Nice specificity here, a fitting complement to Orwell’s classic musings and ruminations along theses lines. But...c’mon, for the kind of heartening boost we all need going forward, the masterful and hilarious contrast he drew in “Politics and the English Language” - between a famed KJV passage from Ecclesiastes and a dreary example of bureaucratic newspeak - can’t be beat. Don’t forget the power of derisive laughter when it comes to fending off the Thought Police, who are mostly a bunch of blustering punks.
Paralogic and paramoralism - those words are so right for what students are taught to use and believe. Too long to go into it here. Anyway, great words.
Fight semantic entropy, learn your mother tongue anew and use it! Every Saxon word is charged with moral judgement; say not "political spectrum": say good and evil; use not those polysyllabic confustications of the continental invaders. (j/k, kind of: but this problem of ambiguity started in 1066 and got worse as each wave of marauders began to pollute the language with their vague foreign words. Try writing anything using only our native words, and you'll soon feel yourself turning verbs over in your mind, trying to find one that isn't too blunt. But the bluntness is good, that is the simple, honest, true soul of English, which calls a spade a spade.)
While the devious use of words and "logic" is important in understanding the mechanics of ponerology, it operates at the level of the symbol, and thus is unsatisfactory when we look at higher levels of knowing. How do these lies creep into those higher levels? We need, eventually, some understanding of the situation that could result in at least a partial resolution of the problem of the psychopath.
For me, this arrived in the form of Hubbard's work. Others find solace in the findings of parapsychology or perhaps in the experiences of some particular person who had an NDE then returned to life transformed.
We must believe that spiritual life, by definition, exists above the level of biological life, and that addressing the spirit, or Spirit, can ultimately revive a being, give them a new sense of hope and purpose, and perhaps even some day free the psychopath from his or her demons.
The ultimate dire image of any horror movie is that of the "hero," sorting through piles of data until he begins to understand what is really happening, suddenly blindsided by a surprise attack and unable to defend himself because he lacked the skills he needed to put that understanding into practice.
As my own biological life slowly burns out, I face that image more and more starkly. I do not have sufficient spiritual skill to get even my own friend to look with a fresh eye, feel with a fresh heart, think with a fresh mind. And so my "friend" today can become my enemy tomorrow and see me as little more than an object needing to be annihilated.
I watched about half an hour of a James Lindsay video called 'The Queer Gnostic Cult' and it was like he'd received a flat-pack of a chair and had assembled it in such a way that people could only sit on it if they stood on their heads.
This article implies that humans are mostly helpless puppets controlled by the language and ideas of their pathological leaders, but they deserve a free society. This suggests a moral paradox: if people are really that deterministic then they are not capable of freedom and therefore not capable of forming a free society; and if they are not deterministic, not controllable like puppets, then why is their society not free?
I don't quite agree. I don't think humans are mostly helpless puppets, just that in certain conditions, they can be such. But with knowledge and/or experience, they can become resistant to manipulations of this sort. In other words, it's not a black and white thing. One of Lobaczewski's main points in PP is that the people DO form something like a free society as a result of the oppressions of a pathocratic government.
This doesn’t quite work either. If there are conditions that can be produced by a leader to make people pathologically controllable, then people are still helpless puppets. Another way, if people can be free only under conditions that make them free then they are not free at all; their apparent freedom is deterministic, a product of external circumstances, not of their own moral will.
There is another way to consider this problem. Let us suppose that people, as conscious rational beings (the Kantian definition of Human) are always morally free, essentially morally free, can never be morally manipulated but, rather, exercise their freedom immorally, willingly choose to collude with the most pathological individuals (which is essentially the central thesis of Wilfred Bion) when they should know that blind obedience (a purported delegation of moral authority) is of itself is a moral transgression. Bion would say that there is a “pathological” urge of people in general to actively seek out a pathological leader, but “pathology” is a vague concept and perhaps a better explanation is that people are simply sub-rational, their belief systems always mostly logically inconsistent, and the symbiosis between tyrants and their enablers is the result of their inconsistencies. This evidently includes what some think is a free society; it is mostly irrational at heart and only momentarily experiencing favourable conditions, falsely believing itself to be free, but its demise is predetermined by the irrational elements it harbours within. In short, irrational people are never free, cannot be free, their mind is not free if they cannot discern sense from nonsense.
I'm still seeing some all-or-nothing, black-or-white thinking here. People aren't a unified mass. You will always find some more suggestible than others. The fact that any given proportion will be more susceptible than others under certain conditions does not imply that people in general or even those temporarily so influenced are "helpless puppets." Case studies, examples of real people in concrete situations, come in handy here.
//if people can be free **only** under conditions that make them free//
I agree, I was a bit coarse just to emphasise the inconsistency of the premise that under certain conditions people can be helpless puppets (but are free otherwise). I will rephrase, if most people are substantially controllable under certain conditions, and those conditions can be produced by a leader, then most people are substantially not free to start with. The degree to which people are controllable is not all or nothing; this is evidently a matter of degree and varies from person to person. My other suggestion is that people, being essentially moral beings (if we were not moral beings then our freedom would have no intrinsic value), are not therefore blameless for the state of unfreedom. They are as morally responsible for their collusion as the manipulative rulers. There also seems to a be a feedback loop between morality and rationality: bad moral choices give rise to irrational beliefs, and irrational beliefs give rise to bad moral choices, and over time this can escalate to a catastrophe, but the process can also be reversed, leading to general moral improvement.
Late response, but I think you put it very well here. Thank you for clarifying, Michael! Lobaczewski makes a similar point at various points throughout his book: that moral failings are in fact what opens the door for ponerogenesis, so ultimately the initial responsibility falls on us. And the two processes do indeed act in a feedback loop.
This is pretty great, although I was chagrined to learn from that video that I write a bit like a midwit. It has the benefit of allowing you to say controversial things without anyone really noticing so much, but if nobody notices, why even say it in the first place?
Excellent! There are several things that immediately come to mind, The most interesting ones are, a book I read many years ago by Friedrich Hacker titled “Freiheit die sie meinen” / “the freedom they mean” (1978) about the Patty Hearst Kidnapping, the brain washing and legal defense, in this book the terms “Unfreezing and Freezing” are used to describe two main stages of brainwashing.
With the five types of demoralization I can’t help it but to think of them as the “unfreezing” stage.
“And once semantic entropy is frozen like this, institutions will tend to preserve the new entropic “order,” repressing any “negentropic” influences capable of reversing it. It becomes self- reinforcing.” - I think this sounds pretty much like the “Freezing” stage in the context of brainwashing.
The second one most important thing that comes to mind is:
paralogic - An illogical, false logic. A paralogism is a statement or argument intended to be persuasive that is fundamentally illogical. It can either be the result of conversive thinking or deliberate mendacity. Ideological propaganda is a form of paralogistics. It is ostensibly logical, but contains false premises, leaps of logic, and double standards. Paralogic acquires much of its persuasive force due to the presence of paramoralisms.
~~~~
So, paralogic is "anti-logic" - it is the opposite of logic or rather it is a twisted sort of logic that turns down up and up down. Paralogic relies upon "narrative" and the premise that if enough think it...it will become true in and of itself regardless as to whether it is real....I reckon. That seems to be what postmodernism is, and it is sort of "group-think" not because any given logic or idea resonates true, but rather only because it is what the group is thinking and the ideas might appeal in imagination of some. Some think this group-think takes on a power of its own and prevails, but I think they are WRONG. I can prove it if need be I think.....(ha, ha).
Regardless.... 2 + 2 = 4 and even a smart 2-year old knows this because it is REAL. It is physical.
Just because some think it, don't mean it has merit, and if it don't add up, and is "illogical", then I reckon that means it could be paralogic especially if it is harmful.
Plus, I agree, once one goes into the "paralogic" realm of mind games, then paramorality follows (or it could be as you imply paramorality leads to paralogic - how many "paras" are there I wonder and when does it end)....but I suspect the flaws in the thinking keep it from ever expanding out too far, because lets be honest - thinking the same thing as the group thinks is not all it is cracked up to be and cracks in the logic soon form and then those who were group thinkers end up (and down) being all alone when reality crashes through the door undeniably....so to speak.
Over the last few decades, there has been this insatiable zeal to remove any screen depiction of a black person that reads as undignified, or ghetto, or otherwise negative. Well all know about this so there's no reason to elucidate. In 2010, A man tried to crawl through the window of an Alabama housing project and rape a young woman. The local news interviewed her loudmouthed, flamboyantly gay brother, who started shouting at the camera that "We gon' find you!" and warning the public to "Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband coz they rapin' e'rebody out here!"
This became a viral sensation and the brother, Antoine Dodson, is now forever Internet famous. But when that aired, the news station was flooded with angry phone calls and emails, and ended up issuing an on-air apology shortly thereafter. Why were they apologizing? They didn't specify. But some segment of the population was upset about the unflattering "depiction" of this young black man on TV. Nevermind that A) his outrage for his sister was justified and appropriate, even admirable; and B) that was his actual personality! He was a flaming gay guy from the projects! People were apparently offended that this guy who exists in real life was on TV "depicting" himself.
Ariel Castro abducted multiple women and kept them as sex slaves in his basement for a decade. He starved and beat them, induced miscarriages, forced one to bear his child—horrible story. They were rescued by a heroic, bug-eyed, nappy-haired, gap-toothed, self-effacing dishwasher named Charles Ramsey, who explained on the local news, in jovial, black vernacular, that he heard someone screaming for help, came to the house, kicked in the door, rescued one woman and the baby, then called 911 and told them there were other women being held captive in the house. He said that no one would ever expect Castro, except one time he saw Castro out with his daughter, and the "little pretty white girl in a black man's arms" didn't seem right to him.
Again, the Cleveland TV station was inundated with angry calls and emails because they didn't like the rescuer being on TV, acting all ghetto! So let's check our cheat-sheet:
> Moral: the actual heroism or moral righteousness of our subjects is irrelevant, and doesn't even register. The presentation of black stereotypes elicits a reaction in people unmoved by the actual story, the actual crimes.
> Perceptual: there's no distinction between a fictional portrayal on television and an actual person in your community.
> Epistemic: Castro's kid must have appeared lighter than him (who was already pretty light) but for whatever reason, their juxtaposition seemed off to Ramsey—and he was correct: something was not right about the relationship. But it doesn't matter that his intuition proved correct; he's still "wrong" to think such a thing.
So there it is. Paramorality blunts and replaces actual moral perception. Btw what dude Ramsey was dirt-poor and he refused the reward money for saving those women, and asked that it be given to the women themselves.
Making the peasants care about politics is abuse, they have no real say or understanding... thanks to the propaganda blitzkrieg. Just more bread and circus divide and conquer
So are "imaginary" numbers based on the square root of negative 1 (-1) to paralogic paramorality as the concepts of paralogic and paramorality are to logic and morality?
In other words you have the classic conflict between that which is "real" versus that which is imaginary.
Frankly, I think imagination has run a bit too wild lately in the postmodernist world we reside, and truly the fewer complex concepts the better because we all know that a coin in the hand is better than 10 in the bank. One is real - the other is fiat. One can be taken away on a dime, the other cannot.
I'd just assume have a coin in hand versus one in the bank and I think too much semantic games lead to a dead end.
With that said, it must be evident, that I appreciate this post Harrison.
I'm not sure I'd make that analogy, precisely. Paralogic would be more like 2+2=5, "because reasons." But the real/imaginary definitely plays a part. Paralogic plays a big role in trans ideology, for instance.
Well in imagination 2+2 can equal 5 even though in the real world we all know it doesn't. That is all I was trying to express. If you think about it, the beauty of imagination is that it is not real, but that also means anybody can just about imagine anything and then it becomes a matter of convincing others - sort of the postmodernist way of thinking I suppose, but I put forth that as much as you might want to convince somebody that 2 + 2 = 5, and as much as you might think this is correct in your imagination, if you take two sets of two apples and put them in front of a 2-year old, even the two year old knows they don't equal 5 total - so paralogically one might imagine all sorts of things, but if a 2-year old can tell the difference....well, just goes to show the real world is what logically matters.
And just to take this to the logical extreme, sometimes it is necessary for some minds to imagine things that other minds might not think possible and at the end of the day, sometimes the imagination of just one turns out to change many minds assuming the imagination can be proven in the real world. That to me is the power of imagination - it is the way new ideas emerge. But most ideas emanating out of imagination are full of flaws in the real world - just like the trans ideology as you suggest is a "paralogic" way of thinking.
So, enough of my ramblings, and thanks for this post.
Part of the beauty of the imagination, IMO, is that you can imagine something unreal, and yet perfectly logical and reality-consistent. So even in the imagination, I'd say there is logic and paralogic.
It's long past time for a rectification of names. Death to all euphemisms! We must say what we mean, clearly, and with feeling.
Agreed! Whole heartedly. If you can’t say your intent with bare faced, plain logic, that is a big sign you shouldn’t be doing it.
Reminds me of that film the last emperor
'If you cannot say what you mean, you will never mean what you say.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX2ggm5bSh8
Nice specificity here, a fitting complement to Orwell’s classic musings and ruminations along theses lines. But...c’mon, for the kind of heartening boost we all need going forward, the masterful and hilarious contrast he drew in “Politics and the English Language” - between a famed KJV passage from Ecclesiastes and a dreary example of bureaucratic newspeak - can’t be beat. Don’t forget the power of derisive laughter when it comes to fending off the Thought Police, who are mostly a bunch of blustering punks.
That was a classic, for sure.
Paralogic and paramoralism - those words are so right for what students are taught to use and believe. Too long to go into it here. Anyway, great words.
Fight semantic entropy, learn your mother tongue anew and use it! Every Saxon word is charged with moral judgement; say not "political spectrum": say good and evil; use not those polysyllabic confustications of the continental invaders. (j/k, kind of: but this problem of ambiguity started in 1066 and got worse as each wave of marauders began to pollute the language with their vague foreign words. Try writing anything using only our native words, and you'll soon feel yourself turning verbs over in your mind, trying to find one that isn't too blunt. But the bluntness is good, that is the simple, honest, true soul of English, which calls a spade a spade.)
While the devious use of words and "logic" is important in understanding the mechanics of ponerology, it operates at the level of the symbol, and thus is unsatisfactory when we look at higher levels of knowing. How do these lies creep into those higher levels? We need, eventually, some understanding of the situation that could result in at least a partial resolution of the problem of the psychopath.
For me, this arrived in the form of Hubbard's work. Others find solace in the findings of parapsychology or perhaps in the experiences of some particular person who had an NDE then returned to life transformed.
We must believe that spiritual life, by definition, exists above the level of biological life, and that addressing the spirit, or Spirit, can ultimately revive a being, give them a new sense of hope and purpose, and perhaps even some day free the psychopath from his or her demons.
The ultimate dire image of any horror movie is that of the "hero," sorting through piles of data until he begins to understand what is really happening, suddenly blindsided by a surprise attack and unable to defend himself because he lacked the skills he needed to put that understanding into practice.
As my own biological life slowly burns out, I face that image more and more starkly. I do not have sufficient spiritual skill to get even my own friend to look with a fresh eye, feel with a fresh heart, think with a fresh mind. And so my "friend" today can become my enemy tomorrow and see me as little more than an object needing to be annihilated.
I watched about half an hour of a James Lindsay video called 'The Queer Gnostic Cult' and it was like he'd received a flat-pack of a chair and had assembled it in such a way that people could only sit on it if they stood on their heads.
This article implies that humans are mostly helpless puppets controlled by the language and ideas of their pathological leaders, but they deserve a free society. This suggests a moral paradox: if people are really that deterministic then they are not capable of freedom and therefore not capable of forming a free society; and if they are not deterministic, not controllable like puppets, then why is their society not free?
I don't quite agree. I don't think humans are mostly helpless puppets, just that in certain conditions, they can be such. But with knowledge and/or experience, they can become resistant to manipulations of this sort. In other words, it's not a black and white thing. One of Lobaczewski's main points in PP is that the people DO form something like a free society as a result of the oppressions of a pathocratic government.
This doesn’t quite work either. If there are conditions that can be produced by a leader to make people pathologically controllable, then people are still helpless puppets. Another way, if people can be free only under conditions that make them free then they are not free at all; their apparent freedom is deterministic, a product of external circumstances, not of their own moral will.
There is another way to consider this problem. Let us suppose that people, as conscious rational beings (the Kantian definition of Human) are always morally free, essentially morally free, can never be morally manipulated but, rather, exercise their freedom immorally, willingly choose to collude with the most pathological individuals (which is essentially the central thesis of Wilfred Bion) when they should know that blind obedience (a purported delegation of moral authority) is of itself is a moral transgression. Bion would say that there is a “pathological” urge of people in general to actively seek out a pathological leader, but “pathology” is a vague concept and perhaps a better explanation is that people are simply sub-rational, their belief systems always mostly logically inconsistent, and the symbiosis between tyrants and their enablers is the result of their inconsistencies. This evidently includes what some think is a free society; it is mostly irrational at heart and only momentarily experiencing favourable conditions, falsely believing itself to be free, but its demise is predetermined by the irrational elements it harbours within. In short, irrational people are never free, cannot be free, their mind is not free if they cannot discern sense from nonsense.
I'm still seeing some all-or-nothing, black-or-white thinking here. People aren't a unified mass. You will always find some more suggestible than others. The fact that any given proportion will be more susceptible than others under certain conditions does not imply that people in general or even those temporarily so influenced are "helpless puppets." Case studies, examples of real people in concrete situations, come in handy here.
//if people can be free **only** under conditions that make them free//
That's not what I wrote.
I agree, I was a bit coarse just to emphasise the inconsistency of the premise that under certain conditions people can be helpless puppets (but are free otherwise). I will rephrase, if most people are substantially controllable under certain conditions, and those conditions can be produced by a leader, then most people are substantially not free to start with. The degree to which people are controllable is not all or nothing; this is evidently a matter of degree and varies from person to person. My other suggestion is that people, being essentially moral beings (if we were not moral beings then our freedom would have no intrinsic value), are not therefore blameless for the state of unfreedom. They are as morally responsible for their collusion as the manipulative rulers. There also seems to a be a feedback loop between morality and rationality: bad moral choices give rise to irrational beliefs, and irrational beliefs give rise to bad moral choices, and over time this can escalate to a catastrophe, but the process can also be reversed, leading to general moral improvement.
Late response, but I think you put it very well here. Thank you for clarifying, Michael! Lobaczewski makes a similar point at various points throughout his book: that moral failings are in fact what opens the door for ponerogenesis, so ultimately the initial responsibility falls on us. And the two processes do indeed act in a feedback loop.
This is pretty great, although I was chagrined to learn from that video that I write a bit like a midwit. It has the benefit of allowing you to say controversial things without anyone really noticing so much, but if nobody notices, why even say it in the first place?
That's just, like, his opinion, man! ;) But yeah, good advice.
Excellent! There are several things that immediately come to mind, The most interesting ones are, a book I read many years ago by Friedrich Hacker titled “Freiheit die sie meinen” / “the freedom they mean” (1978) about the Patty Hearst Kidnapping, the brain washing and legal defense, in this book the terms “Unfreezing and Freezing” are used to describe two main stages of brainwashing.
With the five types of demoralization I can’t help it but to think of them as the “unfreezing” stage.
“And once semantic entropy is frozen like this, institutions will tend to preserve the new entropic “order,” repressing any “negentropic” influences capable of reversing it. It becomes self- reinforcing.” - I think this sounds pretty much like the “Freezing” stage in the context of brainwashing.
The second one most important thing that comes to mind is:
Watch your thoughts, they become your words;
watch your words, they become your actions;
watch your actions, they become your habits;
watch your habits, they become your character;
watch your character, it becomes your destiny
Kudos for the great work
Great stuff, Joachim. When your thoughts are muddled and your words do not map to reality, ultimately your destiny becomes entropic and disordered.
Per the article:
~~~~
paralogic - An illogical, false logic. A paralogism is a statement or argument intended to be persuasive that is fundamentally illogical. It can either be the result of conversive thinking or deliberate mendacity. Ideological propaganda is a form of paralogistics. It is ostensibly logical, but contains false premises, leaps of logic, and double standards. Paralogic acquires much of its persuasive force due to the presence of paramoralisms.
~~~~
So, paralogic is "anti-logic" - it is the opposite of logic or rather it is a twisted sort of logic that turns down up and up down. Paralogic relies upon "narrative" and the premise that if enough think it...it will become true in and of itself regardless as to whether it is real....I reckon. That seems to be what postmodernism is, and it is sort of "group-think" not because any given logic or idea resonates true, but rather only because it is what the group is thinking and the ideas might appeal in imagination of some. Some think this group-think takes on a power of its own and prevails, but I think they are WRONG. I can prove it if need be I think.....(ha, ha).
Regardless.... 2 + 2 = 4 and even a smart 2-year old knows this because it is REAL. It is physical.
Just because some think it, don't mean it has merit, and if it don't add up, and is "illogical", then I reckon that means it could be paralogic especially if it is harmful.
Plus, I agree, once one goes into the "paralogic" realm of mind games, then paramorality follows (or it could be as you imply paramorality leads to paralogic - how many "paras" are there I wonder and when does it end)....but I suspect the flaws in the thinking keep it from ever expanding out too far, because lets be honest - thinking the same thing as the group thinks is not all it is cracked up to be and cracks in the logic soon form and then those who were group thinkers end up (and down) being all alone when reality crashes through the door undeniably....so to speak.
Regards,
BK
It seems that James Corbett and his latest 'Dissent Into Madness: Escaping the Madhouse' joins the discussion on pathocracy. https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/dissent-into-madness-escaping-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=725827&post_id=115272074&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
Nice! James was one of the first people to review PP back when it was first published over 15 years ago. Glad he hasn't forgotten it!
Here are examples of demoralization:
Over the last few decades, there has been this insatiable zeal to remove any screen depiction of a black person that reads as undignified, or ghetto, or otherwise negative. Well all know about this so there's no reason to elucidate. In 2010, A man tried to crawl through the window of an Alabama housing project and rape a young woman. The local news interviewed her loudmouthed, flamboyantly gay brother, who started shouting at the camera that "We gon' find you!" and warning the public to "Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband coz they rapin' e'rebody out here!"
This became a viral sensation and the brother, Antoine Dodson, is now forever Internet famous. But when that aired, the news station was flooded with angry phone calls and emails, and ended up issuing an on-air apology shortly thereafter. Why were they apologizing? They didn't specify. But some segment of the population was upset about the unflattering "depiction" of this young black man on TV. Nevermind that A) his outrage for his sister was justified and appropriate, even admirable; and B) that was his actual personality! He was a flaming gay guy from the projects! People were apparently offended that this guy who exists in real life was on TV "depicting" himself.
Ariel Castro abducted multiple women and kept them as sex slaves in his basement for a decade. He starved and beat them, induced miscarriages, forced one to bear his child—horrible story. They were rescued by a heroic, bug-eyed, nappy-haired, gap-toothed, self-effacing dishwasher named Charles Ramsey, who explained on the local news, in jovial, black vernacular, that he heard someone screaming for help, came to the house, kicked in the door, rescued one woman and the baby, then called 911 and told them there were other women being held captive in the house. He said that no one would ever expect Castro, except one time he saw Castro out with his daughter, and the "little pretty white girl in a black man's arms" didn't seem right to him.
Again, the Cleveland TV station was inundated with angry calls and emails because they didn't like the rescuer being on TV, acting all ghetto! So let's check our cheat-sheet:
> Moral: the actual heroism or moral righteousness of our subjects is irrelevant, and doesn't even register. The presentation of black stereotypes elicits a reaction in people unmoved by the actual story, the actual crimes.
> Perceptual: there's no distinction between a fictional portrayal on television and an actual person in your community.
> Epistemic: Castro's kid must have appeared lighter than him (who was already pretty light) but for whatever reason, their juxtaposition seemed off to Ramsey—and he was correct: something was not right about the relationship. But it doesn't matter that his intuition proved correct; he's still "wrong" to think such a thing.
So there it is. Paramorality blunts and replaces actual moral perception. Btw what dude Ramsey was dirt-poor and he refused the reward money for saving those women, and asked that it be given to the women themselves.
Making the peasants care about politics is abuse, they have no real say or understanding... thanks to the propaganda blitzkrieg. Just more bread and circus divide and conquer
So are "imaginary" numbers based on the square root of negative 1 (-1) to paralogic paramorality as the concepts of paralogic and paramorality are to logic and morality?
In other words you have the classic conflict between that which is "real" versus that which is imaginary.
Frankly, I think imagination has run a bit too wild lately in the postmodernist world we reside, and truly the fewer complex concepts the better because we all know that a coin in the hand is better than 10 in the bank. One is real - the other is fiat. One can be taken away on a dime, the other cannot.
I'd just assume have a coin in hand versus one in the bank and I think too much semantic games lead to a dead end.
With that said, it must be evident, that I appreciate this post Harrison.
I'm not sure I'd make that analogy, precisely. Paralogic would be more like 2+2=5, "because reasons." But the real/imaginary definitely plays a part. Paralogic plays a big role in trans ideology, for instance.
Well in imagination 2+2 can equal 5 even though in the real world we all know it doesn't. That is all I was trying to express. If you think about it, the beauty of imagination is that it is not real, but that also means anybody can just about imagine anything and then it becomes a matter of convincing others - sort of the postmodernist way of thinking I suppose, but I put forth that as much as you might want to convince somebody that 2 + 2 = 5, and as much as you might think this is correct in your imagination, if you take two sets of two apples and put them in front of a 2-year old, even the two year old knows they don't equal 5 total - so paralogically one might imagine all sorts of things, but if a 2-year old can tell the difference....well, just goes to show the real world is what logically matters.
And just to take this to the logical extreme, sometimes it is necessary for some minds to imagine things that other minds might not think possible and at the end of the day, sometimes the imagination of just one turns out to change many minds assuming the imagination can be proven in the real world. That to me is the power of imagination - it is the way new ideas emerge. But most ideas emanating out of imagination are full of flaws in the real world - just like the trans ideology as you suggest is a "paralogic" way of thinking.
So, enough of my ramblings, and thanks for this post.
BK
Part of the beauty of the imagination, IMO, is that you can imagine something unreal, and yet perfectly logical and reality-consistent. So even in the imagination, I'd say there is logic and paralogic.