It’s painfully easy to rationalise anything.
If you’re prepared to sully your mind, there are ‘logical’ arguments for September 11 being a government conspiracy, or for aliens living amongst us, or for racism being a good idea.
The logic is broken, but people are lousy at logic. For most of us, the illusion of reason is enough.
So logic won’t close many arguments. Once people have retreated into their emotional silos, you need to deploy action to get anything done.
Action has a certain unbiased purity to it. Few today would debate that Communism won over Capitalism; reality settled that experiment for us all. Likewise, in most developed nations we take for granted things that were once debated: equal rights for women, education for all, law and order.
When an argument reaches a certain point, discussion becomes pointless. Democracy is based on this simple fact; you can never persuade everyone to agree with every viewpoint, so they set a critical threshold after which they all agree to co-operate.
When you’re stuck in an argument, don’t expect to win. Almost no-one ever does. Move to action. Call a vote. Start a trial. Drum up popular support. Or just go ahead and deploy the whole damn enterprise.
Maybe you’re wrong, maybe you’re right. Either way, soon enough, the debate is over.
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Founder of Silktide, writer, pianist, programmer, artist and general busy bee. Here I write about life and how to better it.
