When presented with a party line of positions, you should pick at least 1/3 to oppose on principle. If you find yourself agreeing with all of them and unable to identify a 1/3 where you could reasonably break ranks you need cult deprogramming school.
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“The opposite of every great truth is also a great truth”. If you can’t find 1/3 to oppose either they’re all trivial tautologies and the party line is a kindergarten morality tale of no consequence OR, you’ve been mob-ified and lost the ability to think for yourself.
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The problem is that it's often hard to disentangle the correlated nature of these truths. You can easily end up incoherent if you reject 1/3 at random.
I've instead argued that we need to be less *certain* of our certitudes, but that's a very different claim than yours.
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I think incoherence is better than mob mindedness. At least it’s *your* incoherence. And what’s so great about coherence? “Foolish consistency the hobgoblin of small minds” etc
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I agree that slavish consistency with past positions is foolish, but incoherence can claim anything as a result of inconsistency (logically, ~True -> anything) and so in fact claims nothing.
People can decide to be incoherent, but claims they make on that basis should be ignored.
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That’s not much of a real problem right now. Pathological, cancerous consistency is the far bigger problem.
I'm basically thinking about how to counterprogram/weaken mass movements comprising memetic zombies. Memetic zombies form most easily around consistent ideological cores.
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That's probably right in general, but I'm concerned that talking heads and politicians are insufficiently held to task for their claims and statements that designed for purposes other than truth-telling, thus poisoning public discourse. Consistency and evaluation can fight back.
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