Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Explain belief.
The late Ray Hyman, a leading expert on cold reading and arch-nemesis of parapsychologists, was once asked if he thought alleged psychic Rosemary Altea was a fraud. Hymanâs answer (from memory) went something like:
I donât know if sheâs a fraud, but if I were a fraud I would do exactly what she does.
Many of the things that seem crazy to us begin to make sense (in a âreverse engineeringâ sort of way) once we ask ourselves:
If I were determined to defend the indefensible, what would I do?
To me the main virtue of Simon Edgeâs The End of the World Is Flat is not that itâs a particularly close analogy to gender ideology*, but the way it deals with precisely this question.
As the word âindefensibleâ implies, persuasion by evidence and argument is obviously not the way to go in this case. Instead you need to work on peopleâs motivations. Some useful âcarrotsâ include being âkindâ (according to self), being on the âright side of historyâ, getting to take your righteous indignation out on others and feel good about it etc. The âsticksâ include the fear of causing offense, of making yourself unpopular, of social isolation, of losing your job, of having your name pulled through the dirt all over the internet etc.
Ideally you want to avoid addressing the actual substance of your opponentâs arguments for as long as possible. Instead make it about your opponent as a person. The âPerfect Rhetorical Fortressâ of the woke Left and the âEfficient Rhetorical Fortressâ of the Trumpist Right (cf. Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott) offer endless excuses for never getting to the issue. Postmodernism (or, if youâre on the Right, Trumpist post-truth politics) is your friend: If any appeal to âevidenceâ and âlogicâ is just a naked exercise of power in a zero-sum conflict between oppressors and oppressed, why waste your time with such such things?
If you have to talk about research, avoid specifics at all costs. All people have to know is that there is generic âresearchâ that proves you right, and that your opponents are too ignorant and uneducated to know about. No need to cite any sources. Instead place all the burden of proof squarely on your opponents. Woke standpoint epistemology comes to the rescue: Itâs not the job of marginalized people to educate you, remember! If you canât claim an officially approved âmarginalizedâ identity for yourself, you can always claim to simply be âpassing onâ what the truly marginalized told you, as a good âallyâ. If you are on the far Right, donât worry. Religious apologists can show you how itâs done:
There are irrefutable arguments in favor of my position that are out there on the internet (or in the theological literature) somewhere. Iâm not saying what they are, but Iâm still going to attack you for not dealing with them. If you had made a serious effort to educate yourself, you would know why Iâm right, so the fact that you still donât agree with me proves you havenât made the effort. Now go out there and study forever or until you agree with me.
Unless your opponents are able to meet any arbitrary standard you impose on them, you get to claim victory by default, without having to meet any standards at all. Once again itâs more or less analogous to saying that âI get to claim for free what you have to pay forâ.
Daniel Dennett once made a useful distinction between two very different kinds of âbeliefâ: You can believe in the actual propositional content of a statement (e.g. I believe that the sun will rise in the East, as seen from my frame of reference, tomorrow morning), or you can believe in âwhatever statement x happens to meanâ (e.g. I believe, on the authority of physicists, that E = mc².). The former kind requires you to actually understand the statement in question (you canât believe in the content without knowing what the content is) while the latter does not. The relevance to our purpose should be obvious: You want to encourage the latter kind of belief! Indeed the less people understand what they are required to believe the better. Once again, all we need to know is that thereâs sound âresearchâ (or âscholarshipâ) supporting all this stuff, and if it all sounds like gibberish to us, itâs because the ideas are too intellectually sophisticated and profound for our primitive brains to fathom.
Ophelia once wrote an insightful blog post (I believe it was called â#peopleagainstbadthingsâ) about people who claimed to be against misogyny (more or less by definition âbad thingsâ) while (from memory) âdefining misogyny so narrowly that itâs defined out of existenceâ. There is also a danger of defining things too broadly. Of course everyone thinks theyâre against âbad thingsâ, whether itâs âmisogynyâ, âphobiasâ, âinjusticeâ, âbigotryâ, âFascismâ, âhateâ etc. And everyone is in favor of âgood thingsâ (e.g. âsocial justiceâ, minority ârightsâ, âdiversityâ, âequityâ, âinclusionâ etc.). On the other hand most people most of the time donât necessarily have a well thought out idea of what all this entails in practice. This can be used to manipulate us by first getting us to declare ourselves âagainst [bad thing]â or âpro [good thing]â and then using that as a Trojan horse for smuggling in tons of other crap thatâs supposedly implied for reasons best left unspecified. Soviet-style Communism is an obvious example. Your âgood thingâ (i.e. the Trojan horse) may be âjustice for the working classâ etc., and what it is taken to imply is unconditional endorsement of tyranny, the one party state, leader worship, forced orthodoxy and intellectual conformity, censorship, thought police, the surveillance state, endless purges and show trials, political arrests, torture, executions, labor camps, forced collectivisation, mass-starvation, genocide etc. etc. In the end even questioning the inalienable right of the leader to live like an emperor while the workers are starving is reframed as denying âjustice for the working classâ.
* Too conspiracist, too traceable back to a single source, too easily defeated in the end etc.
