Independent Thinking

Part One

Nietzsche - an independent thinker?

‘It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well’ (Descartes)¹

‘The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind’ (Nietzsche, Dawn 1881, 573)

By independent thinking, I mean reasoning that is not unduly influenced by known or unknown factors that inhibit the clarity and scope of this reasoning. Not everyone appreciates that reasoning involves the method with which we reason, i.e. inductive or deductive, and the truth claims (‘facts’) we examine using these methods (the substance). If the ‘substance’ is not accurate or does not contain matters that should have been included as part of the reasoning process, then the reasoning will be faulty, just as much as it would have been had we made a logical error. Sometimes, the people we accuse of being irrational are culpable due to some sort of inadequacy in the substance they examine (or choose not to examine) rather than lack of reasoning application or skills. This is important, since independent thinkers should not be inhibited in any way in their decision making about what to include in the substance they are shining the light of reason onto. I have been guilty of poor reasoning in respect of substance and must own up to it. I did not use my mind well.

Since I began studying philosophy in 1990, I had assumed that I was an independent thinker (insofar as anyone can be said to be this). After all, I had dismissed dogmas such as Marxism and feminism and did not belong to any political party. As an undergraduate in University, my essays sometimes attracted criticism for being too original (in truth they were often far more influenced by Marxist theories than they should have been). Both my Masters and Doctoral dissertations explored sociological and psychological issues as well as philosophical ones. This was frowned upon in academia, but I managed to obtain both degrees without too much trouble from the establishment (though I was told that finding an external examiner for my Ph.D. thesis had proved difficult due to its inter-disciplinary nature). That was back in 1999.

It wasn’t until after December 2018 that I realised that there were severe limitations to the independence of thought I appeared to enjoy. At this time, I was a member of the Labour Party and living in the Scottish Borders. I had joined the Party in 2015 when Corbyn was elected leader. However, I was greatly concerned about the attitude of the party and individual members to the Brexit vote. Even though I had campaigned to remain in the EU, I accepted the vote of the British people and felt that their decision to leave should be honoured. But many Labour members of parliament and ordinary members – my own colleagues – did not share this view and made excuses to justify their belief that another referendum should be held. I was horrified at the lack of integrity and the absence of a democratic instinct that was characteristic of many Labour party colleagues I had hitherto respected.

At this time the party’s preoccupation with political correctness was also irritating me, as were proposals for all women shortlists for candidates. I do not believe in positive discrimination and felt that if any group were under-represented within the party, it was working class people rather than females. At this stage, however, I was still hoping for a Labour election victory and a commitment to honour the result of the EU referendum – so I remained active in the party as campaigns officer. Then, in December 2018, my view of the world and politics began to change dramatically. This was my Damascene moment. I should explain.

For a long time, I had been listening to George Galloway’s Talk Radio show. I admired George but wasn’t uncritical of him: he has one or two blind spots and can come across as a little aggressive at times. Then one December evening George interviewed the astrophysicist and weatherman Piers Corbyn (also Jeremy’s brother) about global warming. Piers gave an excellent presentation in which he disputed the claim that the earth is warming and that human activity through carbon dioxide emissions could be responsible for this. CO2 emissions, he pointed out, had been much higher in the past than they are at present. He also showed that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases as temperatures increase; temperature increases do NOT follow increases in CO2 levels - as the proponents of global warming had argued. Piers also argued that the earth was in fact cooling, rather than warming.

After listening to this, George appeared interested, though clearly non-committal. But then something very odd happened. George introduced a speaker to respond to Piers on behalf of the environmental movement. This person proceeded with an ad hominem attack on Piers, accusing him of being a ‘dangerous quack’ who did not know what he was talking about. He provided absolutely nothing by way of argument or any reference to the scientific claims Piers had made. I found this odd in itself, but it was even more odd that the usually argumentative George did not question this response at all, in spite of its obvious flaws. He appeared to agree with this second speaker. Huge alarm bells began ringing in my ears. I could not believe that George Galloway, of all people, should allow this injustice.

For the past 30 years or so, I had believed, along with all my colleagues on the left, that the earth was warming - to the extent that unless we reduced CO2 emissions drastically, and soon, the damage to our beloved earth would be irreversible. I had accepted this without bothering to do any research; this view was accepted by all of my left wing colleagues, so I accepted it as a matter of faith and loyalty. Now I was determined to find out the truth, and embarked on a very long project that was to involve me in hundreds of hours of research; and many hours of soul searching. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this research would provide the catalyst for a paradigm shift in my thinking; a ‘trans-valuation’ of my values and a reassessment of my reality.

I wrestled with some very complicated scientific issues through YouTube videos and articles, including some scientific papers on astrophysics which I found difficult to understand. At this stage I ignored the politics surrounding the debate and concentrated on the science. Within about three or four weeks, after hundreds of hours of my time had been consumed, I could not escape the conclusion that there were huge problems with the global warming thesis and that the earth was more likely to be cooling. I began to realise that the assumption that human activity could destroy a planet was a hubristic myth and that the sun, rather than CO2, was the driving factor in changing the climate of the earth. Climate change, warming and cooling, is cyclical – and it appears that we are heading towards a Grand Solar Minimum (GSM), when the lack of activity on the sun (i.e. lack of sun spots) will lead to a cooling period similar to (though maybe not as severe as) the medieval ‘mini ice age’ – i.e. the Maunder Minimum. Naturally, I recognised that only time will tell whether this is true or not, but the signs of an approaching GSM are there for all to see.²

I searched in vain for any left leaning organisations that supported global cooling; but I was alone. This was also odd; surely some group of lefties was at least keeping an open mind about it. But I couldn’t find any that were not fully paid up members of the global warming ‘community’.³ This was, apparently, an example of group think; of adherence to the party line, where dissidents dared not raise their voices; a toxic environment for philosophers.

Of course, virtually everyone I knew believed in global warming – so it felt strange having to admit that I no longer shared this belief. I was also aware that I was now like the person who had escaped from Plato’s cave⁴ and then returned to bring his colleagues the news that the images they saw on the wall before them were the shadows of puppets manipulated by their jailers. This was not the real world that he had discovered outside on escaping. But his colleagues considered him mad.

So, I was now, ‘officially’, a ‘conspiracy theorist’ (i.e. mad) – even though my conclusions were drawn from the studies of scientists who were financially independent from any organisations that would benefit from their scientific investigations. Such is the tyranny of language – as I discuss elsewhere.

I began sharing information and links with my wife and daughter, Sharon, both of whom, at this stage, believed in global warming. It was months before they finally came off the fence and declared global warming to be a fraud. My sister, Cheryl and my friend Pete were already sceptics, so I eventually had a circle of sceptics around me for support.

It was at this point I learned a very important philosophical/psychological lesson; people believe what they want to believe, and what they want to believe is sometimes determined by what their peers believe. Given the dogmatic nature of the left, as I was beginning to discover, it was very nearly impossible for lefties to hold certain views that were not shared by their colleagues. Therefore, they would not even consider information that conflicted with these shared beliefs – whether this information was conveyed to them in person or through the internet. This response appeared to be guided by a sense of loyalty to colleagues, to the party or to ‘the left’ generally – or so it seemed to me. It is also possible that people become attached to a world view, in this case one that includes an earth that is warming, and would feel insecure if this view had to be reconsidered.

One Labour Party colleague became very upset when I told her that I believed global warming to be a myth; she complained that she was stressed out enough as it was and could not deal with this ‘revelation’. I emailed about ten different links to an old lefty friend, who replied the next day that he still believed in global warming. Yet he could not possibly have had sufficient time to adequately consider the material I had sent. This experience was repeated several times until I could not escape the conclusion that people who share belief systems with colleagues as part of a political ‘community’ such as the Labour Party, the Green Party or more broadly, ‘the left’, will be very reluctant to even consider views that are inconsistent with their accepted (and acceptable) ‘orthodoxy’. This is another form of dogma that prevents even intelligent and analytical lefties from thinking independently.

In practical terms, as I discovered, it was not possible for things to continue as they had before; I could no longer campaign for the Labour Party around issues I did not believe in. I met with the Constituency Secretary to explain the situation but decided to stay on as Campaigns Officer since the issue of global warming was unlikely to be raised in campaigns already planned. However, as the Euro elections approached (May 2019) and it became clear that the party would be pushing for another EU referendum, I could no longer continue with good conscience as Campaigns Officer so I stood down and stopped attending meetings. I no longer felt comfortable in the party; I was like the proverbial cuckoo in the nest; I didn’t belong any more. As far as I was concerned, the party had betrayed the working class once again – as it had during the Blair years. It was not a working class party and was unlikely to change.

Leaving the Labour Party was not a huge issue in itself; I had been a member for only a few years. I always had issues with the Party that prevented me from joining before I did. But now I began to realise that I could no longer consider myself to be fully part of the existing ‘left’ – because I did not believe in global warming. So I experienced the insecurity that accompanies the loss of a political home, but to my surprise, I also experienced a sense of freedom; of liberation from a duty to conform that had been virtually unconscious.

I embarked on a period of reflection and exploration that took me into areas that had previously been out of bounds for a lefty. This process helped me to ‘discover’ the almost invisible barriers that had been placed between myself and independent thinking by voluntary self-censorship or peer pressure/control.

Given the almost total absence of global warming sceptics on the left (though there are some), it was no surprise to find that those who supported the idea of global cooling were on the so called ‘right’ of the political spectrum. These were most prominent in the USA so I began to subscribe to YouTube channels run by US Republicans, who believed in global cooling; some of whom could be described as ‘preppers’ – i.e. people who are preparing for bad times ahead, when we may not be able to rely on the food supply or energy from the grid. Most were working class.

It soon became clear that I had much in common with these people politically and morally. Most were supporters of Donald J Trump. They hated the large corporations, including Big Tech,⁵ they despised Big Government; Big Pharma; pointless wars; Woke Authoritarianism. They were libertarians like me, but from the right, not the left. It seemed that I had more in common with these people than the middle class lefties I had been associating with for the past 30 years.

At this point, I began to realise that the divisions between left and right were false divisions. The lefties I knew 30 years ago, were more like these Republicans than the lefties I know today. The former were champions of free speech; the contemporary lefties are authoritarian Wokists. The former were anti-separatist while the latter seek to divide people through identity politics, intersectionality and critical race theory⁶. For the former, class was the major dividing line between people, while for the latter – well, the number of divisions keeps growing and growing.

I do not agree with most Republicans on some issues and I am more critical of capitalism than they are, but I feel that I could befriend these people more than I could befriend contemporary middle class lefties. At the end of the day, if we are to create better societies, we will have to do so on the basis of compromise, because we will never achieve unanimity of views, values and aspirations. This is especially the case in a society as divided as the USA is today. Given these differences between people, socialists can get the society they want only by oppressing those who don’t want socialism. This will never work and this is why ideologies are always doomed to fail as templates for a better world. You can’t force people to be socialists any more than you can force them to be free.⁷ If you did force socialism onto people, it would not be socialism and would not be recognised as such by Marx and most other socialist thinkers; it could not involve ‘the free development of each as the condition for the free development of all’.⁸ It could not be democratic, as Marx and most other socialist thinkers would want.⁹ This is why even the ideological template of socialism is problematic and this is why democracy as a fundamental political principle must, in my view, take precedence over all other political ideas or ideologies. The type of societies we create must be less important, therefore, than the democratic means by which we create them and run them.

In the light of the above, the divisions between left and right are not only contrived and superfluous; they are inhibitory; they will prevent any sort of negotiation or compromise that is a prerequisite to the creation of a better world. They will prevent us from collectively thinking through the problems that exist in this world.

Another interesting observation I made about these right wing Republicans is that they appeared to be blessed with a degree of humanity that was absent from the average BLM or Antifa supporter. They appeared to be more tolerant and more willing to compromise than the rabid left, and less inclined to violence. The modern left wing Wokists do not believe in forgiveness or rehabilitation. They are like a gang of Mark Darcys ‘whose good opinions once lost are lost forever’¹⁰; they are dogma incarnate. This, in my experience, is not true of the US Republicans I have encountered – though I appreciate the limitations of these anecdotal observations. The fact that most of them are Christians may account for this. Wokism and Global warming are cold religions indeed; they are inhumane, soulless; pessimistic, nihilistic and apocalyptic. They are presented by people who, unlike my Republicans, revel in their own victimhood or that of others.

After such bold explorations, I was like Macbeth ‘in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go oe’r’. Lefties dared not enter into such territory, but now I had done so, I had to venture further into those forbidden forests.

As you will see in Part Two, I even had to admit that there are some good things about Donald J.

1 Discourse on Method and The Meditations

2 For those who are interested, there are many YouTube channels that deal with global cooling some by laypersons and others by scientists. Ben Davidson is a brilliant scientist but his videos (on SuspiciousObservers YouTube) are very very hard to follow. Tony Heller is also a scientist who has a YouTube channel named after him. He is brilliant at debunking the myriad false claims made by the media about global warming. Diamond, of the Oppenheimer Ranch Project (YouTube Channel) is another scientist who comes across as a little eccentric, but produces good stuff. Finally, The Grand Solar Minimum Channel is good if you want something ‘homely’. This is run by two non-scientists, Jake and Mari, whose knowledge and understanding of the science is good. There are, many, many more.

3 The global warmists are now using the term ‘climate change’ for reasons of political psychology, since no one can credibly deny climate change (climate has always changed) and ‘deniers’ can therefore be ridiculed in a way that those who deny global warming cannot.

4 Plato’s allegory of the cave, which is discussed in The Republic is introduced to illustrate his theory of forms – i.e. the idea that somewhere in the Universe reside perfect forms of the good, the beautiful or even a chair. The examples of these things we experience on earth are false, just like the shadows of puppets in the cave.

5 Twitter, Facebook, Google etc.

6 For a good critique of this nonsense see D. Murray The Madness of Crowds Bloomsbury Continuum London (2020).

7 JJ Rousseau The Social Contract

8 The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels

9 Marx believed that the Paris Commune of 1871 could have provided a model for socialism – and it was democratic. Those who associate Marx with Stalinism or Chinese communism should bear this in mind.

10 From Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen – of course.