Commonly-Accepted Premises I Don't Share
Have you ever gotten into a pointless argument with someone who regarded one of his/her essential premises as obvious enough to not be worth defending or even stating? I've started making a list of such premises that I don't agree with. For example:
- Any behavior that is caused is incompatible with free will. In other words, if you do something for a reason, you are not free.
- History moves one way.
- ‘Government’ is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.
- Nobody has an opinion on his/her own. Everything is thought by collectives of one form or another.
- The right-wing consists of people who have cowardly given in to authority whereas the Enlightened Ones have the guts to talk back to The Man.
- Central planning is simply a plan made by one person.
- Everybody knows ‘regulatory capture’ is what happens when businesses influence the government to regulate less.
- If ‘everybody knows’ something, it must be true.
- In the preceding line, ‘everybody’ only applies to those willing to go along with what ‘everybody knows.’
- If a sufficiently-large number of people do something, they cannot be blamed. Either they are right or they have no choice.
- Human are animals. (Since many sane people also believe this, please note we're plants.)
- The amount of government is approximately constant. Regulating X means deregulating Y. Adding regulations will not strengthen the government.
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