I lay on the hotel bed, cocooned in polyester sheets, which hold the warmth of a stranger’s sweat far more generously than my own body heat. A ceiling stain – the aftermath of someone else’s bad decision, is exposed by the moonlight creeping spitefully through the curtains’ previous refusal to close properly.
Sleep just won’t come. Instead, it stalks me from the corridor, jingling its keycard and laughing. I know my tormentor, I know its face well, for I have recently given up smoking. But now in this moment, two weeks clean, all I want is to light a fag, burn away the craving, watch my discipline disperse as puff of smoke into the nicotine-stained non-smoking room, and then I could finally sleep, in the ashes of whatever remained of my own dignity.
I won’t, instead I’ll just suck on a plastic vape until I feel sick. Because that’s who I have chosen to be now, not an unhealthy smoker, but instead, a healthy mush of constant unfulfillment.
It is an odd peculiarity of the human race that, while we have managed to invent penicillin, the aeroplane, and the Greggs vegan sausage roll, we still fall prey to arguments so feeble that even a drunk pigeon could see through them. Logical fallacies, they call them – though I rather think of them as the intellectual equivalent of putting lipstick on a corpse and insisting it’s ready for a night out. They populate every discussion, whether it be politics, social media, or your mother’s WhatsApp group, where she insists “Bill Gates wants to put microchips in your kidneys.”
The Straw Man, for instance, is less an argument and more the Punch and Judy of reasoning, an opponent you construct out of straw, batter senseless in public, and then proudly declare victory. “You want to reduce military spending? So you want to leave the country defenceless?” It’s the kind of leap in logic you’d expect from a bully explaining to you why you’re punching yourself.
Then there is the Ad Hominem, that most popular of fallacies. Why wrestle with the beast of argument when you can simply tell the beast it has a funny nose and hope the audience applauds? “You’re not a scientist, so your opinion on climate change doesn’t matter.” Quite right. And I suppose only plumbers may complain when their kitchen floods.
“A conversation is an exchange” she said.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“And already you’re in debt” she said.
The Appeal to Authority is another darling, because if a man in a white coat says your cabbage soup diet works, it must, surely, be the pinnacle of nutritional science. Meanwhile the Appeal to Popularity (or Bandwagon, if you prefer carnival imagery) insists that if enough people are hurtling into a financial volcano called Crypto, you too should swan-dive after them.
But my personal favourite is the Slippery Slope, which imagines every small concession is the first step on a toboggan ride into barbarism. Allow students to retake an assignment and, before you know it, the university will be handing out PhDs to squirrels.
Spotting these fallacies requires a certain mental sobriety. Granted, rare in an age when most arguments are performed like two brain cells fighting over third place.
Listen for appeals to fear, pity, or outrage, watch for grand conclusions spun from the threadbare cloth of a single anecdote, and above all, notice the moment your opponent abandons reason entirely and begins flinging rhetorical custard pies.
Dealing with them, however, is trickier. One must remain calm, though this is about as easy as remaining calm whilst being stabbed in the leg with a breadstick. Ask questions, point out the fallacy without sounding smug, and gently tug the argument back toward facts – those stubborn little bumps that are present no matter how many times they wallpaper the same wall.
For at the heart of all this, logical fallacies remind us of a tragic truth: people would rather win an argument than be right.
:: REFERENCES ::
- Logical Fallacies – RandomBoo
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