Get Rational:
A Framework for Leading an Effective, Moral, Productive, and Satisfying Life Using Reason
By Russell A. Barkley, Ph.D., LLC
How in touch with reality are you? Get Rational is a free book posted to the internet for any and all to read in order to help them determine just how rational – how in touch with reality – they actually are. It will help you to develop a more rational mind and life. In so doing it will also strengthen your self-confidence, self-responsibility, and self-respect. And it will definitely promote your long-term welfare.
This book contains one of the most important exams you will ever take in your life! It shows you how you have built your mind from the foundation upward to your thinking, your actions, and your interactions in society. In short, it shows just how rational, or irrational, you are in dealing with reality. Get Rational contains the 20 fundamental questions everyone must consciously ask and answer to live more confidently, effectively, morally, and even happily and successfully.
What is your personal philosophy – the basic mental framework everyone must use to interact with and evaluate all of reality? Everyone has one, and it’s the most important thing you possess apart from life itself. But few have truly examined its contents and those few are often the most effective people we know. What is their secret – what do they know and you don’t? They have a coherent, self-originating, effective and razor-sharp philosophy to guide them through life. Do you? What is its content? What does it say about you? Where did you get it? Did you consciously build it or is it just a hodge-podge of artifacts from your childhood and others around you?
Your mental framework determines everything you consciously think, say, and do all of your waking life. How well-crafted is yours? It’s the most effective tool you have because it is the very means by which you survive. Yet it can also be the most dangerous weapon anyone possesses. The vast majority of people have never consciously examined their mind for its basic psychological structure, their mental framework, and their stance toward reality – in short, their philosophy. It is high time you opened your mind and it’s framework to the light of conscious inspection and even reconstruction, as needed. Its time you "got real."
This free internet book argues for a return to the basic mental framework and philosophical principles that gave rise to The Enlightenment and founded the most successful, effective, humane, and influential form of government in human history – The US Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Our form of government is founded on a very special philosophy, on a mental framework for organizing our minds, our life, our public discourse and behavior, our government, our ethics and morality, and our economy. It is a philosophy from which we have increasingly strayed over time and are now at considerable peril of losing, both from forces acting within and from without our country. While the documents that founded this great country begin with three essential rights or principles – the rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness (our property and long-term welfare) – they do not specify the means by which those first rights were discovered and why all others can be seen to flow from those three bedrock human rights. Yet those rights were derived as first principles using a particular and more basic mental framework or philosophy; a specific approach to one’s conscious psychological stance toward reality.
What was that personal philosophy? What are its key governing principles? You can find out, right now, and return to that personal philosophy that gave rise to our American way of life and our system of government. Above everything else, the Founding Fathers emphasized the central role of individual reasoning, choice, and judgment in American life and in creating individual civil liberties. And they used that mental faculty called "reason" to create the documents that formed and guided this country. What is reason? It is rational thinking. What is rational thinking? Read on. It’s all spelled out here.
Read this book and find out what your mental framework is, how rational you are, how in touch with reality you actually are, and what it means for your mind and life. Learn why much of your mental framework was formed subconsciously and haphazardly, and why you need to re-examine it, piece by piece, beam by beam, to get your mental house in order. Along the way, you will also find out why we must actively return to this guiding philosophy and these first principles in order to consciously construct our minds for the betterment of ourselves so that we may be more confident, ethical, moral, and socially effective people. In other words, we all need to "get rational" or "get real." Let this free book guide you to getting and staying real, 24/7.
The book is divided into five parts, each building on the other, like the structure of a house, or in this case – a mind. Part I deals with the nature of reality, or what philosophers call metaphysics. While those questions seem to be simple ones at first glance and often not relevant to the major issues of life we face today, that conclusion is dead wrong. The questions in Part I are actually the most important parts of your mind and philosophy because they form the foundation – a weak foundation creates a weak mind and weak minds create poorly functioning societies. As I will show at the end of this book, every major problem, political issue, or international conflict we face today can be seen to stem from the answers one has given often unconsciously, to the first questions asked in this book. Part II asks the questions necessary to establish how we know what we know about reality, sometimes called epistemology. Part III raises questions that pertain to ethics, or how we should think and behave given what we know. This leads up to Part IV, which addresses the questions related to the nature of how we should govern ourselves since we live in groups with others (politics and government). Part V is a Conclusion; it summarizes all of the earlier parts of the book and the prior 19 key questions it raises along the way. By then, you can see that the ideas in this book form an airtight, coherent, and powerful mental framework to face life, to succeed in it, to promote your own long-term happiness and welfare, and to make decisions about virtually every aspect of life covering diverse topics as values, ethics, government, politics, and even economics. Use it wisely, take responsibility for your mind and life, and live well.
If you prefer, you can even read the book backwards, starting with Part IV which explains rights, politics, government, and even taxes based on a libertarian framework of rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of one’s long-term welfare (happiness). But you would not understand the origin of those rights. They were derived from a certain view of ethics, values, and morality which is set forth in Part III and provides the structural support for the ideas in Part IV – that support comes from using reason to establish life as a starting value in any personal philosophy about ethics. Having read Part III on ethics and values, you would still need to understand the philosophy on which those ideas are based, and that would take you down a level to Part II, dealing with the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired (called epistemology) such as by using rationalism and empiricism. Having understood those ideas, you would still need to know the foundation on which they are based, and that means you have to drop down to Part I, on the nature of reality (known as metaphysics) and the philosophy promoted there known as objectivism. Some people might find reading the book this way a more enjoyable or even informative approach than going through it from the beginning. It matters little which way you approach the book, top down or bottom up, in examining your personal philosophy and rebuilding it as necessary. It is all integrated across the levels, just like reality.
Obviously, this book represents a hybrid or combination of various philosophies integrated into a single mental framework. Its skeletal structure, especially Part I, derives from objectivism, by Ayn Rand, her disciple Lenard Peikoff, and also the philosopher of science, Karl Popper and even earlier the Greek philosophers, such as Thales and Aristotle, and many others. Blended into that philosophy is that of rationalism and universal evolution (or Darwinism) that explains how all knowledge is acquired through an iterative or repeatable process of testing and revising information against objective reality that is explained in Part II. These are then blended to establish the basis for Part III which uses the starting value of one’s life and the starting ethic of using Reason (rationalism) to derive a code of ethics (morality) for how to live and to interact with others beginning with life as our first value. Finally, Parts I-III can be used to build the fourth level of one’s personal philosophy to decide how we should govern ourselves, which is largely the philosophy of libertarianism in politics and government. Although the book is a hybrid of various philosophies, one idea has been woven throughout its entirety and that is the concept of universal Darwinism or evolution – a theory of how all knowledge or information about the environment is acquired through a process of natural selection in which reality criticizes (and thereby selects) across repeated trials of our testing what we know against her and having her kick back in response. Evolution is not just a biological theory of how species originate and evolve, it is a universal principle that has been extended more generally to explain how knowledge about reality originates, gets stored, and gets continuously revised and accumulated. While this is explained in detail in Part II, once it is understood one can see how it is the governing theme or philosophy across the entire book. If there is anything original to this book, it is this idea that the theory of evolution, extended universally, is a general theory that explains the origin, revision, and accumulation of all knowledge (useful information about reality) anywhere in the universe and at all levels of one’s personal philosophy. Learn and enjoy.