Interesting thing I’m seeing with more and more clarity as I continue to debate socialists, never trumpers, and pro-choice gone to “I’ll go apoplectic if you dare say killing is bad” people. Not one of them, not a single one of them have a positive cohesive philosophy.

The vast majority of these people laugh when you bring up philosophy, completely oblivious that every choice you make, every action you do, every thought you reject or accept all stems from your personal philosophy. Ponder that for a moment.

Pondered a bit? Do you see how absurd it is to not take the very core of what makes you you seriously? These people have gathered up catch phrases, random quotes, political rhetoric, bumper sticker slogans, gift card text, pseudo deep thoughts and shoehorned them into philosophy.

There is no deliberate examination as to how each part goes together. No deliberate examination as to how new scraps of philosophy fit with what exists.

This causes these people to have their every action/decision/thought/etc to be tempered with whichever random tidbit of philosophy happens to be relevant to the topic at hand at that time. And if they took in contradictory scraps that hit the same topic?

Which ever surfaces first dictates the choice. This means that self contradiction is common usually at the cost of having no awareness that they have contradicted themselves. Statement A fits philosophy scrap A. Statement B fits philosophy scrap B.

Hard to get them to face that the statements contradict let alone that the scraps of philosophy they took in are the root cause of it. Cognitive dissonance is almost always the result and sadly we aren’t taught to recognize and properly reconcile cognitive dissonance.

The end result of someone suffering a cognitive dissonance is usually anger and lashing out at the person they perceive causing the deep mental anguish they are feeling. Hubris prevents seeing the fault is due to a deep inner conflict. Know how I know? Been there, done that.

I am still relatively new to philosophy and am still weeding out conflicting and/or incongruous parts to have a healthy cohesive philosophy. But as I keep traveling down this path it does become more clear how bad a broken philosophy is. And me? I was deeply flawed.

In most instances in dealing with these individuals that are in one or more of my aforementioned groups, the end result of being consistent in my messaging, stance, ability to spot, address and call out whataboutisms without contradiction; these people flat out lose their .

And the more calm you remain, or as I tend to do, take joy in watching them try their hardest to find an inconsistency and falsely claim their own contradiction is somehow yours, the more they lose their .

Had time to sleep on it. Might redo this thread from scratch. It was a little too meandering and rambling for my liking. I dunno. We’ll see what happens when I get time.