Reactionary Worldviews

What need would there be to address many variants of false ideas beyond simply demonstrating that they contradict verifiable truths unless those false ideas were being advocated for or assumed by other people?  There are numerous relationships between facts that would perhaps never be directly brought up if it was not for misconceptions that demand clarification.  For example, no one would ever need to specifically clarify that two and 413 are not the same numbers unless someone else mistakenly equated them.

In this sense, some specific points are only realized for reactionary reasons.  This is not problematic in itself: there is no philosophical or personal need to reflect on them or mention them to other people otherwise!  However, many logical truths do not fall into this category.  Discovering these truths on a purely reactionary basis is problematic because a person is ignoring the universal accessibility of reason and waiting for others to prompt them.  In other words, when a person never thinks about matters of philosophical truth except when they are reacting to the claims of another person, they have forfeited intellectual autonomy, initiative, and security.

Not everyone is intelligent or self-aware enough at a given time to reason their way beyond foundational, strictly logical truths (as in axioms) without at least some prompting from others, but no one is doomed to a life of reactionary worldviews that are only developed as a response to others.  Whoever looks beyond the cultural issues and popular topics of their day will find that there is far more to sound, rationalistic philosophy than mere reactions to the fallacies of one's society.  Indeed, reactions to the ideologies of others need to be based on prior rationalistic knowledge that one has already contemplated.

At the very least, autonomously reflecting on what others say is a necessity even for those who cannot or do not exercise a more direct intellectual originality by thinking of many concepts, truths, and proofs on their own.  There is no way to argue against this without arguing against reason itself, which refutes all pretense of a right to be treated as an intellectually capable person.  Someone who lacks philosophical initiative and is comfortable to merely parrot or react to others might be stupid enough to think they have taken a philosophically valid approach, but there is no justification for their lack of autonomous thought.

Of course, there are some things that many people might not ever realize without a push in the right direction from rationalists (such as some of the logical facts listed here [1] or those in the even more esoteric class of specific truths alluded on this site several times).  Benefitting from being pushed in the right direction when it comes to the more specific or unspoken truths of epistemology and metaphysics is not a lack of intellectual initiative or competence, and some people may by happenstance hear others mention issues or logical facts that the former would have or easily could have reasoned out on their own.

Hearing basic or otherwise autonomously accessible logical facts by chance does not rob someone of genuine initiative and originality (which can even be expressed by personally reflecting on the information without regard for who it came from), but rationalistic verification, which is a process every person can only carry out in their own mind, cannot be soundly sidestepped in such cases.  This, like every aspect of life, is a chance to exercise needed intellectual autonomy/originality.  When one focuses on the truth in question rather than the person who randomly brought it up, however, it is as if it was never encountered before, and any response transcends mere reactionary ideology.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-list-of-neglected-truths.html