As the old saying goes, mistake is another name for expereience. However, as Richard Feynman says “Your mistakes don’t define who you are. It’s what you do after you have made the mistakes that makes all the difference.” Furthermore, as the Turkish proverb says, “there is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not getting to know.”
The biggest mistake, as it is for an individual is getting lost in your delusions. Investing heavily in your psychological defense mechanisms but neglecting the actual defense mechanisms; the true power of knowledge. The major fault of eastern societies was imposing self centered theories onto the reality instead of learning from reality and analysing it. All losers share the same feature of being disjointed from facts. The reasoning method and arguments should change to meet with the reality.
Reasoning
The method should be reasoning from facts instead of analogy. All underdeveloped nations think of themselves other than they are because mostly, they’ve stucked with the past. They think themselves as their ancestors. They’re not new, their days are not new, their ground was is different and they think they stand in the same place. They liken themselves to the ancestors and cannot move on. Learning through imitation and role models are ok, yet it’s better that we learn through seeing the first principles. What are the basic facts regardless of our ancestors?
Argumentation
The arguments of backwards people rely on ethic or pathic grounds. They either brag about themselves or accuse others to strengthen their position. We don’t have to rely on our identity or an enmity, we can rely on logos, which is relying on dialectics. The cheapest way is hostility towards an idea or an entity, weakest minds rely on it. Second weakest way is boasting your own identity and relying on values. Even the logic for winning an argument is The alternative to all this is dialectics, which means leaving it open to discussion, and creating a culture of reflection on different sides of the issue. Nevertheless, the most politically practical one is pathological, enmity arguments; the least politically practical one is dialectics because of the audience being far from ideal. You can’t expect ideal methods from non-ideal people. Yet we need dialectics not for all people but for intellectual circles and decision makers.
Who remains eastern nowadays?
All in all, eastern societies collapsed and left their place for western equivalents, westernized Turkish Republic for example, as if it was a step in the process of humanity. What is west though? The west is charaterized by relying of facts more than the other societies. The focus is now on the reasoning part. As humans, we first think and than act. First the theory comes, and than the application of it. Anyone would notice the mistake that non-western societies did. Now it’s time to rely on facts, and build a theoretical ground for our society. Without fixing the logic, any practical application would be groundless.