Defend Your Mind: Peter Boghossian's Revolutionary Call to Intellectual Self-Defense

In this episode, we explore Peter Boghossian's advocacy for critical thinking and intellectual self-defense. We discuss the importance of promoting critical thinking and rational inquiry, as well as practical applications in everyday life and larger issues such as fake news and propaganda. We also evaluate some of the critiques and counter-arguments against Boghossian's ideas.

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The concept of "intellectual self-defense" is not Boghossian's, it's a term first used by Noam Chomsky to refer to what he saw as the need for people to develop critical and independent thinking skills in the context of democracy and political organization. From the preface of 'Necessary Illusions':

"In capitalist democracies there is a certain tension with regard to the locus of power. In a democracy the people rule, in principle. But decision-making power over central areas of life resides in private hands, with large-scale effects throughout the social order. One way to resolve the tension would be to extend the democratic system to investment, the organization of work, and so on. That would constitute a major social revolution, which, in my view at least, would consummate the political revolutions of an earlier era and realize some of the libertarian principles on which they were partly based. Or the tension could be resolved, and sometimes is, by forcefully eliminating public interference with state and private power. In the advanced industrial societies the problem is typically approached by a variety of measures to deprive democratic political structures of substantive content, while leaving them formally intact. A large part of this task is assumed by ideological institutions that channel thought and attitudes within acceptable bounds, deflecting any potential challenge to established privilege and authority before it can take form and gather strength. The enterprise has many facets and agents. I will be primarily concerned with one aspect: thought control, as conducted through the agency of the national media and related elements of the elite intellectual culture.

"There is, in my opinion, much too little inquiry into these matters. My personal feeling is that citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy. It is this concern that motivates the material that follows, and much of the work cited in the course of the discussion."