From Philosophical Detection 1974

If you undertake the task of philosophical detection, drop the dangerous little catch phrase which advises you to keep an “open mind.”

This is a very ambiguous term… That term is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions, and granting plausibility to anything.

What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind.

An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them.

Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants – a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear.

If you keep an active mind, you will discover (assuming that you started with common-sense rationality) that every challenge you examine will strengthen your convictions, that the conscious, reasoned rejections of false theories will help you to clarify and amplify the true ones, that your ideological enemies will make you invulnerable by providing countless demonstrations of their own impotence.

If you are at war with liberalism, you need to know yourself, as well as your enemy. What we are at war with is not people, but ideas. The real disease that is killing our society is liberal epistemology and metaphysics, not their politics and art.

These others are nothing but the end result of their false metaphysics and faulty epistemology. Real change will not happen at the level of politics and art. We have to get to the roots of the tree.

What is the axiom of conservative metaphysics? That existence exists, things are what they are.  This is known as the Law of Identity. ALL political confrontations with liberalism is based right here in the metaphysics, not the politics.

Expose the falsity in their metaphysics and the politics will take care of themselves!