Treatise IV: Logic
We are bombarded daily by a deluge of messages and “arguments” from the TV and radio news media and from various outlets that populate the social media landscape. Young people attending school or college are hit with even more from a wider variety of sources. Every time we open our Facebook app or check our Twitter feeds, we are hit with all manner of assertions and declarations meant to move our needles and change our way of thinking. Some of these can be very effective.
It is important then to understand the ancient rules of logic and rhetoric, because usually, the most effective “arguments” that we’re presented with aren’t arguments at all. Usually, they’re debasements of logic known as “logical fallacies.” These assertions usually strive to make a point by playing upon the listener’s emotions rather than by presenting a logical, factual argument.
How many times have we all seen a black-and-white picture of starving African children that some hipster has captioned with “capitalism kills” and posted on Facebook? This is a classic example of an “appeal-to-emotion” logical fallacy. It uses first a visually striking, visceral image that immediately puts the viewer into a state of heightened emotions and then suggests a focus for the empathy-turned-moral-outrage by blaming capitalism. No African country with mass starvation problems uses any sort of capitalist economic structure. Aid sent from Western, nominally-capitalist countries typically gets misappropriated by the governments of those impoverished nations. These underlying facts are totally lost in the emotional gut-punch the meme delivers, as was the point.
More ghoulish yet were those who used photos taken of the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas mass-shooting in 2017 and then posted them with captions that condemned the NRA. Never mind that the perpetrator broke a huge variety of laws before he even fired the first shot that terrible day, laws that all failed to stop him from what he was determined to do. That fact and many, many other salient ones are easy to forget when looking at images of a blood-soaked plaza filled with the bodies of the dead and dying beneath a black-trimmed, bold-faced white font telling you to blame the NRA.
This tactic, of course, predates social media and the Internet by eons. Pro-Lifers have been using photos of aborted fetuses to shock and horrify people into believing the state should violently take rights away from women for decades – it apparently works, because they keep doing it. And obviously, it goes back farther still.
There are many, many other examples of logical fallacies. Blessedly, a quick Google search will turn up several good lists, most of which do a better job of explaining the various rules of logic and rhetoric than I could here – and doing so would make this treatise anything but succinct. It is definitely worth the effort, however, to familiarize yourself with the common ones. In addition to the aforementioned “appeal-to-emotion” there’s the “strawman,” “argument from outcome,” “burden of proof,” “gas-lighting,” and a host of others.
Being able to guard against allowing fallacious arguments to sway one’s thinking is a vital skill for humans to possess. Going back to the appeal-to-emotion example; what sort of reaction is the starving-African-children meme or post-Vegas-shooting meme supposed to elicit? One on the same level as the stimulus, an emotional one. What use is that?
Outrage alone doesn’t typically lead one to formulate a helpful conclusion to anything. In my own experience, when I’m mad at something, I’m usually too busy being mad at it to come up with a good way to fix whatever it is about it that’s irritating me. Be it a malfunctioning electronic device, an uncooperative car, or a problematic coworker – anger is an impediment delaying me in getting around to whatever it is I need to do to fix the issue. Letting it irritate me is my own fault and is counter-productive.
It is because we as a species are not terribly adept at thinking rationally when we’re upset that appeals-to-emotion work well when cynically employed against us by people trying to manipulate the way we think for their own ends.
It’s easy to think to one’s self: “yes, yes, the NRA is a terrorist organization” when you’re looking at a horrific scene and the words are there in black-and-white. It’s far harder to think, when staring at that same image: “wait, the NRA has always preached responsibility and gun-safety, and in the immediate aftermath supported an increase on regulations related to devices used in this very event.”
Likewise for the first example. By design, “look what capitalism has done to these poor children,” comes far more readily to mind for most people than does “wait, that looks like 1980s Ethiopia, which most definitely wasn’t capitalist.”
Left unexamined, the opinions that form from exposure to such fallacious arguments can and will take hold and serve to cloud a person’s judgment and thinking ever afterward.
Every human owns their own bodies, perhaps the most important part of that overall possession is the bit between one’s ears. Exerting and maintaining self-ownership of our minds is a responsibility each individual most look after with great care.
Leave a Reply