The Reading Fallacy & the Double Helix of History
An Introduction to the Protestant Fallacy
P1: “It’s obvious that X is true! Just read the Bible!”
P2: “I did read the Bible. But I don’t think X is true.”
P1: “Oh, well, you just didn’t read it right. You need to read it right!”
We’ve all been around insane people before. They are sometimes ideologues, i.e., people who are both mentally ill and incompetent but who have also latched onto an ideology that channels their delusions in directions that are profitable for the people who invented them.
The lunatics select an aspect of the ideology they like because it validates them. Then, they praise the greatness of their favored piece.
However, these people frequently lack the competence, either because their thoughts are too shallow or too disorganized, to defend the view they adore. So, rather than construct a defense of their favorite position, they instead point to works that contain the view and appeal to their existence as support.
When the ideologue does so, the work is usually, although not necessarily, a written work — be it a book or a study or a poem — which they demand that those who disagree with the position read the work in order to absolve themselves of the burden of defending the ideas they have adopted.
In America, we observe this sociopathic behavior most frequently in the Protestant community because it is infested with people who make aberrant claims about God, the universe, and everything, then defend their weird proclamations with the assertion that people just need to “read the Bible.”
And the prevalence of this particular form of lunacy can trick people into thinking that it is unique to Protestants, whom they misidentify as Christians. However, we observe it coming from other reprehensible populations as well.
In some cases, we observe Muslims making weird claims, many of which are even heretical within Orthodox Islam, and asserting that people need to read either the Quran or the hadith to accept them. Failure to read these is used as justification to disregard opponents.
In others, we observe Marxists and various kinds of gnostic sociopaths who convince themselves that they’ve discovered the proper form of socialism and assign a unique name to it in a transparent attempt to dupe gullible suckers into believing that their particular brand of bullshit is oh-so-sweet and special. And when their ideas are critiqued, they tend to appeal to some obscure writing that supposedly affirms their delusions and reject the counterclaims of anyone who has better things to do with their time than investigate the genealogy of the loser’s lies.
In a shamefully large number of other cases, we observe academics attempting to play the part of public intellectuals even though they have IQs of 115. These people often find themselves in online debates and lack the competence to defend any idea they might espouse. So their cop-out is to appeal to papers they have written and published within academic journals, many of which are paywalled, and pretend that their bad ideas are validated in those writings.
These midwit losers appeal to these writings, which nobody had read, and pretend their profundity can be found therein. And the refusal to waste one’s time on these braindead academics’ unwanted prattlings can be dismissed as laziness on the part of their adversary — thereby allowing the moron with a doctorate to save face and besmirch the people who saw through them.
The ubiquity of the demand that people read this, that, or the other thing to counter the arguments validated by the written work damages discourse. It allows inferior people to bask in their ineptitude while wasting the time and damaging the credibility of their superiors. So, I want to introduce some language that will allow us to more easily confront this form of sociopathy that is so typical of midwits and dullards.
The Reading Fallacy: An Overview
And I begin by naming it. Is it the Reading Fallacy. The Reading Fallacy holds that a flawed argument would become valid if the documents it drew from were read. It is a formal fallacy, because premises are either true or false, and their truth does not depend upon whether or not another person has bothered to read their sources. Nor can a faulty reasoning process be fixed by reading the sources of its premises.
The formal structure of the fallacy is as follows:
Premise 1: Someone is critical of an argument.
Premise 2: That person has not read the sources of the argument’s premises.
Conclusion: Therefore, the criticism is invalid.
By observing this structure, we can easily recognize the Reading Fallacy as a type of ad hominem and subject it to the same criticisms as all other ad hominem arguments.
The Poor Defense of the Fallacy
Of course, a person attempting to defend the faulty reasoning might claim that reading the writings that supported the argument might suppress the critic because they would agree with the views once their reading had finished. This might be the case in quite a small number of instances wherein the writings were shallow enough that only one plausible interpretation could be drawn from them.
However, this occurs so infrequently that it cannot be the general case. The manifold interpretations emerging from any significant work ensure that a sincere reading of its contents is more likely to produce disharmony than agreement.
Therefore, anyone petty enough to read the writings that the ornery fool demands they read will likely conclude something other than what the fool had hoped. At this point, the fool will claim they simply didn't read it correctly — a form of the No True Scotsman Fallacy. This claim is made because it is the path of least resistance and, if taken, it validates the fool’s position while also socketing into their incompetence.
So, the Reading Fallacy is followed by the No-True Scotsman Fallacy, and the chains connecting the two are a need for validation, a preference for poor reasoning, and laziness.
The Gold Coin at the Bottom of the Well
Understanding this connection is valuable because it shows how one error gives way to another and the factors that permit the conversion. From that, we can deduce what I call an error genealogy.
An error genealogy is a method for describing the history, be it of a person, a nation, or an idea, in terms of the character flaws that drove it. It provides a method for interpreting history that departs from dialectical materialism, which is popularly espoused by people infected with Hegelian dialectic and Marxism. It allows us to instead assign events and their precipitating actions to the shortcomings that produced them.
A similar history, the exalt genealogy, can also be constructed from virtuous character.
Yet neither wickedness nor virtue exist in a vacuum. People who indulge one side must always interact with those who satisfy the other. Their interactions bind the strands together and shape the structure of history, thereby leading to the following epiphany.
The Double Helical Structure of… History?
History can be modeled as a double helix if we describe it using character traits.
I don’t know if this matters or what use it might serve to model history in this way.
However, it provides an alternative to the cyclical and linear views, which are commonly propounded, while permitting the inclusion of elements of both. Moreover, recognizing the similarity between history’s bihelical structure and the DNA molecule allows us to begin drawing connections between the two and treat history as a living organism subject to physiological and ecological laws.
Shockingly, there is even some scientific basis for this in the biological Theory of Recapitulation, which holds that ontology is preceded by phylogeny. Such a theory might apply to historical analysis. In that case, we should expect history to assume a bihelical structure because it is driven by people, and people are coded via the genome that is expressed within DNA—which is bihelical.
Extending this in the other direction, we can begin with the recognition that DNA encodes a genome which yields a person. From this, a bihelical structure of history contains events and people, analogous to the nucleotides of a DNA molecule, and culminates in either an event or a person.
Such a culmination is unique among the historical theories that currently exist. Because they tend to model history as a series of cycles or a complete line. Scholars generally use cyclical theories to describe the rise and fall of empires. In contrast, linear theories justify regimes that portray themselves as the endpoint of history. Yet the terminus of the bihelical theory of history is neither a regime nor scholarly consensus — it is either an event or a person.
Final Words
With that, I will end my digression and summarize what I have said so far.
Many ideologues are too inept to defend their claims, so they pretend that critics need to waste their time and energy reading the sources of the claims to send them away. This is a cowardly move and an ad hominem fallacy called the Reading Fallacy. It is fallacious because the validity of an argument depends on the argument’s contents and not on the reading list of its critics. It is often followed by the No-True Scotsman fallacy, which is offered as a reward to those poor suckers who bothered to read what they were told. Moreover, recognizing that the first error leads to the second allows us to construct histories and forecast events by chaining character flaws.
Doing so allows for the construction of new historical narratives useful for culminating in a person as the telos of history. Such a tool is helpful for religious communities that want to produce certain types of people and is a solvent that removes the linear metanarrative of history used to support the many overbearing regimes that currently exist.
I will leave it to the audience to make what they want of this. Because I will not return to it for some time.
This has been Gene of the Space Guild.
End transmission.