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Surf a Flood of random discussion.
Edited by Britton: 12/14/2015 6:19:50 AM
62

How dumb people are fooled.

[quote]Demagoguery is a discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the outgroup should be punished for the current problems of the ingroup.[/quote] So lets go through some aspects. [u]•Use of Binary terms[/u] These are basically used to polarize the ingroup (the target audience) against the outgroup. Examples Strong vs weak Win vs lose Good vs evil Safe vs risky Protection vs danger These terms are used to create a false dichotomy that draws hard lines in the sand pushing people to one side or the other, and getting them to push others to one side or the other, and think in terms of one side vs the other. [u]•Pandering to Naive Realism[/u] Naive realism is the concept that the way you specifically view the world is exactly how it is. Everyone is guilty of this to varying degrees. A demagogue will play to this by reinforcing this view, through supplying the ingroup with rhetoric that creates a confirmation bias. Because naïve realism causes denial that you are looking at the world from a particular perspective, you see no need to learn to perspective shift. In fact, a native realist often believes they can see all perspectives from their position and ultimately negates any need to consider one’s beliefs in terms of falsifiability. [u]•Implementing Aspects of Authoritarianism[/u] -willingness to comply with established authorities placing very narrow limits on people's rights to criticize authorities - Advocating sanction against those whom they deem detrimental.(the outgroup) -Maintain current social dominance by committing to the traditional social norms that are endorsed by society and its established authorities, by directing aggressiveness toward unconventional people or those defined as socially deviant. Using the fear of change, and yet, paradoxically, not being averse to enacting radical and very new policies as long as they are framed as a return to, or a strengthening of “conventional” or “traditional” values.  [b]Ok here's where things start really tying together[/b] [u]• Assertions about Societal taxonomies.[/u] Going back to the use of binary terms, demagoguery relies on the framing of things like ideologies, values, morals, social identifies as either wholly subjective or wholly objective. This creates great difficulty when discussing socially constructed "facts" as things are either up to the individual to decide, or grounded in the very fabric of the cosmos itself. Coupled with naive realism this can create a giant feedback loop of confirmation bias. Example: telling people the things they perceive are objective truths, and they have no need of trying to understand them from different perspectives. This lead us to our next point about what things are considered objective reality, and which things are not. [u]•"Deductive reasoning"[/u] Demagoguery is all about certainty, accuracy, and “facts,” all of which can be deduced from 1)“traditional” practices, values, beliefs (as defined above—they are the most familiar and comfortable to the audience) 2) “traditional” interpretations of authoritative texts 3) reasoning backwards from what must necessarily be true to maintain current hierarchies (racial, gender, national, or economic). This means demagoguery often uses these [i]assertions about societal taxonomies[/i] from what “must” be true, even in cases when there is adequate empirical evidence otherwise. To argue for a particular policy that has been enacted before, demagouge does not reason from the results of when these policies were enacted, but from what must or should happen if their premises are correct. [b]Premises are thereby protected from falsification—the very things that might throw them into question, conditions in which they are shown to be falsified, are rejected precisely on the grounds that it would falsify the premises.[/b] yet, these premises are built on the [i]"deductive reasoning" used to make assertions about societal taxonomies.[/i] Because of this reliance on deductive reasoning that works from premises guarded from falsification, there is a strong tendency in demagoguery to refuse to redeem claims—that is, demagoguery will not provide evidence that demonstrates the major premises, only arguments deducible from the premise, or examples (or citations) that support them. Now for last and most important aspect I will touch on. •Victimization Demagoguery relies heavily on a rhetoric of victimization. The ingroup is being victimized by the situation (often by being treated the same as the outgroup, so there is some fantastic double standards at play), and the claim is that the ingroup has responded to this victimization with extraordinary patience and kindness, reinforcing the victimization of the ingroup. As a consequence, demagoguery has to square the circle of inspiring fear while not looking fearful, since this would play negatively in the faming of all things as strong or weak, good or bad, etc. To do this there are often claims of extraordinary courage in the face of a terrible situation, or a representation of one’s self as calm and reasonable while making apocalyptic predictions, and the odd insistence of the sheer rationality of exaggerated and extreme claims. [spoiler]this is kind of thrown together. As people comment Ill reread it and edit for clarity. [/spoiler] Do not fall prey to the deception of demagogues. Edited for clarity and better thing together of points.

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