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Mental Levers

Is there a secret to being smart? 

In the classic book “Thinking Better” psychologists David Lewis and James Greene identified programs, or patterned ways of thinking, as the key to making quick, accurate evaluations. They observed that this was the approach to thinking employed by the smartest people.

This is exactly how libertarians think! The Thinker re-sized

The libertarian approach uses various principles, facts, examples, and bits of logic to make thinking more efficient and accurate. Here at the Zero Aggression Project we call these tools…

Mental Levers

A lever allows you to do more work with less effort. The approach to thinking that uses such tools is…

Leveraged Thinking

Too many people think randomly. With few or no principles to guide them, they have to re-analyze each issue from scratch. Sometimes people like to justify this random approach by giving it a nice sounding name — they call it “independent thinking.” But what is that approach to thinking independent from? Principles? Facts? History? Logic?rsz_leverage (1)

In practice, such “independent thinking” is simply random thinking. It is unreliable and time-consuming. It inevitably leads to error and self-contradiction. Imagine if you tried to do math or engineering, or run a court of law that way. The result would be chaos. Even worse…

Random thinking makes people vulnerable to emotional manipulation by political con-men and the ambulance-chasing media. Mental Levers are the cure for this. They anchor your thinking to sound principles, rules, logic, and facts.

The Zero Aggression Principle (ZAP) is a good example of a Mental Lever. Z-earth

Voluntaryist-libertarians use the ZAP to judge all political questions. For every issue ask yourself the following questions…

  • Does the proposed policy require a threat of force to make innocent people act against their own conscience or preference? If the answer is yes, then you should oppose it.
  • Would you feel justified using force against your neighbors and friends to enforce this policy? If the answer is NO, then you should NOT be willing to have politicians, bureaucrats, or police impose this policy on your behalf.

The voluntaryist-libertarian philosophy is rich in Mental Levers 

We’ve assembled many of them into collections here in this section of our website. We plan to add many more in the future. You can use the drop-down menu above to view these collections. They include…mental-levers-icon

Take a look. Use our levers to engage in leveraged thinking! Please also…

Share them on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Link to them in discussions on the internet. One of our Mental Levers will often be the exact right thing to say in some point during a discussion. Use them. Spread these concepts far and wide. And…

Use the form at right to subscribe, so you can receive new levers in your email inbox.

By Perry Willis & Jim Babka



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