Every single one of us can relate to being misunderstood.
We’ve all heard, “If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around, did it make a sound?“
There’s an extra layer to that, “If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody who MATTERS was around, then it did not make a sound”.
If you are not a person who people care about, you will not be listened to.
In a perfect world, all you gotta be is right, but that’s not all there is. There’s right, and there’s correct. ‘Right’ is subjective, just how ‘good’ is. ‘Correct’ means you adhered to logic. In a perfect world, right and correct should be the same thing, but this world ain’t perfect.
Aristotle came up with a structure of logic called ‘categorical’ that we use to come to conclusions. This structure comprised 2 premises, a general statement and a specific instance, and the natural conclusion of those 2 premises. The most famous one is:
All humans are mortal
Socrates is human
Socrates is mortal
As cut-and-dry as it is, this doesn’t mean that form of logic is the be-all-end-all for human knowledge. In my 3rd computer science post, I went through Boolean algebra. It uses this categorical logic for computers and robots. If A is B, and B is C, then A = C. This works wonders for math equations, but it can be myopic to apply this to everything, especially human situations. You can’t math-ify subjects with variables and ambiguities.
Even if you’re correct, like I said in my (TikTok) intro, they’re not gonna listen to your 30-page essay if they’re not obligated to. If you’re trying to convince somebody of something through logic, you can be making all these connections, deductions and well-structured arguments, yet that somebody’s only response is, “Man I ain’t tryna hear that shit!”… all that logic is gone. You can shame them, but that’s rarely going to work out for the better, so what do you do?
Meet rhetoric.
Everything I’ve read on this has been trying to tiptoe around this label, but I’m gonna give it to you for what it is.
It’s manipulation. It is. Even if you’re doing it ‘ethically’ or ‘for the right reasons’, you’re shaping their thoughts and feelings to make them behave a certain way, without them being aware of it.
In Ancient Greece there was a group called the Sophists. While regular school focused on logic and being correct, the Sophists taught you how to be right.
They taught you how to get people to trust you when you say the tree made a sound.
Of course there was controversy around them since people thought they taught you how to lie and deceit; hence the word ‘sophistry’. I just called it manipulation, so I’m not gonna say that’s incorrect, but all in all they were teaching you how to debate.
Problem is, most debates are doomed from the jump cause we forget we don’t all value the same things.
If I want to go to Mcdonald’s and you want to go to Burger King, somebody is going to not get their way. You can say maybe we’ll find a spot we both like, but that’s not possible in a lot of situations.
In that sense, why would we argue over directions when we got 2 different destinations in mind? See how dumb that sounds when taken literally? That’s what most debates are.
Some people will admit they’re biased. But even they recognize they won’t get far playing that card. You can’t run for political office or seek a position of power while telling everybody, “I don’t care about the greater good or what yall think is right. This is what I feel. So we gonna do what I feel and yall not gonna stop me.”. You’re not gonna get anywhere with that. So where do we go from here? This is what I plan to study.
Of all my philosophy posts, I had to trim this one the most. These are both big subjects and I had a lot more to say on them, but I didn’t want to overload this. This is only the beginning, we’re gonna dive into em.
Grant Abraham 