Case in Point: False Premise
When Smug, Self-Righteous Pride Blinds People to the Humanity of Others
“Check your premises.”
—Ayn Rand
Sometimes, people make a false assumption that leads them down a ridiculous path they never would have gone down if they’d examined their premises to begin with. Often, those assumptions pile up like sedimentary layers until they get so thick, it is nearly impossible to communicate through the strata of delusions.
Ayn Rand’s famous axiom “Check your premises” cuts through those layers like a machete through cheesecake, saving ourselves a lot of time and trouble going down dead-end rabbit-holes and arguing with spelunkers lost in the cavernous maze of their own false premises.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to deploy it before Leslie In Boise (not to be confused with my dear and wonderful friend Leslie Manookian of the Health Freedom Defense Fund who brought medical freedom to Idaho!) blocked me, but I am grateful to her for illustrating how easily a person can get tied up in her own jumprope and wind up fitting her noose.
The silly thing is we agree on bedrock fundamentals, but she was too blinded by her smug sense of intellectual superiority, self-righteous pride, and hatred for her perceived outgroup to recognize I was in her perceived ingroup. She just kept burying herself deeper under layer upon layer of false premises.
Heartbreakingly, her ingroup/outgroup biases caused her to cast spiteful aspersions on a family I consider among the bravest, strongest, most brilliant and loving fighters for humanity, freedom, truth, and justice on this planet—and this on the birthday of their heroic son, who is battling to survive the terminal illness he developed from the very injections Leslie is so proud of herself for averting. She chose contempt for a vulnerable young man and his parents instead of recognizing they are among our greatest allies in this war against the cruelites and their psychopathic objectives.
Because this interaction highlights the value of intellectual humility, the continual need to check our premises, and how false premises can lead to false conclusions (not exactly a logical fallacy but still results in erroneous thinking), I realized it would make a worthwhile entry in my Case in Point series, which uses real-life dialogues to demonstrate logical fallacies and cognitive biases (confusingly, I published a couple entries under Behind the Scenes, an older series where I shared private exchanges).
Below is our exchange, which began with my simply sending birthday wishes to a courageous young man who is fighting for his life with all his Stoic resilience and resourcefulness.
