Continuing our scrutiny, we discover the formal transgression of the Fallacy of Denial of Antecedent, in which the logical syntax of the left hemisphere harmfully confuses the categories of sufficient condition and necessary condition in conditional judgments. Whoever argues that if a citizen was born in Madrid he is Spanish, and then claims that someone who was not born in Madrid lacks Spanish nationality, commits an obvious formal nonsense, since he has elevated a sufficient condition to the hierarchy of an exclusive and necessary condition, ignoring the multiplicity of origins that grant the same citizenship. This error is directly related to the absurdity of trying to rule on the vital destiny of a grandmother by arguing that she has not ingested a specific poison, as if that isolated circumstance closed all the other laws of the biological order and human mortality.

When the analytical capacity fails completely, the depraved arguer descends into the baseness of the Fallacies of Personal Attack, abandoning the discussion of ideas to attack the opponent's person or his circumstances in the so-called Ad Hominem Argument, or constructing a rude and fictitious caricature of the opponent's thoughts to easily overthrow it in the Straw Doll Fallacy. Studies in sociology and persuasion demonstrate that an overwhelming proportion of popular assent is based on interpersonal trust and a sense of tribal belonging; Consequently, the demagogue aims to destroy the moral credit and reputation of his opponent with the certainty that, once trust in the masses is ruined, the most impeccable rational arguments will be perceived by the anesthetized public as mere hypocritical tricks. These maneuvers constitute an absolute abdication of dialectical honor and an open violation of the justice owed to one's neighbor.

At the opposite extreme of personal disqualification is the cognitive idolatry of the Fallacy of False Authority, a transgression in which the testimony or legitimacy of a supposed eminence who lacks specific competence over the matter discussed, who acts motivated by unspeakable prejudices or interests, or whose words have been maliciously taken out of context, is appealed to. Our social brain has been ordered by natural design to abide by the teaching of the wise in the community; However, the manipulator perverts this natural inclination by presenting actors dressed in clinical clothing to prescribe scientific opinions or by resorting to media celebrities to rule on serious constitutional and metaphysical matters. The defense of the enlightened citizen consists of invariably demanding verification of the qualifications and impartiality of the cited source, refusing to subject their understanding to the arbitrariness of propagandistic illusionism.

The maximum degree of corruption of discourse is consummated in the Argumentum ad Baculum, the appeal to the cane, to fear or to bare force as an integral replacement for discursive reason. In this pathology, the stimulus is specifically designed to annul any analytical processing and trigger the servile panic of submission in the hippocampus and amygdala. In the realm of journalism and republican life, coercion is rarely expressed through crude threats; Rather, it takes the subtle and perverse form of veiled pressure on institutional financing or the professional survival of independent media. It is imperative to distinguish between the legitimate warning of a natural consequence inherent to reckless behavior and the moral extortion of someone who imposes his will exclusively by force of material power.