Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, charcoal burning everywhere.
— Gerry Goffin
Facing a $1.3 billion defamation suit, Donald Trump's wormy shyster Sidney Powell now says "no reasonable person would conclude" her claims of election-rigging "were truly statements of fact."
Yet, thanks in part to Powell, 64,829,709 adult Americans believe Trump won and are backing bills in 33 states designed to suppress Democrats' votes in the future.
What's wrong with them? How can they be—to borrow Powell's defense—so unreasonable?
A logician would say they're guilty of the fallacy known as the argument from incredulity.
Their flawed reasoning looks like this:
- We can’t explain or imagine how this thing—Trump's loss—can be true.
- If we can't explain or imagine how the thing is true, then it must be false.
- Therefore, this thing is false.
Their second premise is clearly unsound. (I can't explain or imagine, for example, how a paper cut can be worse than a knife cut; but I don't therefore deny that it is.)
Why 65 million adult Americans can be so patently illogical is mystifying—until you consider the Pleasant Valley pseudo-reality in which they live.
As conceived by philosopher Josef Pieper, a pseudo-reality is a deliberately maintained "fiction," a pathological interpretation of reality.
A pseudo-reality allows anyone who lives in it to shape the world to suit his biases, and to accommodate others who, like himself, can't accept the world as it is.
A pseudo-reality is, in effect, a playground for psychopaths. It can persist, Pieper says, only as long as the kids outside the playground—in other words, the normal kids—don't challenge it.
Writing in the 1970s, Pieper's prime example of a pseudo-reality was Nazism.
Today's prime example is the GOP.
Its members are all delusional psychopaths, water-carriers for a destructive lie. As such, they cannot be logical.
Because logic only applies to the real world.
