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To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. -Thomas Paine
He is right. Try discussing climate science with those who have drunk the environmentalist Kool-Aid. Or maybe the reality of two sexes with someone all-in on gender fluidity. Try discussing crime with someone fully convinced that punishing criminals for their actions is really an expression of systemic racism. Who honestly believes bigotry in favor of people of color is somehow different than bigotry that favors those who are white? That it is not just appropriate, but laudable.
In all of those examples, your facts, no matter how little they care about their feelings, simply slide off their wall of feelz. What they believe is more important than your stupid reality. I do not even try to engage those types anymore, at least not one-on-one. It is a waste of time and life is too short. I generally say, "That's nice," and move on. (Look up the etymology of "nice." It comes from a Latin word meaning ignorant.)
The only times I argue with the true believers of nonsense is if a third party is present — a third party who is not a true believer and amenable to reason. In those situations, I am not arguing with the person who has renounced the use of reason. Rather I am using that person as a foil to convince the third party of my position. Doing that is kind of fun.
Discussion (17)
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"The only time I argue with true believers of nonsense is if a third party is present, a third party who is not a true believer and amenable to reason. In those situations I am not arguing with a person who has renounced the use of reason. Rather I am using that person as a foil to convince the third party of my position. Doing that is kind of fun."
And when *nobody* does that, then it promotes the view that the entire opinion space is owned by the nonsense-believers.
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Writer Arthur Koestler ('Darkness at Noon'), himself a former Communist, wrote about the nature of intellectually closed systems and how the affect their believers. Link.
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Which is why I do it and what makes it fun. That look that crosses the third party's face when they realize the nonsense the true believer is spouting really is nonsense.
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This was hammered home to me during the 2016 presidential race . I used to go back and forth with the Kool-Aid drinking numbskull left at work . I no longer engage . It is pointless.
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David,
Thanks for that. Here is an eloquent summary, from that link.
A closed system has three peculiarities.
Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man.
In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of casuistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops.
In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself.
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