Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Disproving One Political Ideology Does Not Prove Another

One person's--or group's--incompetence and idiocy establishes nothing except that the person or group in question is incompetent and irrational.  Nothing is revealed about another person.  When it comes to politics, conservatives and liberals love to think that attacking or even disproving ideas from the other party is enough to prove their own ideas true.  Of course, what most of them apparently mean by "disproving" other political philosophies is really just challenging their reports on current events with more appeals to authority by respected figures talking about current events.  There is little to no explicit concern for genuine proof or conceptual analysis; the focus is on things that cannot be proven or on things that are irrelevant to the heart of the issue.

Conservatives might pretend like abortion being murder means that not only are most liberals wrong about abortion (being a pro-life liberal is possible, although it is rare), but also that the conservative obsession with abortion at the expense of more serious issues like prison rape is valid.  This is not true: the denial that abortion kills humans and hypocrisy about the concept of murder does not mean that it must follow that abortion needs to be elevated above practically all else as conservatives usually think.  Liberals might pretend like the idiocy of assuming that racism against black people must be almost nonexistent in America just because black people hold corporate and political positions not only means that conservatives typically trivialize racism against blacks, but also that the liberal tendency to assume that racism is always present is true.  This is not true: neither trivializing nor exaggerating racism is rational.

The flaws of conservatism and liberalism do not prove the opposing party's positions or justify believing in the other side's ideas.  Only a fool thinks that one philosophy is validated by a contrasting ideology being false if there are more than two possibilities.  If metaphysical relativism is false (and it is), metaphysical objectivism must be true because these are the only two options.  If moral relativism is false (and it is), it does not mean that moral realism is true, because moral nihilism is still a possibility.  Politics is like the latter example.  It is not true that conservatism being false means that liberalism is true and vice versa.  There are not just two political positions to prove or disprove, so even disproving the foundations of both does not falsify other ideas.

Moreover, the reason why most conservatives and liberals object to the other side's stances is not typically logical impossibility, epistemological unverifiability, or anything remotely similar to a rationalistic philosophical analysis.  Some of them, especially conservatives, like to present themselves as if they represent reason, but any rationalist has the capacity to see right that nothing is true or obligatory because it is traditional (conservatism) or because it becomes culturally encouraged (liberalism).  It is emotionalistic desperation and subjective dislike of the other side's ideologies that drive most perceptions of conservatives by liberals, as well as most perceptions of liberals by conservatives.  Almost none of them are even trying to be rational--or else they would not believe in most tenets of either party.

A world without conservatives and liberals would not automatically have a valid political structure, but it would be a world with far fewer insects who falsely think themselves lovers of truth and justice.  Their assumptions and inconsistencies alone mean that anyone who sincerely identifies with either major American political party does not care about truth.  What they care about is appeasing their insignificant, epistemologically irrelevant emotions or fitting into a group of people they admire for reasons that have nothing to do with philosophical validity.  Conservatives and liberals--not people who recognize that some ideas associated with conservatism and liberalism are valid, but those who truly believe in conservatism or liberalism--are simply too stupid, selfish, and petty to disregard familiar concepts for those which are true.

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