Thursday, January 02, 2014

The Appeal To Emotion

An ability that we as Human Beings have is to be able to learn from our own errors  And to preferably learn from the errors made by others.

In his campaign for the office of President of the United States in 1964 Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater made numerous errors.  One mistake that stood out in particular was the Appeal To Emotion.  During the campaign he said:

In your heart you know he’s right.

This one statement was absolutely wrong.  In it Senator Goldwater asked us to not actually see things as they are.  He are also asks us to not use the uniquely Human capacity to conceptually think and to construct a larger and complete mental picture that incorporates all of our actual knowledge.

In this one statement we are asked to not think and only to make a decision on the base of an emotion.  And in the real world the result of acting on emotion instead of rational thought is invariably a failure.

But that’s not the whole picture.  The Appeal To Emotion is a tactic used by statist politicians around the world.  And it was  most effectively used by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Barack Obama.

But if the Appeal To Emotion is wrong then why should they use it at all?

In the above mentioned cases the politicians and their parties are absolutely wrong.  Their programs and the underlying philosophy can be illuminated by rational thought and then properly rejected as being completely wrong.  Thus those who believe in the primacy of the state can only obtain their desired powers through the deception of the electorate. 

Unfortunately for us the cultural foundation for winning through the Appeal To Emotion has already been laid.  Throughout the nations of the West the intellectual establishment has been taken over by Marxists and other nihilists in general.  To immunize their doctrines from the effect of rational thought they have systematically denounced the exercise of reason.  Although their goal is the triumph of Marxism they have also opened the virtual gates of the West to the savagery of Islam.

To survive and ultimately to prosper we must bring back Reason as the way of life. 

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