In this post we discuss how a very old yoga practice called ‘Neti-Neti’ can be used to see through propaganda. Now, neti-neti, ‘not this–not that,’ is just a negation technique where you keep discarding propaganda in order to arrive at the Absolute truth. What it essentially does is create a counter-context for the context in which something is said, thus revealing the truth in the Absolute context. This is a commonly used technique in math proofs, “proof by contradiction.”
For example: When a CEO says that starting a company is not motivated by earning money, a counter-question using neti-neti could be: if they were earning zero money, would they be doing what they are doing? The most likely answer would be no, because they wouldn’t be spending their own money on day-to-day expenses while working on the company’s work. So, they are doing it for money but they don’t want to accept it.
They might have to qualify their statement to say that money is not the main motivator but is a motivator nonetheless. This could be questioned again by asking them to give a situation in which they would not choose money when choosing between money and another entity, X. Here X could be morality, usefulness of the product, etc.
If there’s an entity X that they quote, they can be questioned again by asking them if another company which chose money instead of X wouldn’t be more successful than their company due to how the laws of capitalism work. That is, the more profit-oriented the decisions, the more profitable a company would be, since moral decisions are never rewarded by themselves but only when their intent is to make profit …
And so on. The idea is that you assume what’s being said is incorrect and try to arrive at a negation of the self-evident truth or a law derived from the self-evident truth, and if you can’t, then what’s being said is not correct in the Absolute context. What happens using this technique is that you remove all the propaganda behind what’s being said and can see if it is supported by a self-evident truth.