Tag: tools for thinking

The Twilight of Authority

John Michael Greer250 Comments

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the need for a rhetorical education—that is, an education that doesn’t presume to lay down the law about what’s true and what’s false, but instead teaches each individual how to understand and assess claims about truth and falsehood. That’s a concept many people find challenging these days.…

A Rhetorical Education

John Michael Greer261 Comments

Quite a bit of the discussion on this blog and its predecessors has focused on controversial issues, the kind of thing that causes rhetoric to fly fast and thick.  Given the themes I like to discuss in these essays, that could hardly have been avoided.  Ours is an age riven by disputes, in which debate…

Zeno’s Laughter

John Michael Greer267 Comments

We really are going to have to start a conversation about ethics, aren’t we? Last week’s post on the fallacy of claiming that there’s one and only one proper diet for all human beings everywhere brought a pretty fair barrage of pushback. Now of course this wasn’t any kind of surprise; it’s an odd fact…

The One Drop Fallacy

John Michael Greer216 Comments

Last month, in the process of exploring the awkward fact that most people in today’s industrial world have never learned how to think, I talked at some length about thoughtstoppers: those crisp little words or phrases that combine absurdity and powerful emotions to short-circuit the thinking process.  Thoughtstoppers, as I noted then, very often keep…

A Field Guide to Thoughtstoppers

John Michael Greer327 Comments

It occurred to me a while back that one very simple issue is responsible for much of the crisis of our age. No question, that crisis has plenty of causes, some of them recent, some of them much less so; to get a clear understanding of the way that modern industrial civilization has backed itself…