Selective Amnesia There was a point to this. But I forgot.

On storytellers, liars, logicians and the cartel

Seth Godin on his Liars blog, has this very cool insight:

It may be, that like me, you wish that all issues were decided on facts and reliable data. They never are. We’re people, not machines, and we believe stories, not facts.

I’d like to add to it. People don’t ‘get’ logic. People are trained to be illogical. That’s our first impulse, and our defense mechanism. Emotions work better than cold facts.

This is why, the cartel can never become popular or liked. We folks put you off with our sticking to the facts and insistence on first principles. While, the others use rhetoric and word-play (pro-people, pro-poor, pro-life, pro-equality and ad nauseum) and fuck your priorities up.

Logic doesn’t cut ice. Not when you have a message you’d like 1, 10, 100 or a million people to buy into. Logic works only in the long term. By which time, the original participants in the debate are long dead.

Logic works when both parties in a debate are mature enough and are intelligent – intelligent to hope to win the debate, not the argument.

So, why the fuck am I stating the obvious?

Because, like I was telling Anand the other day, a lot of libertarian thinking is stating the obvious. But, often, the obvious is overlooked, and rhetoric screws with your thinking. You are indoctrinated so much, the obvious sounds counter-intuitive.

It is this, my understanding that logic is not effective enough when your audience is not capable of following it, that leads me to be an illogical typo-jew.

[Related: Why the Cartellians are wrong, Re-iteration, The L word, The illogic of logic]

*Yes. I am being inconsistent. Am I not the one who went after a certain Delhi-based blogger who wrote for that tabloid? Explanations on this, next post. If you care enough, that is.

logic | illogic | stating the obvious