How the World Lost Its Dayum Mind (and You Can Too!)
It is painful to read a magazine or an op-ed column these days. The comment sections of most online newspapers or message boards are guaranteed to make eyes bleed. People simply cannot think anymore. In olden days, when one was unable to frame a coherent thought or argument, one refrained from speaking in public without the inducement of strong drink. The old adage, which has made its way from King Solomon on down to Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, held true, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Yet in today’s shameless world of egomaniacal braggadociousness, the more ignorant one is, the more one calls attention to that fact.
Now it is tempting to suggest that anyone who disagrees with your worldview or position is ignorant. That is not what I am suggesting (despite the startling number of slack-jawed idjits who happen to oppose my worldview). What I am suggesting is that the average person has a much harder time thinking logically today than at any point since the advent of Greek philosophy, and it is all due to the spread of relativism in our schools and our art.
Enemies of faith and freedom have managed to convince a sizeable portion of our culture that truth is as customizable as a Value Meal; that it is possible to take this aspect of the truth but leave that aspect because it isn’t convenient or palatable. Take what you like and leave the rest! Truth is what you say it is!
This leads directly to the death of logic in our intellectual marketplace. Logic requires the recognition of absolute truth. But our communal acceptance and understanding of truth has gotten so bad lately that many people are unable to even distinguish between an argument which is logical and one which is not. Intellectual positions seem to be judged on the basis of emotions and fidelity with the hive-mind.
To wit, I offer the following examples:
Zimmerman
In the forefront of the American consciousness right now is a pudgy “white Hispanic” man from Florida. Despite the fact that the prosecution had every opportunity to offer all of the evidence in their possession and argue the case in whichever way they desired, they failed to convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman was guilty of murder or manslaughter. This is a fact.
However, in direct contradiction to the findings of investigators and the prosecution, a number of folks have opined that the motivation behind the shooting was racism. No justification for this assessment at all. The fact is that the FBI already investigated Zimmerman to see if there were any racial trends in his profile and came back with nothing.
So much for that argument, right? Wrong. I’m guessing there will be calls to investigate “institutional racism” at the FBI, because whenever illogic hits the brick wall of reality, the cognitive dissonance induces an even greater leap of illogic to hurdle the wall. There is usually a “card” which gets played, typically the race card, the gay card, the sexist card, or the Matthew 7 card, to name a few of the more frequent options.
