I Am No Devil, For There is None...
I participate in an online forum that discusses current events. A believer in plain speaking - especially these days - I express my views and my criticisms of the views and arguments of others in a frank - sometimes a brutally frank - fashion, but always with the intent to be fair and the objective of getting at the truth. Some in this forum can’t take the heat. Here below is a recent posting of one participant making reference to me (Torq):
Guys, I don’t know if you have followed Arthur Brooks. He was the head of The American Enterprise Institute and has written some stuff I value. In particular, I found The Conservative Heart to be a great read. Here are a couple of paragraphs from a recent article where he describes what could be an email chain with Torq, Fish and others we all know:
The way that people tend to argue today, particularly online, makes things worse. Disagreements can feel like a war in which the fighters dig trenches on either side of any issue and launch their beliefs back and forth like grenades. You wouldn’t blame anyone involved for feeling as if they’re under fire, and no one is likely to change their mind when they’re being attacked.
These sorts of fights might give everyone involved some short-term satisfaction—they deserve it because I am right and they are evil!—but odds are that neither camp is having any effect on the other; on the contrary, the attacks make opponents dig in deeper. If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon, and start offering them as a gift.
Here below is my response:
I have never agreed with the idea that this forum is just an unresponsive bulletin board, where participants thumbtack their opinions to the corkboard and walk away. Instead, I see it as a blast furnace, a refiner's fire of ideas. All opinions are not created qualitatively equal and are not all equally deserving of respect. A little heat consumes the dross. Can't take the heat? Get out of the kitchen.
"In the absence of controversy, the truth cannot be honed." - Weldon Taylor, First Dean of the Marriot School of Management, Brigham Young University
Sadly, though I do wish it were otherwise, there is a real war underway today in our society - not a garden party where people can banter politely, disagree over meaningless frivolities, nobody is ever offended, and everything continues as before. We are in a street fight where everything that matters is at stake - our liberty, property, prosperity and indeed our very lives - and time is running out. With all due respect, I think Jack vastly underestimates the gravity of our present circumstances...
This is a conflict not between cantankerous people who have differing opinions on things and are determined to win arguments in order to achieve some sort of "short term satisfaction". It is a conflict between truth and lies, reality and fantasy, right and wrong, light and darkness, liberty and tyranny and good and evil - absolutes not subject to opinion but woven nonnegotiably into the very fabric of reality - and the battle lines have never been more clearly drawn or dug-in than they are today. On the one side of the conflict you have arrogant demons, hungry for money and power, willing to employ any means necessary to achieve their ends, supported by their gullible useful-idiot minions, and, on the other, the more intellectually, morally and spiritually enlightened residue. Sadly, I believe the gulf is so wide we are now well beyond the time when we could politely work to change minds.
In this conflict, one side understands the true nature and scope of this conflict and fights accordingly - as we saw, for example, in their in-your-face theft of the 2020 election and as we are seeing in their willful overthrow of the rule of law at our southern border - both deadly, potentially existential blows struck at the heart of our republic - and the other side, by and large, sadly, is still stumbling around in a thumb-sucking stupor with only a vague awareness they have been taken advantage of but no real idea of the ramifications or what to do about it. And if, here and there, there are a few of us so bold as to speak the truth and name the theft and lawlessness for what they are, we are instantly dismissed, ad hominem, as heartless racists and boorish conspiracy theorists.
As a first step, let me suggest we need to start calling a spade a spade - and in that regard I am happy to render service from time to time. On the principle that you can't solve a problem you refuse or are unable to correctly define, let's put away all the polite BS and name the beast for what it is. Because these arrogant, power- and money-hungry demons simply cannot help themselves, this usually is no more difficult than listening carefully to what the beast has to say out of its own mouth - as when the swaggering, quintessentially arrogant Barack Obama some years back declared his intention to "fundamentally transform the United States of America." My wonderful America. Your America. Shall we just politely and quietly disagree with that kind of treason and let it be, or are we justified in getting a little hot under the collar and raising the temperature of the discourse?
As others in this forum have occasionally done in the past, the piece of limp-wristed, invertebrate fluff Jack quotes from below appears to exalt genteel decorum above all else, condemns those who employ plain speaking, and completely ignores reality and the existence of absolute values like truth - the way things really are and really work - things that make all the difference and are worth fighting for. This piece, in a very subtle way, is an implicit denial of such absolutes - there is no "truth"... no uncompromising absolute reality we should seek to understand and orient ourselves to. It's all just matter of opinion - you have yours and I have mine, and one is just as good and as deserving of respect as the other... so... can't we all just get along? Shouldn't we all just get along? And if you don't agree, you're a self-righteous prig.
Not just no, but hell no.
This strategy of the left - to attack as crude and rude anyone who, using plain language, dares call out their fraud - reminds me of phraseology from the LDS Church's Magic Book, speaking of our day:
"And others will he [the devil] pacify and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell. And behold, others he flattereth away, and telleth them there is no hell; and he saith unto them: I am no devil, for there is none—and thus he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance." - Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 28:21-22
There is a vast, a profound difference - a profound character difference - a profound difference in methodology - between having as one's objective simply the winning of arguments as opposed to getting at the truth - the way things really are and really work... As I have noted many times in the past:
The credibility of WHAT you argue is directly a function of HOW you argue.
Find the truth in the methodology of argument. The truth cuts its own way and can be argued for in an honest, open fashion that does not insult the intelligence of those it seeks to persuade. Deceit cannot be so argued.
For my part, I am as willing to have this standard applied to my own arguments as I am willing to apply it to the arguments of others. Since the objective is to get at the truth, what's to worry? If my thinking is proven wrong in any instance, I benefit. Because truth is the objective, winning or losing arguments, I benefit.
A common if not ever-present tactic of arguments that are not intended to get at the truth is ad hominem attack - attacking the arguer rather than addressing the argument. The former tactic - attacking the arguer - is intended to win an argument by putting a stop to it. The latter approach - responding to the argument - is intended to work its way toward a better understanding of the truth. If a man beats his wife and I call him a wife-beater, though he may not like it, have I attacked him ad hominem? As with the charge of slander, the truth is always an absolute defense against the charge of ad hominem attack.
Finally, in my opinion, anyone who, in the interests of conviviality, is willing to sacrifice the plain speaking of truth, however offensive that truth may be to some, is on the wrong side of the existential conflict unfolding before us.
These are the times that try men's souls...
Torquemada