Labour’s Chaos Comes From Left-Wing Logic
The Government’s illogical energy policies… Jess Phillips’s illogical approach to safeguarding…the illogical selling off buying off of the Chagos Islands… It seems to any half-thinking person that the Government is behaving in a way that is completely illogical if it is concerned about its own or the country’s success. However, the unrolling of all of the above policies are not the result of illogical, messy or on-the-hoof thinking. Quite the opposite: the actions of this Labour Government are the result of clear, exact and rigid logic.
Much is made by Cummings and others of ‘The Blob’ – obstructive civil servants, entrenched Left-wing ideology – but I think more attention needs to be paid to the restrictive role of logical thinking that has afflicted the modern world and might well be the root cause of our problems.
A.C. Grayling, the Remain campaigner and former philosopher, defines logic as: “The science of valid inference. Drawing a conclusion from premises and assumption from which we try to deduce or induce a conclusion.” Aristotle got the whole logical way of thinking going. In Prior Analytics he set out the radical notion that we might systematise thought to generate new knowledge. He was rather fond of using the syllogism to discover new truths from those already known.
Medieval Scholastics such as Abelard, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham developed logic before Descartes put a temporary end to things. His famous, “I think therefore I am” again made the individual’s subjective certainty the foundation of all knowledge. Alas, logic reared its cold clinical head again in the 20th century with Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Turing. Things, ideas and even truths could again be rigorously proved. And thus we have lived under the tyranny of the Aristotelean syllogism ever since.
You may be familiar with the famous syllogism:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore, Socrates is mortal
This basic method of logical thinking has infiltrated every corner of the Government operation and explains most policies that appear daft. Policies are crafted based on premises that are treated as axiomatic truths. And from the one flawed premise follow all sorts of logically imperative actions. Alas this generation of thinkers do not apply the rigorous interrogation of each line or word to establish whether the opening premise is actually true. Instead we have flabby, often incorrect ‘truths’ that then logically force all manner of socially destructive policies.
Carbon Dioxide causes terrible global warming
Gas and oil cause carbon dioxide
The UK’s energy system must be decarbonised
The state should house the homeless
Illegal immigrants are homeless
The state should house illegal immigrants
A research paper was published recently that suggested the vigorous use of the Aristotelean syllogism would be of marked benefit to the development of public policy. Relevant to the cancellation of many UK council elections, the paper looked at the merger of councils in New South Wales Australia in pursuit of greater efficiency.
Large councils are efficient
We want efficiency
Therefore, we must merge small councils into large ones
The authors argue persuasively that this was sloppy use of logic that insufficiently interrogated the truth of the opening premise: “Large councils are efficient.” Is this correct? Yes, but also, are small councils efficient? Yes. What about medium sized ones? Yes also – depends on the personnel. With logic, if you insert just one logical fallacy, you get logical ‘explosion’. The New South Wales council reorganisation was an explosion of inefficiency – as no doubt ours will be.
It seems that the Labour Government is clinging rigidly to creaking logically fallacious opening premises:
Policing must involve community groups
Small councils must be merged
Private education is bad
Traditional education is bad
International law must always be followed
Gender is a social construct
Boys are naturally misogynistic
Bodily autonomy trumps the sanctity of life
Taxes are a moral good
and so on. From these fundamentally untruthful premises, various destructive policies follow with grim logical inevitability.
Policing must involve community groups
Some community groups are dangerous Islamists
Dangerous Islamists must be involved in policing
In logic this is a known as a valid argument. Under these logical parameters, solar and wind farms, puberty blocking drugs, euthanasia, abortion up to birth, VAT on private schools, the shrugging off of overseas territories, may appear monstrous, but they are all logically valid, if not logically sound.
Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are often referred to as intuitive leaders. It will be interesting to see if anyone is able to crack the rigid dominance of entrenched institutional logical thinking. They will either have to force themselves to enter more deeply into logical thinking and use exhaustive logic to thoroughly interrogate if ideas or civil service orthodoxies in principle are actually true. Or they explode the whole system as Descartes did and revert to vibes, where once again an individual’s subjective certainty is the foundation of all knowledge.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
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As stated, the islamists syllogism is invalid because the middle term (community group) isn’t distributed in either premise. A valid one would be:
Policing must involve all community groups.
Dangerous islamists are a community group.
Therefore, policing must involve dangerous islamists.
Criminals are also a community group, by the way. Because of this, the distributed version of the minor premise probably won’t be used in the real world. It’s more likely that
it will be claimed that community groups involved in policing aren’t composed of dangerous islamists and/or that existence of dangerous islamists would be a right-wing conspiracy theory.
Triangulation. Blair in Northern Ireland ignored the moderates to treat and trade with the extremes, so an accommodation could be reached whereby both would get more or less what they wanted, and had failed to get, without violence. The result, the extremists shared power, the majority had to suffer.
Blair was congratulated for gaining the peace, but he had just given in to violence. Don’t hit me, I’ll give you what you want.
That approach is evident with the police, Government, judiciary with the immigrant wave of cultures where aggression, destruction, violence, anti-Jewish, hatred for other cultures is endemic.
By getting rid of all the New Labour politicians in disguise who have been strategically parked there to cope with a possibly lost election.
….and, getting rid of the liberal wing (majority) of the Tory party MPs at the same time!
Remove the State from provision of education.
It is overlooked that State involvement in education is a recent thing, which started in the late 19th Century and increased thereafter.
It is similarly overlooked the Victorian’s had a national health service with about 2 700 hospitals, 75% of the population with private health insurance, the uninsured covered by the voluntary sector and parish.
It seems to any half-thinking person that the Government is behaving in a way that is completely illogical if it is concerned about its own or the country’s success.
The madleft is not concerned with promoting the success of our country. Obviously. The madleft is intoxicated with its hatreds. Hatred of white people. Hatred of the working class. Hatred of men. Hatred of English culture. Hatred of European civilisation. And the whole of government policy reflects these hatreds.
Vandals destroy things because the destruction and depriving others of their use is their reward. It is not illogical, it is calculated with malice.
There is no thought of destroying it in order to replace it with what they think is better. It’s just the joy of destruction – because they want to and can.
The aim of Socialism is to destroy capitalism by tearing down economies and social structures based on it. Fulfilling that doesn’t require anything further. Job done.
Yes Minister made the same point. “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”
“Left-wing logic” has poisoned the political spectrum – witness near unanimous parliamentary support for the 2008 Climate Claptrap Act, doubling down on the 2019 net-zero amendment and falling for the flawed premise of The Pandemic That Never Was.
“Nullius in Verba” – Take Nobody’s Word for It.
Just a brief point. ‘I think therefore I am’ was not an excuse for the ridiculous subjective logic of woke loonies. It was a much deeper explanation of existence.
Woke loonies don’t – can’t – think, they don’t have the higher brain power to do so.
Marx, the Fabians and their stepchildren sought to replace the ancient foundations of our society and culture to erase the influence of centuries of wisdom. Therefore everything that emanates from their false philosophies is always going to be at odds with what is true, pure and fair – which explains not just the policies of the present administration but perhaps much of the last 70 years.
Not sure that logic itself is the problem. Aristotle gives us ‘A is A’. Tremendously useful. A is a man swimming/ running in a race against women, whatever you call A or A calls himself.
The corrective to such (il)logical policy-making is an approach to policy-making that doesn’t claim to be logical: Common Sense. It is out of fashion, largely because it frequently requires policy-makers to stay at home and do nothing.
This is nonsense. Logic is a formalized (or semi-formalized) system for conclusions from premises. If the premises are invalid or disputable, the conclusions will also be invalid or disputable. Eg, International law must always be followed. An international court has decided that the Chagos archilepago ought to belong to Mauritius. Therefore, it must be rendered to Mauritius. The first premise is invalid because there is no such thing as international law, only treaties sovereign countries have agreed to. If the Starmerment decides to pay Mauritius for coming into possession of Chagos archilepago, that’s a political decision a sovereign entity made. This sovereign entity could have decided to do something else instead and the only war to force its hand would have been winning a war against it. The second premise is also invalid because there is no international treaty which deals specifically with the Chagos islands with reference to the former French colony Isle de France Britain captured during the seven years war. That the present of state of Mauritius was a British overseas posession (“colony”) doesn’t imply any particular relation of Mauritius to other British overseas possession. This so-called court made the political decision to publish a certain declaration… Read more »
Or, they could just be ignorant morons that if breathing required an IQ in double figures would not be troubling us.
They are Linear thinkers, they think in straight lines, they never examine the possible offshoots or consequences of their one track ideas, hence the constant messes their policies create.
I think you have hit on the issue – whatever the policy, notion or idea, Merton’s Law of Unintended Consequences comes into play and because of the latent ignorance of the current crop of Governments, we have failure at all levels
“Progressives” are linear thinkers. They see society as on a journey with each step forward an improvement, but only they know which is the best step to take, so in their certainty they must push people in that direction even if they don’t want to go because it is against their interests.
Bastiat: Ce qu’on voit. Ce qu’ on ne voit pas.
eg – Minimum wage. What is seen: earnings of people on minimum wage get a pay increase. What is not seen, therefore not considered: is those out of work who cannot get a job because their labour is not worth the minimum wage; those who lose their jobs because their employer cannot afford the increase, and other employers reduce jobs by replacing them with machines or a move abroad.
On balance minimum wage impoverishes and reduces economic activity.
It does seem that the blob’s use of logic is very selective.
We need electricity all the time
Wind farms only generate electricity some of the time
Therefore wind farms are useless.
The logical conclusion would be: Therefore, windfarms cannot satisfy our needs.
Wether or not they’re useful is a completely different question. They’re obviously very useful to the people who own them because it’s politically desired that they’re built and used as much as possible. Logic cannot be used to decide political questions. It can only be used to justify or question political decisions.
But remember that the boss of Ofgem – once a regulator to work to the benefit of consumers – said that people would have to get used to not having electricity everytime they needed it. And the retards running Germany were planning to instruct industry to work only when the energy was available.
An interesting essay, but the author hasn’t read Descartes. Descartes was attempting to show that because human senses can mislead us, (and this is where the phrase ‘common sense’ is meaningful, do all senses simultaneously agree? Not always) the only thing I can be sure of, is that I am a thinking thing. Humans are thinking things as it were. Therefore, I know I exist because I am thinking. Descartes was exploring the idea of being, not logic. The likes of Heidegger demonstrated the paucity of systematic ‘calculative’ thinking, and Descartes is benchmark for a critique of that. It’s definitely not about vibes.
“I know that I exist because I am thinking”
So what happens when you are not thinking? Does your existence also vanish? This is a bizarre statement by Descartes; he should take a look at the ways of eastern philosophy, and Buddhism in particular, where an exalted state of consciousness occurs called “samadhi“, where thinking is left behind and a state of joy and heightened awareness persists – beyond thought.
This is no illusion or delusion; anyone who cares to practice meditation consistently can verify it for themselves, despite the defensive claim by western Fundamentalists that such experiences are “the works of Satan – the Great Deceiver”. This is laughable, pitiable in fact.
A similar state is also described by Christian mystic St. John of the Cross in his “Dark night of the soul”.
Even without venturing into mystical and meditation realms we all experience states where we are not thinking – particularly when absorbed listening to music for example.
IWHT there was no such thing as left-wing logic, only logic. There are left-wing premises, many of which are false.
Sense is the foundation of understanding, because sense is immediate, like life. When thinking begins understanding becomes a process and starts to grow less complete. Now that the status of information-processing is almost total, understanding is becoming meaningless because it is senseless.
It comes from evil – Socialism is the epitome of evil as it seeks to over-write our Humanity with its creed of greed, envy, spite, malice, and enforced compliance to serve collectivism.
Collectivism is still a nonsense term invented by a sex-crazed Russian housewife and mediocre (very politely put) novelist which mainly illustrates her lack of education, specifically, her lack of knowledge about history of anything save a selective bit of the history of the first half of the 20th century. Nor are these the only points in which our city is worthy of admiration. We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of… Read more »