#NotI

I am tired of people who are so childish as to believe that he said/she said can be made more objective by becoming he said/they said. If SHE cannot provide evidence for US, the matter is nebulous, but if THEY cannot provide that evidence either, then the matter is objectively so: that THEY ARE WRONG. The fallacy ad populum is more than merely an arbitrary fantasy, a longing for community; it is in FACT the direct OPPOSITE of sound reasoning. If one person cannot provide evidence, so be it; we should not presume that all truthful claims have evidence available. If TWO people attest to the same unsubstantiated claim, the jury is out still, but at least now the prosecution has an opportunity: namely, if it can prove that the two did not conspire, that they had no knowledge of one another, and that they were not operating under a common influence outside of the stated proceedings, then, and ONLY then, can one begin to build a case for them. But suppose that FIFTY people come forth. All that their multitude proves is their magnitude; their claims would be that much more damning, WERE THEY TRUE, and that has yet to be proven. If they were truly operating independently, then we might guess that they are probably right. Yet if we know for a fact that their modus operandi is memetic, that their victory in court is literally the propagation of an agenda, that their movement is literally named after the hashtag which brought them together in the first place, that literally the entire basis for their populist sentiments is that absolutely ANY one, however intrinsically depraved, can be rendered entitled to the pursuit of her own benefit at the expense of a man whose guilt has not yet been proven empirically, then we start to wonder. One does not WANT to believe that so many people would do something so evil in a group, but observation evidences that it is only WITHIN a group, operating according to this same populist attitude, that ANY gross miscarriage of justice has ever been propagated. To the same extent, therefore, that they know each other, they ought to be held accountable for themselves, and so it is that to the same extent that any one of US can make these claims EACH one of us is bound by due process to make these claims within legal limitations and with sufficient evidence, so as not to insult the intelligence of our fellow human beings (to say nothing of the innocence that we wish to see in others and within ourselves, for without it what is to STOP us from making false allegations?!?). So it is that to the same extent that claims are damning in their implications they must be considered carefully, only with the utmost caution, for to act upon such a fear without due process would be so barbaric and inhuman that even to raise the accusation should be suspect.

So let us consider the burden of proof now. Clearly, while the burden of proof was small in the case of the solitary voice, that precious vestige of our decency, in all times and places, it was greater in the case of two men who made identical claims, seemingly in independence of one another, but without either having found evidence to prove them to us. Yet if FIFTY people all believe the same thing, and not only do we KNOW that they all know each other, for in fact they PRIDE themselves in their solidarity, but not even ONE of them can PROVE A SINGLE CLAIM, even in that same Court of Public Opinion which they represent, often at the expense of the Legal System, then they. Are. Simply. WRONG.

A million people believing something does not make it right; what makes it right is one person PROVING it, and if a million people cannot PROVE it, then a million people are wrong. Due process makes sure that the Individual is protected from this process. Mob rule seeks the annihilation of the Individual and of his gifts for Rational Discourse.

Six million Jews died because of a mad ideology which was propagated memetically, in the same manner as people in this very present day commit suicide and murder because they read a tweet about it. And six million Jews were in the minority. Far greater was the number of people who believed, purely by suggestion, that the Jews were guilty. And the greatest injustice lies in this: that one cannot EVER try that many people. One can send a single innocent man to the gallows, but it is far harder to execute ten guilty men. If a MILLION guilty men decided to make a single man their scapegoat, then how could justice possibly be attained? It is always easier for the instruments of law to execute the one rather than the many. But why should we allow this incidental limitation to govern our entire notions of right and wrong, of law and order, of truth and falsehood, and, finally, of good and evil??

Simply put: we do not have the right to agree. Freedom of assembly is a privilege beside personal integrity. The more that people believe in something blindly, the less likely it is to be true, and therefore the greater our obligation to doubt it. It’s nearly impossible for a group to be right, for each group has an outgroup that believes the exact opposite of what the former group believes, and even if a synthesis were possible or an underlying unity were discovered, the sheer one-sidedness of each group would preclude it from seeing this compromise, and so we would be forced to amend our understanding of each group’s position to include its uncompromising absolutism and, by extension of having discovered an underlying relativism and potential compromise, its falsehood. Those who blindly follow populism must by extension admit that, according to the same epistemological framework, the common man in every century has all ways been right, without fail, though what he said in the Middle Ages stood in stark contrast to what he professed in the nineteenth century, but irreconcilable at their very core with his claims during the twentieth century, and the whole lot of them discarded by the turn of the next millennium. Clearly, though, history has NOT been singularly a story of infallible public opinion whose contradictions are purely incidental. It is rather a history of people getting things WRONG, over and over again, starting a new line of thought on the bones of the old. And wherever the old line of thought was ready to die, there were millions who kept it alive out of spite. In the case of Bill Cosby, a man that should legally be considered innocent, less than one hundred people came forth. And while their burden of proof is not so great as that with which we charged the Nazis, some of whom are still trying to prove their ideology, it is still large enough to be considered an empirical failure, while as a counterargument to the naivete of the populists it remains small enough to pale before the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, all three of which our populist must uphold if he or she is to defend his or her precious populism. But he or she is unlikely to accept this burden of proof, not only because the burden is too heavy, but because it is too easy, in absolutely every time and place, for human beings to presume upon their present state of enlightenment. “Yes,” says the populist. “All of human history was wrong up until this point. But I know for a fact that we are right in how we treat Bill Cosby.”

[({Dm.A.A.)}]