Amerika

As the old joke goes, they will tell you why there is something wrong with you, but never that what you said was wrong. Bulverism, derived from the work of C.S. Lewis, makes an implict ad hominem attack into an altruistic psychiatric diagnosis to disguise the subversion of its lie.

The charge of Bulverism refers to this self-help approach to argumentation:

“At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

Shifting the topic from the argument to the person distracts the audience and allows trial-by-peer-pressure in the most devastating way: starting with the presumption that the person bringing the argument is diseased, it explores the disease as a way of explaining the discontent, which soothes the rest of the crowd by asserting normalcy and goodness to the status quo.

For them, it is in fact easy to proclaim a whole society diseased by positing a lack of empathy at its core and using that as a justification for more censorship, surveillance, and propaganda:

Empathy isn’t just a fixed trait — it can be trained. In a study published in Psychological Science, researchers found that people began to care more about someone not because of shared experiences or values, but because that person’s joy had become emotionally linked to personal reward.

The effect was subtle but meaningful, and it lasted even when no rewards were involved. “It’s a social twist on Pavlov’s classic experiment,” said Leor Hackel, assistant professor of psychology. “Just as a dog learns to salivate when a bell signals food, our brains may learn to feel good when someone else is happy.”

“It can be trained.” Translation: we will make this mandatory training that is necessary for you to get the degrees and jobs you need to live well.

If we look beneath the surface, they want to control us by introducing critique and therefore misery, making us dependent on them as the only people who can lift that misery.

Bulverism starts as a way of defending against realistic attacks on conjectural — not time-proven or reality-based — ideological projects, but ends up becoming a way of medicalizing politics. Agree with the dominant theme or you are un-educated and have a mental disease.

It forces a false unity on a population by uniting them around panics and fads, and it requires making life bad, because otherwise people drift off and live well without caring about what their ideological nannies and corporate overlords want:

How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on.

This too is bulverism: if your audience is happy and does not need your products, find some way to make them thinking they are missing out so they participate in your religion, ideology, or physical product buying.

Bulverism is a form of the begging-the-question fallacy, which starts with the question, “What if everything that was real was not, would you still believe what you do?”

You can either champion strength and reward it, or decide that everyone must be following the same behaviors (means-over-ends) and enforce equal misery so that they all cling to your bureaucracy.

Bulverism lives with us as an attitude of the Left, and once it is made transparent to you, you will see the Left as what they are: envious losers holding the rest of us hostage with their tantrums in a desperate bid for power.

Tags: ad hominem, bulverism, empathy, monetization, pavlovian response