Labour’s Chaos Comes From Left-Wing Logic

JOANNA GRAY

The Government’s illogical energy policies… Jess Phillips’s illogical approach to safeguarding…the illogical selling off buying off of the Chagos Islands… It seems to any half-thinking person that the Government is behaving in a way that is completely illogical if it is concerned about its own or the country’s success. However, the unrolling of all of the above policies are not the result of illogical, messy or on-the-hoof thinking. Quite the opposite: the actions of this Labour Government are the result of clear, exact and rigid logic.

Much is made by Cummings and others of ‘The Blob’ – obstructive civil servants, entrenched Left-wing ideology – but I think more attention needs to be paid to the restrictive role of logical thinking that has afflicted the modern world and might well be the root cause of our problems.

A.C. Grayling, the Remain campaigner and former philosopher, defines logic as: “The science of valid inference. Drawing a conclusion from premises and assumption from which we try to deduce or induce a conclusion.” Aristotle got the whole logical way of thinking going. In Prior Analytics he set out the radical notion that we might systematise thought to generate new knowledge. He was rather fond of using the syllogism to discover new truths from those already known.

Medieval Scholastics such as Abelard, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham developed logic before Descartes put a temporary end to things. His famous, “I think therefore I am” again made the individual’s subjective certainty the foundation of all knowledge. Alas, logic reared its cold clinical head again in the 20th century with Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Turing. Things, ideas and even truths could again be rigorously proved. And thus we have lived under the tyranny of the Aristotelean syllogism ever since.

You may be familiar with the famous syllogism:

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man

Therefore, Socrates is mortal

This basic method of logical thinking has infiltrated every corner of the Government operation and explains most policies that appear daft. Policies are crafted based on premises that are treated as axiomatic truths. And from the one flawed premise follow all sorts of logically imperative actions. Alas this generation of thinkers do not apply the rigorous interrogation of each line or word to establish whether the opening premise is actually true. Instead we have flabby, often incorrect ‘truths’ that then logically force all manner of socially destructive policies.

Carbon Dioxide causes terrible global warming

Gas and oil cause carbon dioxide

The UK’s energy system must be decarbonised

The state should house the homeless

Illegal immigrants are homeless

The state should house illegal immigrants

A research paper was published recently that suggested the vigorous use of the Aristotelean syllogism would be of marked benefit to the development of public policy. Relevant to the cancellation of many UK council elections, the paper looked at the merger of councils in New South Wales Australia in pursuit of greater efficiency.

Large councils are efficient

We want efficiency

Therefore, we must merge small councils into large ones

The authors argue persuasively that this was sloppy use of logic that insufficiently interrogated the truth of the opening premise: “Large councils are efficient.” Is this correct? Yes, but also, are small councils efficient? Yes. What about medium sized ones? Yes also – depends on the personnel. With logic, if you insert just one logical fallacy, you get logical ‘explosion’. The New South Wales council reorganisation was an explosion of inefficiency – as no doubt ours will be.

It seems that the Labour Government is clinging rigidly to creaking logically fallacious opening premises:

Policing must involve community groups

Small councils must be merged

Private education is bad

Traditional education is bad

International law must always be followed

Gender is a social construct

Boys are naturally misogynistic

Bodily autonomy trumps the sanctity of life

Taxes are a moral good

and so on. From these fundamentally untruthful premises, various destructive policies follow with grim logical inevitability.

Policing must involve community groups

Some community groups are dangerous Islamists

Dangerous Islamists must be involved in policing

In logic this is a known as a valid argument. Under these logical parameters, solar and wind farms, puberty blocking drugs, euthanasia, abortion up to birth, VAT on private schools, the shrugging off of overseas territories, may appear monstrous, but they are all logically valid, if not logically sound.

Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are often referred to as intuitive leaders. It will be interesting to see if anyone is able to crack the rigid dominance of entrenched institutional logical thinking. They will either have to force themselves to enter more deeply into logical thinking and use exhaustive logic to thoroughly interrogate if ideas or civil service orthodoxies in principle are actually true. Or they explode the whole system as Descartes did and revert to vibes, where once again an individual’s subjective certainty is the foundation of all knowledge.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.

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This article (Labour’s Chaos Comes From Left-Wing Logic) was created and published by The Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Joanna Gray

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