The catalog of intellectual terrorism culminates in the haughty crest of the Fallacy ad Verecundiam, the paralyzing appeal to respect, to indisputable authority and to the social fear of public shame. It is that sophistry in which the adversary is intimidated and the controversy is muzzled by citing as an irrefutable shield the opinion of a human totem, a sacred institution or a temporal power whose social reverence makes any attempt at contradiction or scrutiny dangerous, evil or ridiculous.
The neurobiology of the masses and the anthropology of fear explain in overwhelming detail how this fallacy operates in the civilizational brain. The authoritarian arguer does not seek to illustrate the cerebral cortex of his interlocutor; It targets your social amygdala and your instinct for community preservation, posing a false dilemma between silent obedience and ostracism for civic heresy. On contemporary university campuses and parliaments, this fallacy has been embodied in the new secular inquisition of Politically Correct Thinking. The new clerics of relativism erect ideological dogmas on history, human biology or economics, and in the face of anyone who dares to question the consistency of their statements with scientific or philosophical data, they raise the wall of Ad Verecundiam: the dissenter is instantly labeled as a fascist, retrograde, insensitive or enemy of institutionalized science, crushing their voice under the weight of the modern Magister Dixit. The pontifical distinction between cognitive authority—that which springs from knowledge and is honored to open its evidence to the free examination of the wise—and the normative authority of the imperial command is subverted, transforming opinions of current academics or consensuses of bureaucratic committees into absolute commandments that prohibit thinking.
At the conclusion of this exhaustive survey of the aberrations of the argument, it is unavoidable to crown our treatise with a panoramic and theological look at the primordial etiology of error: the deep roots from which our infinite cognitive stumbles flow, synthesized in the masterful concept of the Abandonment of Rationality. As pre-conciliar theologians, doctors in Aristotelian metaphysics and neuroscientists who guard this publication, we proclaim that human reason is not a random tool daughter of blind matter, but a reflection of the uncreated Logos, a participation of the divine understanding that orders us to seek the truth, defend the good and reject falsehood.
The voluntary abandonment of rationality constitutes the synaptic suicide of the prefrontal cortex and the surrender of man to the lower passions of the beast. This collapse is verified in three pathological manifestations in civilian life. Firstly, through the dogmatic blindness of those who enter public deliberation with the deliberate and unchangeable purpose of not being persuaded for any reason, replacing dialogue with the stick of Ad Baculum or the censorship of Ad Verecundiam. Secondly, through the semantic disguise of reality, advocated by those who fracture the philological unity of the language through ambiguity, deconstruction and leading questions, seeking to defeat others in the shadows of grammatical confusion instead of illuminating them in the clarity of being. And, thirdly and finally, through the runaway amygdala that conceives the fair demand for logical proof as an outrage to self-esteem, responding to the legitimate question with personal defamation, the kipper of distraction and the feigned scandal of populism.
Our journalistic and philosophical mission at Editorial Santa Jacinta remains on a spiritual and cultural war footing against this architecture of deception. By restoring the knowledge of logical fallacies to the intelligence of our parishioners, we do not give them a mere manual of rhetorical fencing; We give them the armor of the Logos so that they do not bend the knee before the idols of consensus, do not tremble before the straw dolls of slanderers and hold their heads high in the face of the intimidations of the century.