Political Rallies And Marches

Political rallies and marches are a major part of how American political factions gain visibility, express stances (not that a march could ever demonstrate that anything is true except that one is perceiving a march, negating the significance of this expression of ideas at the very start).  Whether the position they are trying to express/win others over to is related to abortion, taxes, or something else, these and other public displays of political ideologies are meant to stir up engagement or perhaps even convince someone to join their philosophical alignment.  There is a major epistemological and logical problem, however.  Only a highly irrational person would actually embrace or discard a philosophical position because of an emotional reaction to a march, and nothing but emotion could drive someone to change worldviews after just seeing a political rally/march.

Since it is logically impossible to know if a major idea is true or even probable because someone else expresses it, much less because an (in all likelihood) emotionalistic frenzy of people express it, the only kind of person who would truly change their worldview or behaviors as a whole just because of a political event is a fool.  If someone had been contemplating the issue in question already without making assumptions and while actually looking to reason to see what does logically follow from various ideas, all while recognizing which of the ideas are true by necessity and which are unverifiable but potentially supported by evidence, then that is different.  Even then, the person is ultimately aligning with the laws of logic and not with what some random crowd or speaker thinks.  Because it is extremely unlikely that some political ideas would even be thought of without experiential prompting after which one can see what logically follows (or if the initial premise is possible and provable), it is not always irrational to embrace a truth after seeing a rally, just not because of the rally itself.

If a rally was formed around a genuine logical truth and not an assumption based on preference, consensus, or even mere evidence that does not reach logical proof (evidence alone, from the senses or from memory, never can because it is not the laws of logic), of course it is not irrational for an onlooker to be roused from philosophical apathy or slavery to errors and fallacies given that the rally only promoted their thoughts but they looked to reason itself after that point.  After all, this is the entire hope of even having conversations with people who talk and act as if they are in the depths of irrationalism, something much more common and relatable to many than participating in or observing a political march, rally, or display!  This is not what many in rallies seem to want, though.  They only want onlookers to be subjectively persuaded to make the same assumptions that they themselves already do.

The fact remains that just looking at a political rally and immediately giving allegiance to a political idea--and all political ideas are ultimately metaphysical, moral, and epistemological ideas as well--on the basis of seeing something like a march is wholly asinine.  It would be like watching a film such as The Matrix and becoming a sensory skeptic not because of logical truths/rationalistic proofs, but because one personally liked the movie, or like thinking a historical event is likely to have occurred not because of the primary source evidence for it, but because a contemporary person or someone else supposedly long after the event believed it did.  Almost all political rallies and marches are objectively meaningless and epistemologically useless in light of this.