People don’t use Logical Fallacies in their arguments because they are stupid. They use them when they’ve started with a conclusion they want the recipient to accept, and they’ve composed the argument to lead to their conclusion. Back in the days of the Glorious Greeks, there was something called Dogmatism. In those days, it wasn’t a negative term. That came much later in response to the Catholic Church. In days of yore, Dogmatism was the strongly held belief that there were absolute truths in the universe to be found. The worship of logic followed – a beautifully constructed piece of logic seemed to promise a road to the truth. Then along came Skepticism, championed by Pyrrho of Ellis.
Skepticism was a philosopy that held that all truth is relative – again a positive term meaning that there were no absolute truths, only relative approximations of certainty. They had yet to come to understood the depth of the self-serving aspects of human communication. It remained for Machiavelli to plumb the depths of using fallacious arguments to control the populace. That’s not how he said it, but that’s what he meant. Certainly, skewed argument is the stuff of political discourse. It’s the underpinning of the whole concept of democracy, the hope that the majority opinion will dampen out the effect of any particular subsystem.
The Bush Administration has carried the usual kind of political, self serving argument to new heights. Nothing is completely out in the open. The party line is carefully scripted, delivered on multiple fronts at the same time, and protected from challenge. Logical Absurdity seems to be their only tool in debate. Since everything is carefully spun in advance, one can only follow the course of things by inference. Anything contraversial is done in secret. No one has ever tried this kind of deceit on so grand a scale, at least not in a democratic society. There seem to be several threads:
- Things that constituents want to hear [to get support]
- Things that trivialize the opponents [Straw Man politics]
- Things they want to do [covered by secrecy or subtrafuge]
- Immediate devastating attacks on critics of any kind
They succeeded for about five years, but their recent failings haven’t stopped them. They don’t seem to know how to play things straight. It’s the gift that keeps on giving…
[…] by Mickey […]