Jed, you sure can write a thoroughly depressing post. On the plus side if the world we have now is the result of a minority of people being logical (jokes about women vastly underestimate the problem) then it does give me hope for how great a society where the vast majority actually grasps logic and truth and holds it above whatever the popular belief might be.
But I never had any training in logic, so I assumed it was something that most people naturally had but chose to reject (which we can all do as our right brain often wins out). But I guess that my logic came inbuilt as part of my being an INTJ. INTJ's have the highest IQ of any of the 16 Myers Briggs types, so are perhaps more likely to generate their own logic without any education. Introversion, intuition, thinking and judging sounds like the ingredients to invent logic independently. Seems like there should be a class in logic at school then if it isn't obvious enough. Increasingly emotional arguments, persuasion, conversational hypnosis and psychological pressure are looking like justifiable tools to get the needed agreement. Pioneer hypnotist Dr. Milton H. Erickson once won over a number of Doctors/Professors who had visited him with the intent of disallowing his work in some respect (I forget the details and I can't find a reference, would be in respect to psychology or psychiatry). Of course he used conversational hypnosis to reverse their intention. I would normally have considered it wrong to persuade right thinking people this way, but increasingly I am not sure they are common enough for that moral concern to be valid. If logic can't work, then I am unsure there are any other options, except as you say, going fishing. Let those bright enough join in if they will. John
