Your last question caught me. I think I see what you mean about being careful not to answer the question you want to answer rather than the one being asked. My opinion here is that using fallacies would create pain where it is not necessarily present and obfuscate where it is in reality. So in perceiving pain, it seems like fallacies like the appeal to emotion, for instance, could create a false equation between a negative emotion/discomfort and pain, which is not always the case. Similarly, using a fallacy could deny pain by painting over it. For another example, by using appeal to authority, someone could say that x authority told me that I should do y for my health so that must mean it's a good thing, and even if they have an otherwise negative reaction, they would filter it as good, potentially, due to their fallacious thinking. In confronting pain, I could see someone using something like the middle ground fallacy to think they are doing the right thing to resolve a dispute by compromising when in reality they are making grave sacrifices that will ultimately lead to more pain, all while thinking they have dealt with the pain. Of course, as I write this, and having read this post, I am questioning my own thinking all over the place and if I am using any fallacies when responding to the question. Ha!
Yes, it is more common than people think. It takes time and attention paid to the question at hand without defense mechanisms being brought into play. That cocktail is rare in current society, and frankly, a rare one throughout history. In short, what you have written attends to the use of fallacies of various types as a means of structural defenses generated to protect and put forth the individual's unassailability within an environment. The future writings within this series will address these states of being as well as several others that are significant causative agents. Thank you for engaging with the material, Perry. I think you will enjoy how things unfold once the discernment mechanisms are laid out in detail. I am careful not to go into certain areas of your observations as I do not wish to take away the pathways of discovery that one will walk in taking on this series without prior advanced knowledge. That said, we will have some fascinating discussions along the way especially starting around the twentieth essay. Please keep contributing and engaging. I appreciate your thoughts and input highly. Note that the application of co-dependent thinking is readily visible within the examples you referenced. This is one angle of approach and one that is common. How might other angles look? Other psychological states would yield some novel pathways for us to traject and generate discovery through while offering an intriguing intellectual challenge! If you move through those in your thoughts, you will find some of the other components held within the writing up to this point. If you choose to take those on, please let me know how that goes.
Very true regarding defense mechanisms, and when you said that I wondered, are defense mechanisms just forms of biases, fallacies and heuristics when it comes down to it? I hadn’t thought about them that way before but based on your writing it seems that there’s a lot of shared ground there.
I am definitely interested to hear more about what you have to say on protecting one’s unassailability. Thank you for pointing out that bias in my thinking! I will explore this further.
Your last question caught me. I think I see what you mean about being careful not to answer the question you want to answer rather than the one being asked. My opinion here is that using fallacies would create pain where it is not necessarily present and obfuscate where it is in reality. So in perceiving pain, it seems like fallacies like the appeal to emotion, for instance, could create a false equation between a negative emotion/discomfort and pain, which is not always the case. Similarly, using a fallacy could deny pain by painting over it. For another example, by using appeal to authority, someone could say that x authority told me that I should do y for my health so that must mean it's a good thing, and even if they have an otherwise negative reaction, they would filter it as good, potentially, due to their fallacious thinking. In confronting pain, I could see someone using something like the middle ground fallacy to think they are doing the right thing to resolve a dispute by compromising when in reality they are making grave sacrifices that will ultimately lead to more pain, all while thinking they have dealt with the pain. Of course, as I write this, and having read this post, I am questioning my own thinking all over the place and if I am using any fallacies when responding to the question. Ha!
Yes, it is more common than people think. It takes time and attention paid to the question at hand without defense mechanisms being brought into play. That cocktail is rare in current society, and frankly, a rare one throughout history. In short, what you have written attends to the use of fallacies of various types as a means of structural defenses generated to protect and put forth the individual's unassailability within an environment. The future writings within this series will address these states of being as well as several others that are significant causative agents. Thank you for engaging with the material, Perry. I think you will enjoy how things unfold once the discernment mechanisms are laid out in detail. I am careful not to go into certain areas of your observations as I do not wish to take away the pathways of discovery that one will walk in taking on this series without prior advanced knowledge. That said, we will have some fascinating discussions along the way especially starting around the twentieth essay. Please keep contributing and engaging. I appreciate your thoughts and input highly. Note that the application of co-dependent thinking is readily visible within the examples you referenced. This is one angle of approach and one that is common. How might other angles look? Other psychological states would yield some novel pathways for us to traject and generate discovery through while offering an intriguing intellectual challenge! If you move through those in your thoughts, you will find some of the other components held within the writing up to this point. If you choose to take those on, please let me know how that goes.
Very true regarding defense mechanisms, and when you said that I wondered, are defense mechanisms just forms of biases, fallacies and heuristics when it comes down to it? I hadn’t thought about them that way before but based on your writing it seems that there’s a lot of shared ground there.
I am definitely interested to hear more about what you have to say on protecting one’s unassailability. Thank you for pointing out that bias in my thinking! I will explore this further.