Fallacies We Live By

 

I have special difficulty explaining to students the ad populum fallacy and the ad temperantiam fallacy. The problem is that public discourse as a whole is largely currently founded on these two fallacies. Pointing them out causes major cognitive dissonance. They tend to do a double take, and at first be incredulous. 

This is precisely why it is vital to teach them. The fact that we do not teach the logical fallacies in every school is profoundly sinister. It allows us to be manipulated.

The “ad populum” fallacy is the notion that truth is a majority mandate. If everyone thinks something is true, that proves it is true: “everybody knows.” This is the very premise of “constructivism,” the currently dominant educational philosophy. Constructivism holds that all truth is “socially constructed.” Truth is whatever the majority of any given social group says it is, and accordingly varies between cultures. Which is why we get “cultural relativism” and the insistence that all cultures must be accepted to be equal. It is also why we get transsexualism: according to constructivism, if an interest group can just get everyone to agree that a man can become a woman, it is a fact. For this very reason, dissent cannot be tolerated.

This is why classroom teachers always want to break into small groups. They cannot teach; the group must decide. The current Vatican synod on synodality seems to be based on the same dynamic: there is no truth other than whatever the people in the pews want to hear. We all get to vote on whether the sun goes around the earth, or vice versa. In fact, until the time of Copernicus, according to this theory, the sun DID go around the earth. Galileo was dead wrong. Einstein was a lunatic. Slavery was perfectly moral in the US South until those meddling Yankees got involved. 

Interestingly, based on constructivism, a bridge built in India by Scottish engineers, would probably collapse. Scottish mathematics and physics cannot work in India.

The “ad temperantiam” fallacy holds that, whenever there are two opposing views, the truth must lie in the middle. A popular view, as old as Delphi, but also already exploded in ancient times. This fallacy is implicit whenever people object to “extremists”; as if holding a view strongly proves it is wrong. This is perfectly illogical. 

The “ad temperantiam” fallacy is also implied when people demand an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement for, say, the war in Gaza or the war in Ukraine. As though the problem is always a refusal of both or either side to compromise.

If two people hold opposing views strongly, there is no reason to think that a position in the middle between the two, which perhaps no one holds or would argue, is more correct than either of them. If some people think the sky is blue, and some people think the sky is red, this is not proof that the sky is purple. If teacher thinks 2 + 2 = 4, and little Johnny thinks 2 + 2 = 7, this does not prove that 2 + 2 = 5.5. If some people believe the sun goes around the earth, and others that the earth goes around the sun, it does not follow that the heavenly bodies dance around each other. If one country invades another, it does not prove that they have a legitimate grievance, and their opponent is equally responsible for the war in pig-headedly defending themselves.

In the natural course of things, if there is a disagreement between two parties or two positions, one position is probably wrong, in error, and the other correct.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Most people are insane.

As we await the results of the British EU election, I am enjoying, sometimes in a perverse way, watching Carl Benjamin/Sargon of Akkad’s YouTube videos of himself campaigning. He engages interested passersby in an exchange of views.

Sargon has been branded by both the left and the Mainstream Media—if there is a distinction here—as “far right.” Yet his views seem, down the line, classically liberal. By any traditional measure, up until perhaps the last dozen years or less, he is on the moderate left. He is also a master of the admirable English tradition of polite political discourse with those with whom you disagree. I would never have his patience.

So why is he frequently attacked with milkshakes? More frequently, in fact, than the less moderate-mannered Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage?

One guy he interviewed, initially intensely hostile, turned out to have views very similar to Sargon’s on every issue he heatedly raised. Right up until Sargon brought up the matter of Pakistani Muslim “grooming gangs” in the north of Britain. At which point the interviewee started ranting incoherently, would not let Sargon state his position, and stormed off. Another bystander, apparently a member of the town council, then came up and told Sargon he was not welcome in their town.

I'd like to link to the video, but, oddly, it seems to have been removed from YouTube. That may itself be telling.

Sargon’s point was that these particular Pakistani Muslims and their brand of Islam were intolerant and racist. The interviewees were apparently adamant that to call anyone who was not “white” racist was racist. An obvious logical contradiction, and an obviously racist attitude.

Sargon’s interlocutors abruptly ceased being rational. It was a plainly hysterical reaction. It was not simply that the two people could not follow Sargon’s argument, either; it was not stupidity. That could not account for refusing to hear it, or for the sudden rage. It was “denial,” in psycho lingo: knowing their own view was wrong, and refusing to accept this.

One of the great benefits of religion is that it teaches that most people are insane. That insight is most helpful in such cases.

This may sound odd. But it is fairly obviously so. Lots of people are now acting just like this guy in the video. It may well be a majority of the public, in the UK or in Canada. Many or most people are denying obvious realities on a variety of topics: not just on immigration, but on feminism, where Sargon is also attacked and not listened to, or on the half-dozen other subjects everyone knows will cause someone to become agitated or even violent if brought up in public: abortion, transsexualism, Donald Trump, and so forth.

Whenever this happens, this fairly obviously happens because one side knows they are wrong, and is consciously in denial. Inevitably, and self-evidently, this is the side that wants to shut talk down and resort to force.

A critical problem with modern psychology and psychology is that, not having any valid philosophical foundation, it denies this basic truth. It defines “sanity” as “thinking the same way most people think.” This is obviously wrong: it is the ad populum fallacy. Einstein thought very differently from his peers about relativity. By this logic, then, he was simply insane.

Religion in general, and Christianity and Buddhism in particular, teaches instead that most people are likely to be fundamentally wrong in their perceptions or assertions. And they explain why: guilty conscience; Buddhism would say “desire.”

Raising a second critical problem with modern psychiatry and psychology: that it ignores morals. A dehumanizing omission. As here, the denial and the hysteria seems always based on some implicit moral issue. Many if not most people are irrational on subjects where their conscience is troubled. Abortion is the obvious example. But it is people who are themselves clearly racist who seem most eager to accuse others of racism: it is a form of instinctive scapegoating. Feminism, too, is arguably best explained as a mask over a tacit awareness of female privilege, and guilt as a result; women have traditionally been placed on a pedestal, at least in the West. They did not have to go out and get killed in the World Wars, Korea, or Vietnam. They were exempt from the draft.

The New Testament has the straight goods:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.

Jesus further suggests that this will commonly be the majority.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Buddhism’s claims on this are even more extreme.

If it is indeed the majority, the influence of modern psychiatry and psychology actually appears as pernicious. The appeal ad populum is an easy way to justify immorality, and so to sustain one’s personal madness.

This seems, in turn, the fatal error of modern mainstream Christianity: it has come to simply hold that whatever the majority of the congregation wants to assert as true and moral, is true and moral. This assumption is actually incompatible with religion; man does not create God. So that anyone who is religious will fall away.