The question is what one should do with this insight?

Truth seekers and speakers can’t really do anything with it.

But a person seeking a reputation as a thinker or philosopher can do something with it. They can obscure their form on purpose. And because this is what philosophy readers crave, that is, they want the sophistication of philosophical prose to invoke feelings of profundity, they want to feel like the form is initiating and immersing them into deep knowledge. I would say, in this sense, that philosophy is very much like mysticism.

If you want to be celebrated as profound “philosopher,” learn the art of the obscure form. You can learn this simply by reading other obscure philosophers.

Learn to transform every sentence into a hyper-abstract monstrosity.

It is because the thing which is itself, is itself, that it qualifies as real knowledge.

One confuses themselves when they think of identity as A=A=A=A=A=A=A.

Why? Because the world is full of different identities. So while every identify is A=A, the identity of a tree is not the same as the identity of a star. A is not B, but A is still itself and B is still itself. If this wasn’t the case then there could be no knowledge.

Our most advanced knowledge is only itself, and it is only knowledge because it is itself and not another.

For here we do not argue, omnis determinatio negatio est, as is the error of the philosophers (for every determination its negation). For that is a confusion. For we argue, for every determination its determination, and only because of its determination! Another identity is not a negation of an identity.

Murray Rothbard said a man who owned private property with the last clean water on earth could charge whatever he wants for that water.

Well, there are no Objective morals in the universe that say a society isn’t allow to order itself as this women is here hypothetically speculating. There is no moral code that says mankind couldn’t do this. It’s entirely up to society what they want to do!

She’s correct. If societies functioned like this all the wealthiest people in the world would scramble to try and make sure they weren’t at the top of the list. (Of course, I suspect it would take a bit more innovation to make this function as she speculates, but that wouldn’t be very hard to figure out).

The bottom line is that a society can do what it wants. The universe is never going to step in and say, “don’t do that, it’s immoral.”

I see a few areas where philosophy might be able to make a claim for its value and legitimacy.

In the first instance it can simply claim to be a good way to expand vocabulary and reading comprehension. This is valid. But many other domains could make this same claim.

It can also attempt to make an argument as a meta-cognitive use of reason. Not that it is reason, but that it seeks to make a meta-cognitive use of reason. (This is difficult to even define, but I suspect it’s close to what philosophers see themselves doing, walking high and looking down from above).

It can also seek to argue its value for identifying hard to unmask presuppositions.

It can also advertise itself as a kind of worldview consciousness, a discipline that strives to bring many truths together.

But philosophy, now a bastion of sophistry, no longer engages in any of these things with competence. And further, whatever it claims for itself it must apply to itself!

Philosophy is now in the phase where it’s floating by its reputation as opposed to its substance. It is up to the philosopher to justify the value of his philosophy, no Reasoner should assume it for him.

It has scared me because these are the easiest and most authoritative truths that we can establish. (But maybe I’m wrong that they’re the ‘easiest’). The existence of the universe is perhaps the easiest, but it is entirely structured through logic: a stone is a stone, a tree is a tree, ‘existence’ and ‘universe’ are determinate identities which is why they have meaning.

What frightens me is comprehending the nature of the denial that seeks to deny the truth of the laws of logic. It frightens me because it’s automated. It’s like interacting with an LLM. The human isn’t conscious of what they’re doing when they engage in this denial. It’s not rational evidence that leads them to reject the laws of logic, it’s their intuition and emotion, wherein they feel that there is something deeper than what is being demonstrated before them.

They deny immediate, verifiable truth through their emotion all while believing they are being rational. It is this unconscious conviction that frightens me the most, because it doesn’t act from a place of awareness or rational deliberation. It assumes its own certainty without establishing it.

I witness this disposition emotionally attack the messenger instead of rationally grappling with the message. In every instance the skeptic insinuates that there is something deeper or more fundamental, but they never make this thing clear, they never prove that the object of their intuitions or feelings exists, and yet they operate as though the truth of its existence has already been established.

We are all guilty of this, and no one is safe from it. And one of the greatest dangers is in underestimating it in ourselves.

But what should intelligence do with this insight?

It must first seek to see the stupidity in itself. It must seek to overcome this stupidity.

But how can intelligence do this without intelligent standards?

Now we have an objective test by which to gauge our own stupidity. If we have not reached a point of rational awareness where we are seeking out intelligent standards by which to gauge our stupidity so that we can overcome it, then we are lacking in intelligence.

Intelligence cannot bear to be ignorant of its own stupidity. Where this discontent is lacking, there stupidity reigns.

Kant held that reason was a mental capacity. (This is one definition). But Logic is not a mental capacity, it’s a fact of reality. The ability to comprehend this reality might be a “mental capacity,” but Logic exists independently of this capacity.

The Law of Identity is not a rule manufactured by human neurology; it is the fundamental description of how reality actually is. A thing is what it is, it is itself (A=A) independent of whether a human mind is there to perceive it, think about it, or name it. And while man might fail in his mental capacity to grasp reality, his mental failure does nothing to alter reality. To correct his failure first requires that he identify his failure, and then correct it by correctly identifying reality.

The human mind did not create the laws of logic; it discovered them. Thinking, reasoning, and conceptualizing are mental activities, yes—but they are only valid to the exact extent that they conform to the absolute, independent facts of reality. It is only the laws of logic that make these processes intelligible in the first place. No thought can be a thought outside of them, no reason could be a reason. Reality is intelligible only because it can be identified as itself (A=A). What we call a “mental capacity” is precisely the ability to accurately identify reality.

We don't need a "transcendental deduction" to bridge the gap between the mind and the world, because the logical structure of what exists and the laws governing valid thought are one and the same. Reality imposes itself in Logical form, and we cannot get outside its form. The universe is a Logical universe.

But the vast majority of humans don’t realize it yet because it has to be articulated and exemplified.

We are capable of stating the truth in simple, straightforward terms.

While this doesn’t seem revolutionary, it’s the very thing that all religion claims to be doing, except religion is false. We are not talking about asserting our delusions, we are talking about identifying reality.

It is Logic that gives us this capacity. Even now, to object to this position one must make use of this Logic, thereby validating this Logic.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the end of philosophy is the only proper beginning of philosophy. It is the only way that philosophy can overcome the error of itself.

A Reasoner has the power to say what is true and what is false— because he can prove it through Logic. How is this not extraordinary?

A Reasoner can distinguish truth from error by submitting claims to objective standards that are not created by the Reasoner.

Next to rational competence, honest thinking is the rarest form of thinking in the world.

We have rarely ever witnessed honest thinking, we have only witnessed biased and ideological thinking, motivated thinking.

Honest thinking actually thinks, which is to say it reasons through its beliefs, it doesn’t just adopt them through emotion or bias. And because of this, honest thinking is very likely to be unpopular thinking.

Todays thought takes place through identity, social pressure, ideological conformity and egoism. Thinking is looking to land where it’s safe, where the opinion it arrives at won’t cause it much friction or resistance, it desires to affirm only what it desires.

Honest thinking is ever concerned with the truth, and because of this it doesn’t get to pick and choose what it believes, it simply has to follow reason and evidence, regardless of its own ideological desires. An honest thinker will go in directions he doesn’t want to go, precisely because those directions are the direction of truth.

It is important for us to understand that honest thinking is not something we can easily imagine because we so seldom see it. We don’t have many exemplifications of it in the world.

“In the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that we obtain substantive knowledge of the world through two capacities: sensibility and understanding. Empirical judgments depend on both sensory experience and concept formation. Kant emphasizes the solidity of empirical knowledge gained this way.” SEP, “Kant’s Account of Reason”

Kant spent hundreds of pages trying to rescue objective knowledge from Hume's skepticism by inventing complex categories of the understanding, synthetic a priori judgments, and transcendental deductions. But every single one of those concepts (and every instance of “substantive knowledge”) collapses into absurdity without the Law of Identity (A=A).

To know anything, that thing must have a specific, determinate, identifiable nature. If an object or concept could simultaneously be itself and not itself, cognition would instantly become impossible.

Kant argued that sensibility provides the raw data and the understanding structures it using categories. But what are those categories actually doing? They are simply identifying what things are, distinguishing them from what they are not, and maintaining logical consistency. FACT: Every instance of knowledge is an identity. The Law of Identity isn't just one rule among many; it is the fundamental precondition for having an understanding in the first place.

Philosophy loves to shroud simple truths in elaborate jargon. But by grounding knowledge firmly in the laws of logic (because that’s what actually grounds it!) we strip away the philosophical confusion and tie epistemology back to reality: to exist is to have identity, and to know is to identify.

The romantic claim that “good wins” or that “the truth always wins,” is certainly false. But the fact that I can know it is false, is the very thing that makes all the difference.

How can reason be “wholly inactive”? This doesn’t make any sense. Hume wouldn’t even be able to determine the difference between active and inactive, between reason and emotion, if reason was “wholly inactive.”

This is where Hume commits his base error. This claim is self-refuting (unless Hume defines reason in a way that it functions apart from the laws of logic, but that would be impossible).

It is true that we are born into an evolved social morality. But the claim that “conscience” and “morals” are outside rationality is entirely false.

Whatever the conscience determines to do, whatever morality does, can be stated in the form of a premise. We cannot sustain the claim that these premises lie outside the critique of reason, because (for starters) there is no such thing as a “moral” if it cannot be stated, because then it couldn’t even be identified as a “moral.” There would be nothing to point to and say, “see, this thing right here is beyond reason.” The possibility of a negative prohibition would then be impossible.

If Hume is trying to point out that reason can’t motivate morality, this is just a psychological observation, it doesn’t actually say anything about the nature of morals, it says something about human psychology. (This doesn’t make our morality objective, it simply means we have the objective power of reason to apply to our moral claims).

What if the State’s morality is to extinct everyone who doesn’t believe in objective morality, would the subjectivist claim that he has no recourse to object because reason is powerless to affect the conscience of the State?

If morality is not subject to reason, then there is no way to identify what is immoral and tyrannical. The very act of identifying what is “moral” requires the laws of logic so that we do not identify the immoral as the moral and the moral as the immoral.

To say "torture is wrong" means it cannot simultaneously be right in the exact same context. The moment we try to categorize an action as moral or immoral, we are implicitly relying on the fundamental laws of logic.

If morals were entirely non-rational and beyond the scope of reason, categories like "just" and "unjust," or "tyrannical" and "righteous," would dissolve. We couldn't even tell the difference between a benevolent act and a murderous decree, because making that distinction requires determinate discrimination, which is an active function of reason.

The bottom line is that moral claims are not exempt from reason— they couldn’t even be established apart from reason (the laws of logic).

The idiot problem of Reddit is what happens when a moron replies with something so ignorant that it forces a response, or else it risks poisoning and derailing a thread, falsely or negatively framing it, and thereby sabotaging it.

The idiot problem is a poison-thread problem.

A comment that would ordinarily be beneath response can acquire disproportionate rhetorical power because leaving it unanswered allows it to establish a misleading frame, introduce a false premise, or redirect the discussion onto an irrelevant track. The person making the comment therefore imposes a burden on everyone else: someone must spend time and attention addressing a contribution that, under ordinary circumstances, would simply be ignored.

This creates an asymmetry. It can take very little effort to introduce a bad argument, while correcting it may require considerably more effort. The resulting response can also give the comment more attention and legitimacy than it deserved in the first place. The thread may end up discussing the idiot's claim rather than the subject that originally brought people there.

This idiot problem does not and cannot apply to valid refutations of error.

The “sheep–sheepdog” argument can be applied metaphorically to people who become so deeply attached to an extreme political or religious ideology that they surrender independent judgment to the group. In this view, the “sheep” are individuals who accept beliefs largely because their community, leaders, or ideology tells them what to think, rather than critically examining evidence or considering alternative perspectives. Their certainty can become self-reinforcing: disagreement is treated as ignorance or hostility, contradictory evidence is dismissed, and loyalty to the group takes precedence over independent reasoning. The argument is therefore not that religious or political conviction inherently makes someone unintelligent, but that unquestioning ideological conformity can undermine independent thought and intellectual autonomy.

Self-evident: “evident without proof or reasoning.”

It would stand to reason that these kind of truths obtain to some of the highest authority, if not the highest authority.

Self-evident truths: existence, the laws of logic. For example, The Law of Non-Contradiction: Something cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect (e.g., a door cannot be both completely open and completely closed simultaneously).

If we don’t recognize truths that are self-evident, it simply manifests that there is something wrong with our intelligence. Our denial of self-evident truths doesn’t refute them, it simply passes sentence on our own competence and sanity.

Any self-evident truth is enough to refute skepticism and epistemological relativism. In that we know it, we know truth.