The Necessity Of Self-Education

Many people will try to sell you their truth claims as you meet and listen to them.  Yet if you probe the claims and those who offer them, you will likely discover that almost nine of the claims or claimers are reliable.  Even if the conclusions of these assertions follows from their premises, you will find that many of the starting premises are unverifiable or demonstrably false--and yet this does not prevent the claimers from announcing that they have found the truth.

How can one know what to reject, what to analyze with pure skepticism, and what is true?  After all, few who are willing and quick to tell you what they think is true will want to admit outright if their beliefs are false or unfounded!  So how can one come to know how to navigate the bombardment of competing and exclusive truth claims one will inevitably meet?

No one can know how to identify and verify truth without engaging in the process of self-education.  Apart from teaching yourself, you will never be equipped to assess the claims of others.  Other than through this method, how is it even possible for someone to do anything else but blindly rely on the useless guides other people can so often turn out to be?  It is not possible.  Anyone who does not self-educate will have to merely assume and be at the mercy of the fallacies of others.

If you want actual knowledge and not just acceptance of what other people claim, you must subject everything to doubt, identify what cannot be false, see what follows from these infallible truths, and then begin appraising claims hurled your way according to this system founded upon the infallible [1].  You must seize control of your own worldview and deny that authority to other people.  Do not expect to arrive at truth except by chance if you approach it any other way!

None of this means that every person who wants to persuade you of a worldview is a moron or a malevolent deceiver, though (and persuasion is not proof).  Some well meaning people with correct conclusions might offer you the most asinine arguments and explanations for their worldview; some people with highly erroneous conclusions may have better defenses but also have a totally false starting point for their arguments.  You must learn to detect all of this if you wish to repel false claims and accept the true ones.  No person can intentionally embrace truth if he or she does not know what it is and recognize it, and the only way to truly know is to set cultural conditioning, familial upbringing, and the fallacious or unverified beliefs of others aside.  Self-education is a necessity for someone who wants to know the truth as opposed to what other people will ignorantly or knowingly pass off as the truth, when they may offer nothing but pathetic distortions and lies.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-necessity-of-cartesian-skepticism.html