical.
The commonly accepted language of thinking in almost all global societies, defined by placing primary importance on belief as the driving influence, is of such easily-influenced malleability that it is as virtually limitless as our imaginations themselves.
As such, thinking through belief systems immediately opens people up to manipulation and division, and being coaxed into behaving in ways that they know to be destructive for some grand, idealistic vision of the greater good.
Because of this, even the most seemingly peaceful belief systems can be interpreted and mobilised to give rise to perpetual warfare, oppressive psychological conditioning, baseless superstitions, endless levels of division and splintering compartmentalisation of humanity, subtle levels of socially-acceptable cognitive dissonance in the majority of people, and a silent assumption that humanity itself must rely on the decisions and whims of a ruling class to set the directions of the future for everyone else.
After all, while regular people find themselves divided and bickering over the divisions wrought by their belief systems, they look to those in positions of differential advantage; perhaps someone more informed, or an agency who makes it their business to solve problems while most people don’t have the time, to lead the way and solve the problems for them. However, as is always talked about but not yet applied to the way our world functions, these are almost always the same people and agencies who have the most reason to see to it that we remain divided and misled, as not only does it preserve their institutions and the lifestyles that it affords them, but also keeps humanity voluntarily dependent on them, and, hence, under their control.
Just as we grow as individuals and overcome old tendencies and patterns of thinking, as time goes on and our species becomes more aware, more technically capable and more self-empowered, the need for old institutions will continually be diminished as we find new, more effective means of achieving their goals.
However, it’s a basic insight of our awareness that the institutions and the traditionalised power structures will resist this change and will go to increasingly despotic lengths to recapture what was once theirs, even going so far as to hold their populations to the bare-minimum, lowest possible standards of living while extending themselves every luxury and convincing people it’s for the greater good.
This reason alone could serve as enough justification for some people to realise that belief systems are at the root of our great human delusion and everything that results from it, and that a new philosophical discipline is needed which can slice through the delusions of belief while leaving the natural human qualities it may have once encouraged intact.
The human mind might twist and turn at the idea of giving up belief systems; after all, we have come so far as to root our personal identities in them, along with our hopes and dreams, and through this language of thinking, we evaluate our surroundings and decide what’s worth paying attention to and what isn’t. They’ve become so central to many people as to become the most important thing in their lives, because on top of all else, it is the only language of thinking they’ve ever known.
Besides that, this language of thinking has a somewhat chilling self-validating influence by having their believers be able to look out at the state of the world, and through a series of conceptual filters, be brought to the conclusion that the state of the world is a consequence of people believing the wrong things; “if people just saw things the way I see things, then we would be OK.”
This, unfortunately, is another self-preserving fallacy of belief as a whole.
Seen through the lens of the BADN philosophical discipline, it is actually irrelevant whether someone’s beliefs are “right” or “wrong”, damaging or not, close to the truth or heavily deluded, and so on; it is the language of thinking itself that it is erroneous, and people’s habitual perpetuation of it is the greatest cause of unnecessary suffering, misery, and deprivation.
Just as overlooking our natural unity and seeking the feeling of belonging by joining a tribalised group will ironically backfire by leading to more detachment, disconnection and isolation, sacrificing our greater human awareness in favour of belief will backfire in that it will close our minds.
This has even been recognised in almost all of the world’s oldest well-known religions; from Buddhism to Hinduism and from Christianity to Judaism to Islam, yet these aspects have usually been pushed aside in favour of interpretations of these religions which preserve modes of social control and the dependence on the institutions of its followers, regardless of all personal and social costs.
From ancient religion to ancient philosophy, and from modern technical insight to conditioned modern apathy, it is clear that to be insightful, to be understanding, and to be wise in ways that empower people to relate more effectively with everything else around them, to think and to communicate with greater clarity, and to find inner strength in times of need, can be done without belief – and indeed, our chances are infinitely better without it.
This will be the true revolution of awareness, and it will occur when we reach the levels of maturity and self-mastery needed to see beyond what we’ve been historically conditioned to think. This calls for the discovery of a new philosophical discipline with a focus on truth, uncompromised by the corrupting forces of the belief-oriented language of thinking.
Believe and disbelieve nothing.
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