Notes
The Olympic ceremony is a good example of how Sophists (and lawyers) hijack the left hemisphere to gaslight us.
To everyone stepping even half an inch back, it’s blatantly obvious that the ceremony mocked the Last Supper, which of course is entirely in line with today’s artsy sentiments, and therefore not even unexpected.
“But no,” they tell us, “it really was about a different painting, and the Greeks, so you are wrong!” Which is technically and analytically correct, and yet obviously nonsense.
It’s the same trick they use when they tell us “it says female on the passport, so we put him in the female category, what else can we do”, or “he’s an Englishman because he has an English passport” and so on.
In Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist describes an experiment we should all keep in mind when dealing with analytical sophists:
Candidates were asked to look at the following syllogisms (logical arguments) and decide whether they are sound or not:
All monkeys climb trees; [OK]
The porcupine is a monkey; [obviously wrong]
The porcupine climbs trees. [obvious nonsense]
And:
Winter is cold in tropical countries; [obviously wrong]
Ecuador is a tropical country; [OK]
Question: Is it cold in winter in Ecuador, or not?
Now, in the experiment, the right or left hemisphere had been artificially inhibited.
Result: those with predominantly right-hemisphere (“bigger picture”) thinking tended to see through the nonsense at once; those who thought with their left hemisphere tended to accept the conclusion because the logic is formally correct, even though it clearly was nonsense.
One respondent who accepted the nonsense answer, when asked why she thought so, answered that “it said so on the card!”
Indeed, the Olympic ceremony had nothing to do with Christianity: it said so on the card.
