I originally published this article fourteen months ago, and I’m now re-publishing it with some important edits. The ideological method is the means by which ideologues and their sycophants argue for flawed ideas. Those of you who stand for truth, regardless of whether or not that truth is comfortable, need to know what you’re up against. Effectively, the ideological method is the exact opposite of the scientific method, but there is much more to it than that. Thus, before the ideological method can be properly defined, it is necessary to define the scientific method for contrast.

The scientific method, also known as methodological naturalism, is the process of creating a hypothesis, performing experiments to test the hypothesis, observing the results of those experiments, and drawing a conclusion from those observations. The conclusion will either confirm or debunk the hypothesis, and in many cases, hypotheses are formed from observation of the natural world to begin with. Any hypothesis that is inconsistent with the facts must be either discarded or revised. The philosophy based upon this method called empiricism; in diametric opposition is sophistry. Empiricism is a very simple philosophy that allows dissection of a complicated truth, whereas sophistry is a complicated method of justifying a simple falsehood.

The ideological method is the process of creating a presupposition and accumulating only the data that supports it, whether by very careful selection or outright fabrication. Any facts that are inconsistent with the presupposition are discarded. For those who are familiar with the logical fallacies, this is the process of cherry-picking, or painting bulls-eyes round arrows. For those who are not, a logical fallacy is a statement which is presented as true but cannot stand up to scrutiny even when the truth is unknown. However, there is a lot more to the ideological method than that. Every logical fallacy has been used to defend flawed ideas, and every flawed idea requires logical fallacies and other forms of intellectual dishonesty in its defense. A great deal more intelligence and creativity is required in order to craft a sophistic defense of a falsehood than an empirical defense of a fact.

It takes a great deal more intelligence to lie than to tell the truth. Lies require creativity, from the small amount needed to twist the truth in one’s favour, to the large amount to fabricate a tall tale. Because most people lack the intellectual capability to craft a big lie, and naïvely assume that more intelligent individuals are both honest and altruistic, the plebians of society have a greater proclivity for believing eloquent sophistry than blunt empiricism. For the emotional creature, a comforting lie is easier to accept than an uncomfortable truth.

Society has moved away from what works and moved toward what sounds good. – Thomas Sowell

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. – Aron Ra

Thomas Sowell is probably the only American intellectual I genuinely respect, and I appreciate the irony that Sowell himself has nothing but disdain for the label “intellectual.” Aron Ra, on the other hand, has some brilliant one-liners and other put-downs, but I should remind you that I in no way endorse his positions; Ra is an extremely prolific liar, and anything he has to say on any subject other than evolutionary biology should be taken with a massive pinch of salt. In recent years, even his otherwise excellent content on evolutionary biology has become laced with more and more socio-political and moral grandstanding, and I have contemplated copying his series on the systematic classification of life, both while updating some of the factual information and removing the political messaging.

I have repeatedly warned my readers not to debate ideologues, will continue to do so, and I have a good reason for that. Professional pompous postmodernist pontificators, or as I like to call them, forsaken princesses, are widely known to toss word salads at their opponents, and the winner is the one who uses the most flowery language. This is nothing new, in fact this is the very criticism that Plato (423-347 BC) made of sophists, and Cicero (106-43 BC) later echoed the exact same sentiment in his repudiation of direct democracy, because the public is too easily manipulated by the honeyed words of demagogues. However, while word salad may work on the uninformed, easily impressed plebians who enjoy watching political debates or internet blood-sports, the deceptive wiles of the forsaken princesses ultimately fail to convince anyone who has a sufficient command of language to be able to see through the veil of nonsense.

A quote commonly attributed to Winston Churchill is that a lie gets halfway round the world before the truth can even get its pants on. There is little evidence to suggest that Churchill actually said this, but the point still stands. In addition to flowery language that entertains more than it informs, the ideological method is more about propagating control than propagating truth. Truth moves slowly by design, because the truth is complicated. The big lie, however, whatever lie that may be at the time, is usually quite simple, but merely cloaked in complexity. As before, we see opposites: the truth itself is complicated, but the method to determine it is simple, whereas the big lie is simple, but the method to justify it is complicated. Since the best lies all have a grain of truth to them, the ideological method partially relies on self-evident truths in order to stand up to superficial scrutiny. Here is where we see the invocation of the second logical fallacy: the double standard. Mind you, I have argued that every logical fallacy is a derivative of cherry-picking, and that anything called a logical fallacy that cannot be derived, either directly or indirectly, from cherry-picking should be classified as something else, such as an “intellectual cop-out,” which is how I categorise the non-sequitur.

The double standard is one of several logical fallacies that fall into the category of motte-and-bailey arguments, so-named for a type of early mediaeval castle. In such a structure, the bailey is a small fortified town where most of the inhabitants live, easy to access but difficult to defend. When under heavy siege, the defenders will retreat to the heavily fortified motte, which is difficult to access, but easy to defend. In an ideological argument, the bailey is a generally unpalatable or otherwise indefensible idea that the ideologue wishes to propagate. When subjected to criticism, however, the ideologue will retreat to the proverbial motte, which is a much more palatable or defensible idea, i.e. that is easier to argue in favour of, and that many more people would agree to.

For those of you who know mediaeval history, you will be aware that castles were as much offensive structures as defensive ones. Castles projected power, since they were places where armies could safely gather and launch attacks from. Another type of motte-and-bailey argument is the armoured strawman, which one could also call the hollow steelman. The steelman is the most charitable interpretation of an opposing position, and generally the most honest. A strawman, on the other hand, is a deliberate misrepresentation of an opposing position that is designed to make it look as weak or malicious as possible, and it is a logical fallacy in itself. Since the strawman is such a well-known tactic, thanks to creationists in the early days of YouTube, it is such an obvious fallacy that virtually no-one uses it on its own anymore. Instead, in a deceptive effort to appear honest, ideologues will first prop up a steelman, but then later transform it into a strawman when it is convenient for their position. One could also call this a “bait-and-switch” method of argumentation, and I find it profoundly telling that ideologues habitually accuse their interlocutors of “baiting” them whenever they ask an inconvenient question, because this is the fallacy of projection.

Accusing one’s opponent of that which one is guilty is another fallacy. If the opponent is actually guilty of this accusation, it is called tu quoque (Latin for “you too”), or the pot calling the kettle black; if the opponent is not guilty, it is called projection, or the pot calling the silverware black. Curiously, this is one of Saul Alinsky’s rules for radicals, taken directly from the book bearing that title. Rules For Radicals effectively teaches the ideological method, in other words, it directly advocates for people to use intellectually dishonest tactics in order to win ideological arguments. This is nothing new, either. All religions advocate for the exact same thing, teaching people to use the ideological method to propagate their beliefs. Oh, but curiouser and curiouser, there is one particular fallacy that I once thought was unique to religious apologetics, yet I have since encountered it typed by the fingers of secular ideologues.

It is no secret that the most vocal atheists, anti-theists in particular, were once highly religious people. The more radical and dangerous the religion that they once belonged to, the more they oppose religion later in life. In order to dismiss their arguments, however, religious apologists will attempt to smear these individuals as “never having been true believers.” This is not merely an invention of the apologist making the argument, but instead an instruction in many religious doctrines: “he who loses faith was never a true believer to begin with.” Copy and paste that quote into any search engine, and you will find multiple bible verses that say almost exactly that. This is a justification for constantly testing the adherents’ faith, usually through some form of struggle session. The statement itself is a “no true Scotsman” fallacy, however there is more to it. It presents itself as a false Scotsman, but it is also a strawman, implying that the person was not sufficiently indoctrinated into the religion to keep the faith in the face of hardship or an inconvenient truth (another curious admission), it is generally meant as an attack on the person’s character, thus an ad hominem fallacy, and finally is also an unfalsifiable claim. The dismissal of an ideological traitor as “never having been a true believer” is therefore a four-for-one fallacy, one of many compound fallacies. A compound fallacy is any single statement that contains more than one logical fallacy, and amounts to telling multiple lies at once. This is how it is possible to tell more lies in a sentence than there are words in that sentence. Religion doesn’t have a monopoly on this, either. Soviet communists did this all the time as well, claiming that “traitors to communism” were never truly communist to begin with. Right, maybe that’s a bad example, because communism is actually classified as a religion in Russia, and rightly so, though most atheist activists in western nations reject the Russian definition of religion, and instead embrace a definition that limits religions to being belief systems concerned with the supernatural. I argue then that “религия,” the Russian word for “religion,” should perhaps be translated as “ideology” instead, if you wish to abide by the western atheist definition of “religion.” Alternatively, you could use the phrases “classical religions” and “secular ideologies” and avoid having that argument altogether. On that note, this is precisely why I use the phrase “ideological method,” rather than “religious method,” much less something even narrower, such as “creationist method.”

If all these alternative terms to describe the same phenomenon have your head spinning, that’s because ideologues love to obfuscate. Scientists are always very careful to define their terms and remain consistent, whereas ideologues do the opposite. Big words employed in scientific discussions have extremely specific definitions, whereas big words employed in ideological debates are deliberately vague, and even if they are properly defined, the definitions themselves are usually so broad that quintosyllabic postmodernist drivel may be salted and peppered liberally so as to artificially inflate the perceived intellectual pertinence and depth of any provided proclamation. Do you see what I just did there? Here, let me re-phrase the second part of that sentence: ideologues like using big words all over the place to lend undue weight to any given statement.

Since the ideological method is the basis of debate, rather than investigation, it is more important to be convincing than earnest. As the debate continues and all fallacious statements cloaked in a veneer of factual accuracy are debunked, the ideologue will resort to emotional appeals, since emotions are easier to manipulate than knowledge. This is true not only within individual debates, but within larger societal debates. When the “factual” claims (in quotes because an awful lot of facts thrown about are false) of an ideological movement have all been debunked, the ideologues will default to emotional appeals in each new encounter with their ideological detractors, attempting to morally brow-beat people into compliance, while smearing those who stand in their way, undaunted by their screeching, as “cold, uncaring, and violent” thus projecting their sociopathic lack of compassion onto their enemies. At first, this begins as pure projection, but when those who desire truth and freedom begin to fight back, it turns into tu quoque, partially vindicating the vicious ideologues, and that’s how they win over more people. Ultimately, appeasement doesn’t work, standing your ground doesn’t work, fighting back doesn’t work, and beating them doesn’t work; ideologues have answers for all of these. The proper approach is to mock them, and then walk away when they demand you fight them, but pursue them when they attempt to flee; the spectacle you must put on for the plebians is to show the vicious ideologues that they are not your equal, but instead are beneath contempt. Just as in asymmetrical warfare, disengagement is the key to victory, in other words, debunk, but do not debate.