For all of our historical and present struggles, not only have we gained a great deal in the way of natural insights, scientific understanding and technological capability, but also endless streams of creative self-expression and cultural variation. Combined with advanced technology, and thanks to the questionably free flow of information that the internet has afforded us, people are no longer as isolated as they once were, becoming more informed and in many ways a lot more self-empowered when it comes to their thinking.
Similarly, the gaps between many different cultures have been bridged, and through the simple fact of living in a connected world, many people are coming to the realisation that life isn’t a game of a bunch of separate groups competing for dominance in a power-based structure, but that we are instead one species competing against our own shortcomings to find ways of living peacefully in the natural world.
This leads to the basic realisation that the integrity of our own personal lives is fully dependent on the integrity of everything else in our world.
The mere fact that we now have this awareness proves how far we’ve come from the ill-equipped, near-blind species we once were, and at the same time affords us a wealth of guiding insights that help us overcome the great, perplexing and seemingly-impossible challenges of life.
When we stop to consider the rate of the growth of our awareness and abilities as a species, and try to track the effects of these changes in our own personal lifetimes, our minds are forced open to a world of staggering, often dizzying ways in which our conditions have been transformed in such a short time.
Yet, at the same time, it can seem the rhetoric of old surface-level and ideological divisions have managed to reach their loudest – despite all the ways we have advanced, we are still largely driven by belief-based structures that operate through monolithic social institutions that have prioritised their self-preservation over what benefits people as a whole, and props up these divisions through prevalent states of mind that put them at the forefront of our consideration.
The same is true with human ego, which has historically been rewarded in politics, business and religious institutions, as the characteristics which push people to seek power and control over others are also the characteristics that serve the prevalence and self-preservation of these institutions. It has often been said that we live in a cut-throat, dog-eat-dog world, and it is undeniable that our ideological institutions and our belief systems have been conditioned along these lines.
This, to some, can make it seem as though the ways we’ve changed really aren’t that impactful since the prehistoric influences are still such a central force in determining our behaviours and directions, and, more often than not, it appears that despite all that, there’s something at our core that operates in a fundamentally fixed way and is incapable of real, lasting, significant change.
This is a good place to plant a flag: our greater human awareness has taken us from mythological explanations of natural processes to detailed technical insight, from rudimentary stone and wooden tools to automated machinery, from cave paintings to modern communication and personal artistic expression, and from volatile, impulsive, low-resolution states of mind and behaviours to complex thinking and mutual understanding.
This was not the work of our dominant belief-based ideological institutions, and in fact, they have often resisted these advances, fearing that it threatens their stranglehold on information and power. All the great revolutions of thinking and lifestyle have been a result of the natural growth of human awareness – it’s simply what we are capable of and what will inevitably emerge when our minds are uninhibited in our quests for truth, awareness, creative self-expression, etc.
These are things that are common to us all, and even though there have always been people, organisations and institutions that would rather keep us in a state of ignorance for their own purposes and condition us into shelving certain parts of ourselves in order to co-opt our energies, our curiosity, awareness and creativity are aspects of humanity that have never been fully captured by the domineering aspects of belief and all its outgrowths.
Obviously, it doesn’t stop here.
The development of our awareness and everything it results in shows no sign of ending, but it is in constant conflict with age-old tendencies that threaten to send us back centuries and that have their roots in our own active thinking.
This is where BADN becomes useful. Not only does it offer a framework of interpretation that puts these things into perspective, but it also reframes this conflict as being the direct result of states of mind and institutions that simply refuse to change. It’s not that they are incapable – it’s that they have a lot to lose, and it’s not that humans are built a certain way – it’s that our minds have spent centuries being conditioned under misled influences.
BADN is an attempt at pushing our awareness past these historically-conditioned institutionalised barriers and centring our interpretations on the parts of the mind which benefit us all, highlighting their importance and relevance wherever possible, while also seeking to offer a genuine effective attempt at handling the unpredictability of the world without going to war with it.
It requires no ideology, no self-affirmation, no groups to join or dues to pay – just a series of choices about where we want to put our focus. This is the natural position to be in once it’s been accepted that we’ve been deluded up to this point, realigning us with the position that we are all born into before our decades of divisive social conditioning.
It is the point here to show that it isn’t our growth, awareness and creativity that we should sacrifice in order preserve the institutions, but the other way around. The fact that our historical states of mind and all the ideological and belief-oriented institutions require conditioning, capture and restriction of our natural human qualities simply to keep themselves relevant can be seen as a sign of deep human error, and that these self-preserving influences are a false basis for a peaceful world.
This digital age of information is still relatively new, its emergence within living memory of a large percentage of the world’s population, and the younger generations now are the first generations to be born into it, never knowing, for example, a world before streaming media or the internet as a whole.
If we take a moment to stick with the current day, it’s easy to start listing off many aspects of the modern world that have improved people’s lives and made them a lot more comfortable and enjoyable thanks to the creative and technological endeavours of others – comfortable, lasting clothing; instant communication at the click of a button; detailed awareness of how others live and how nature works; being able to share our creativity and things we find interesting with wide audiences of people, whereas contributions from people of past generations will have often faded into obscurity because this outlet wasn’t available.
The list goes on and on.
But these revolutionary technological changes have also presented a whole new set of challenges to humanity as a whole, and the default response to us failing to overcome these challenges is often to blame the technology itself.
Technologies such as firearms and knives, social media, mobile phones and television, in an attempt to grapple with certain behaviours or not being able to deal with the shortcomings of our own thinking, become a scapegoat behind which are an easy set of reasons for them to take the blame.
When we blame social media itself, for example, we run the risk of inadvertently giving cover to the truly corrupted business models which govern these services that seek to influence certain behaviours in order to increase engagement time, further financial and political agendas, and fortify their own integrity and relevance.
Social media proves its technical value to us every time we send a message to someone we need to communicate with, and were it not for unwanted human interference, we might still be able to recognise it as a simple technology which serves a great purpose for humanity.
Instead, social media has had many business- and politically-oriented layers added onto it, wherein people have their most shallow behaviours encouraged in games of egotistical popularity contests, and companies have often interfered in the sharing of information along political lines in order to control how certain information is communicated, only allowing it to be shared in pre-approved ways that do not threaten the preservation of certain modes of social control.
Firearms are another kind of technology that takes the blame for human behaviour. Here, it’s important to point out that violence is not, and never will be, symmetrically distributed across the species, and while one person has a gun and actively wants to shoot someone with it, another person will have a gun and shooting someone with it is the last thing they would ever want, and would do anything to avoid it.
What are the main differences between the two, and what could be done differently in the world to the first person’s desire to shoot someone below the danger point?
Here in England, gun crime is less common as the population has been largely disarmed, although this has been changing in recent years. In our case, knife crime has been a huge blight on the population for around two decades, give or take. It’s important to recognise that this is a relatively new phenomenon, as knives have predated our knife crime epidemic and were previously carried by youths and adults alike as everyday items with no immediate danger to anyone. Things have changed from then to now, and something is actively influencing the states of mind necessary to make these behaviours common.
The hard fact is that these technologies exist and knowledge of them will not be going away. This is especially true for knives and firearms more so than social media, as knives are everyday objects and the production of gunpowder takes little more than the combination of three natural substances. Therefore, we can talk endlessly about what a nice world it might be if we could just rid ourselves of these technologies somehow, but ultimately that would require us to become wilfully ignorant of something we are already aware of or submit to full totalitarian control over our actions.
Seeing that, the question then becomes, what do we do about these things? How do we handle awareness of the existence of technologies and make peace alongside the existence of things that have the capacity to destroy us? How do we do that without trading our potential for growth and awareness for totalitarian control?
Under our current establishment-oriented worldviews, the assumed solution is to use justice systems to punish or to reform those who commit these crimes, but what isn’t talked about often enough is that these methods of dealing with these behaviours, by necessity, are only called upon after the damage has already been done. This has immeasurable consequences, as the trauma that victims of all sorts of crime may experience might form the exact kind of psychological foundation necessary to give rise to more of the same or similar behaviours.
Beyond that, as it has been said, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Even our most morally-just leaders and institutions are not immune to the compromising divisive and self-preserving interests of their foundational language of thinking.
It doesn’t work and it’s never going to work.
Due to the self-validating nature of belief, it produces a skyrocketing likelihood that, instead of turning their perspectives inwards to refine their awareness, people will project their shortcomings onto the world around them, and due to its divisive nature, this will often take the form of destructive and even violent tendencies being channelled towards those who do not share the beliefs and are deemed to be “others.”
So long as humanity clings to belief and accepts it as a primary driving psychological force, we should expect this to occur with certain percentages of the population, and in increasing numbers as populations grow and the world’s people become more desperate and their beliefs, more radical.
Alongside them exist a peaceful majority whose states of mind are guided by something of real value which can seemingly bring most violent tendencies to a halt before they drive behaviours, and the claim here is that there are real solutions to be found in these states of mind. This is evidenced by this peaceful majority, who, even in their lowest moments or their most experimental creative states, aren’t a danger to anyone.
If awareness of these states of mind and their peacekeeping components can be encouraged and nurtured, and perhaps, in a more mature world than the one in which we find ourselves, can be built in to our philosophical disciplines from an early age, the bloodshed, brainwashing, co-opting and censorship of our awareness and restrictions on our creativity, and all other undesirable behavioural results of our shortcomings, would be reduced to being such rare occurrences as to no longer be an accepted norm in so many societies.
The critical point is this: these states of mind must be the natural results of combined awareness, insight and understanding, not top-down micro-managed ideological indoctrination in the name of the greater good, nor superimposed with an iron fist.
When we blame technology, try to micro-manage people’s curiosities and creativity, or rely on a so-called leader to dictate our paths to us, what insights about ourselves, behaviour and life itself do we sacrifice by not overcoming these challenges personally?
Under current conditions, it’s not only that we don’t enable ourselves to become aware, but that we designate only a few people to do it for us, essentially outsourcing our own growth so that we don’t have to go through it ourselves. This comes with the silent clause that, while the people we outsource to will reap the benefits of their enhanced awareness, it’s the majority of the world’s population that will suffer the consequences for their mistakes and their malice.
Almost purely for the fact that we are not psychologically mature enough to handle certain truths, we, as a species, voluntarily pit ourselves against the very fruits of our awareness and creativity. This can be considered as very revealing of the false, backwards nature of our current languages of thinking, and through all the silent assumptions we make to justify it, how we have been conditioned to give socially conditioned belief systems, and the establishments they spawn, false relevance and raise them up to higher importance than our own uniquely-human abilities.
In today’s world, despite the fact that our wealth of insight has grown to incredible levels, our species continues in streamlined skyrocketing generation of crime, war, and social fragmentation and isolation along arbitrary identity-oriented lines.
It is the claim here that this disparity isn’t due to Human Nature or the mere existence of certain technologies, nor certain groups of people, nor “The System.” It is due to bottlenecked states of mind that are the inevitable outcome of belief-oriented languages of thinking, especially pronounced now that the world is emerging into conditions that require understanding.
The blaming of technology is both easily understandable and readily available, as is blaming “The System” for all our troubles, which is why so many people can subscribe to it, and it also conveniently keeps people’s critical perspective turned outwards towards something and someone else, rather than inwards. This may be comforting and make sense in the short-term, but unfortunately for us all, this scapegoating only calls back to a mixture of fear of the unknown, blind ignorance and prehistoric superstition. Evidence, to add to the pile, that the ancient noise in our heads is still blocking our paths forward.
With the rate of our technological progress becoming difficult to keep up with, no matter how actively people try, and the potential impact of these technologies affecting larger amounts of people along with the very planet we inhabit, we must recognise that, just as technology is an outgrowth of our insight, ingenuity and creativity, The System is an outgrowth of our historic languages of thinking.
The philosophical discipline being presented here is an attempt at being one of the first that operates in fundamentally different ways than switching out one ideology for another, one belief system for another, and so on. Its characteristics predispose people towards the kinds of qualities that are natural to us all and require no lifelong social conditioning to be convinced into, and which lead people to become natural contributors to our awareness and understanding.
As for how to handle technologies which become destructive forces when in the wrong hands, it’s the claim here that without all of our tribalising, divisive social conditioning being the basis for the dominant institutions in our world and of the belief systems of individual people, we would simply grow out of these wild brutal tendencies that have stained the history of civilisation.
The ancient languages of our modern-day thinking set us up with a silent never-ending list of reasons to divide, to hate each other, to go to war and wreck the planet in the process, and enables malicious individuals and organisations to gatekeep truth and divide humanity for profit and power.
This is convenient for those who seek social control as they are instantly called upon to take power each time there’s a problem that needs to be solved. This can also be seen as a self-preserving feedback loop of the establishment – so long as they are assumed to be real problem solvers, and so long as people are kept from thinking otherwise, their preservation is guaranteed.
A great majority of people are aware of this, but have little choice but to fall back into the same routines of blaming technology and relying on languages of thinking and authoritarian control that drag us into conflict with ourselves and with our neighbours because no other viable options are made available in the public consciousness.
And now that we’ve developed the technology to do far more damage a lot easier than we’d like to find out, it’d be the mark of a truly wise species to actively overcome whatever psychological obsolescence we can in order to discover the self-empowering aspects of technology and creativity rather than using them to feed erratic, destructive tendencies.
For the sake of all of our futures, we should seek to set new social standards necessary to pull the species out of our divided, belief-based slumber, and do what we can to push humanity towards meeting those standards.
BADN – Believe and Disbelieve Nothing – is an effort in this direction.
Whatever our future world might look like, the intent and focus of this philosophical discipline is to influence one which strongly encourages creativity and educational exploration, as not only do these things keep life more enjoyable and interesting, but they also bring about the real, significant change in our world that lead to insights and technological innovations that have the realistic ability to impact everyone regardless of arbitrary surface-level division.
It is also the claim that the majority of people want this kind of world; the kind of world where they can raise families into a living standard and with a stability that isn’t constantly dancing on the edge of deprivation, social breakdown, or malicious intentions being hurled in their path; where individuals can travel, pursue hobbies and educational interests which enhance their awareness and, as a consequence, benefit everyone around them, rather than having these energies co-opted and commodified to benefit institutional or financial interests; where people can encourage each other’s creativity without being forced into competition with each other; where truth isn’t hidden from people for the purposes of social control, and where people are finally empowered with states of mind ready and willing to handle these truths, wherever it may lead.
“The smarter your kids are, the better my life will be.”
Roxanne Meadows
When it comes to behaviour and the uniqueness of humans, it isn’t our tribalism and divisive behaviours, the torture of our own species and the constant warring that defines us. No, that can be found throughout the animal kingdom. In reality, what defines us and makes us unique as a species is our conscious awareness, our informed curiosity, creativity, and complex thinking that has real-world effects in terms of how we relate to everything around us.
These aspects and capabilities of the human mind not only offer us a unifying social force, but they can also serve as a natural basis on which to form states of mind fit for the future; states of mind which no longer encourage us think our way into hatred and destruction, and to mass-produce our way into apathy.
When it comes to the practicality of believing and disbelieving nothing as a way of life, and specifically in context of the BADN discipline, it’s clear that with great power comes great responsibility, and with the kind of technology we have at our disposal today, the claim here is that we have a philosophical responsibility to find ways of avoiding using it to destroy ourselves and the world around us.
Also, as humanity opens itself up to new levels of self-empowerment through awareness, every individual person shares this responsibility before venturing into a quest for truth, as knowledge is power, and each one of us must take a conscious step to arm ourselves with disciplines and ways of thinking that can handle the massiveness of this power. This can be passed on from generation to generation in the same way that belief systems are today, and for much better reasons.
When this isn’t done, a little knowledge can inflame the ego and lead to the perpetuation of some of the worst, most irritating attitudes, which could be funny in how shallow they are were it not for the fact that they are so dangerous. It also sets those who seek to control others up to become nagging arbiters of morality, which translates socially into critiquing people’s use of words, conversation styles, humour, and interpersonal choices in an attempt to try to micro-manage their lives.
Another part of that philosophical responsibility is to recognise the basic insight that it is not only ourselves that our actions affect, but neighbouring cultures with no vested interests in our ideological clashes, and a planet of plants and animals that has been millennia in the making. It would take a uniquely human kind of madness to destroy that because of the oversight of some basic philosophical principles and the misuse of technology that resulted from it.
The goal is that we maximise utilisation of technology, the encouragement of creativity, the empowerment of awareness and educational exploration, and with a new emphasis on philosophy and the scientific method as guiding, non-commodified mentalities, as those aspects of our lives produce the real revolutions that impact more people on average, regardless of arbitrary social division. Not only that, but they can make their achievements without bloodshed.
The same can not be said for politics, religion or monetary economics. As stated repeatedly so far, the practise of these institutions being the best places to outsource our problem-solving energies is now an outdated custom, and not only are the institutions themselves not worth the human suffering they cause, but they actually have very little, if anything at all, to offer in the way of wisdom, insight or actual solutions.
The truth is that our species creates endless problems for ourselves when we outsource our growth and decision-making abilities to a select few leaders, financial elitists and holy men and trust that they will make positive changes for everyone else. With a shifted focus on liberating human insight and creativity, and rising to the challenge of accommodating for this new focus, the change we seek will happen as a natural result of our growing awareness. But as it stands now, people are sucked into the game of demanding change from those who dangle it like a carrot on a stick, while simultaneously being incapable of leading us to it.
We have centuries of their self-preserving propaganda and cultural reinforcement in our own minds as individuals to overcome, and if this were not a great enough challenge, we also have its equivalent on a social level in the institutions.
To give credit where it’s due, these institutions and the languages of thinking they are founded on were undoubtedly worth living in divided states for once upon a time when they truly increased our chances of survival and social stability, but now, since the opening up of the world and empowerment of humanity through advanced awareness and technologies with global reach, the species requires unity to live practically and in balance with nature and each other.
Not only do we have the means to make this a practical, realistic goal to set our sights toward, but we also have enough insight to know that this is something we can achieve by setting ourselves new standards of thinking and behaviour, rather than trying to outsource it and waiting for someone else to achieve it for us.
Previous: Chapter 4: The Scientific Method
Next: Chapter 6: Future Thinking and Morality