English
"Romania has gone crazy", Deutsche Welle wrote in Tuesday editorial, where it said that "the Ponta government was planning a large scale falsification of the electoral lists", adding that "the falsified data was intended to retroactively declare as valid, the controversial referendum of July 29th, concerning the dismissal of Băsescu".
That's what it looks like from there.
The Germans aren't doing us any favors.
No one is going to take the time to interview Victor Ponta, to hear him lie about how everything he's doing is constitutional and that everything is perfectly democratic and that everything is normal.
The Germans aren't working for news, so they have no reason to have a bone to pick with Ponta.
For them everything is clear.
Simple: Romania has a prime minister who lies.
The foreigners don't enter arguments.
The Romanian government is led by a plagiarist, who lies that he didn't plagiarize and who used the power of the government to avoid being officially declared a "plagiarist".
What could you even talk to him about?!
Talking isn't going to lead to anything.
You can't talk with a wall.
The lies of the Ponta-Antonescu pair aren't a problem for the Germans; in fact they are not much of a problem for anybody abroad.
One month ago, I wrote about this.
I didn't write "Romania has gone crazy"; I wrote that in a diagnosis of social psychopathology, we are likely suffering from mythomania ("A mania characterized by the sickly tendency to distort truth, to lie"/ Source of the definition: The Explicative Dictionary of the Romanian language 1986).
Which is the same thing as "Romania has gone crazy".
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"The outcome of this < Modus operandi >, synthesized earlier, is that the political statements precede reality, which is forced, at any cost, to transform, in order for the statements to become true.
In a social psychopathology, the behavior of the USL would border on mythomania and I do believe that mythomania is gaining traction with the masses and is about to become dominant, with its constant barrage of threats, even beyond intimidation when it is supported by politicians.
I think that we will all have problems.
Diplomats aren't all idiots, at least not so much, that they can be duped by mythomaniacs.
I do believe that in the offices of the European governments and in Brussels, our mythomania is obvious..."
("AN ATTEMPT TO DIAGNOSE THE SOCIAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: MYTHOMANIA / USL versus Băsescu - modus operandi", author: MAKE / BURSA / 16.07.2012)
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Is Romania a country of mythomaniacs?
Romania is our fatherland.
From my point of view, regardless of the state it is in, the country is worthy of praise and being served, regardless of the aggression it is subjected to, be it even an aggression on the foundation of reason.
Praise.
Philip Gordon, the representative of the American government, said on Monday night: "We expect respect for the independent institutions, we expect the credible accusations of fraud and interference to be investigated and solved and we expect them [the leaders in Bucharest] to support what should have been viewed as a legitimate result. I don't have to clearly say what that means, in either case, but these things are obvious. (...)", said Gordon.
That's precisely what I am saying: they are obvious.
What our political leaders are doing IS OBVIOUS.
There is no need for proof.
It is just common sense.
How ironic is the electoral slogan of Crin Antonescu now - "Romania of common sense"!
Still, in the opinion of Ion Iliescu, it is surprising "how easily some Western governments (including their representatives in Bucharest) can be influenced by the campaign conducted by the supporters of Mr. Băsescu and how insensitive and disrespectful they can be towards a popular vote, expressed in a Referendum held in mid-summer, in spite of the boycott claimed by Mr. Băsescu and his supporters".
I will not deal with how familiar Ion Iliescu is with the techniques of the double-speech, the favorite weapon of the communist propaganda.
I am only calling attention to the sophism of Ion Iliescu.
Sophists can prove anything.
A sophist tells Socrates: "You have a mother, but so do pups, the pups' mother is a bitch, therefore, you are a son of a bitch." (Plato, "Euthydemos").
The sophists' technique has been thoroughly analyzed in antiquity, but dismantling it would require diligence, an ambition to study the forms of thought and the understanding of the wide contributions of the logical thinkers, which is not up everyone's alley, for various reasons, but requires qualification.
Because of that, we keep offering to you, our readers, our own synopsis of the techniques of sophism - part of my more widely-ranging work called the "Evolution of forgery", based on a quasi-exhaustive bibliography of logic, metalogic and epistemology.
The work considers sophism as (only) an intermediate stage (after the error - the first - and lie - the second), preceding the transformation of lies into forms which disarm the seeker of truth (aporia), followed, a little higher up the ladder, by what I would call "the perfect lie" (antinomy), which ruins reason and sets its boundaries, beyond which we can't go without descending into madness.
Despite my desire to make text easily comprehensible, still, by treating the subject in a more specific manner, I could not write in a typical journalist style, hence it does not deviate from the conceptual level, which makes it hard to read by those who are not familiar with the metalogic literature.
I therefore, I advise you to only skim through it, so you can get an idea about how complex the problems are, or study it with the pencil in hand (I may provide additional explanations online).
Once again, I feel like I jumped into the pond to bring back the stone thrown down by a madman.
The sophists' techniques
(Excerpt from the work "The evolution of lies")
The need which was filled (at a certain level) by the so-called all-knowledge of the sophist was that of intelligibly integrating the event, thus providing the ability to adequately get around in everyday life.
For that purpose, the sophists are elaborating algorithms which, when applied to concrete situations (such as dialogue - provided a dialogue could become a political event), lead to success.
The principle of these algorithms is the sophism of "ignoring invalidation".
By rejection we mean (according to Aristotle), a syllogism with a conclusion which contradicts a given conclusion, "ignoring invalidation" would consist of not achieving a true rejection, either by not achieving a true contradiction (through linguistic sophisms), either by not achieving valid syllogisms (in extralinguistic sophisms).
A requirement which the sophist needs to achieve however, in order to succeed, is to know, at any rate, what an authentic invalidation would be, or else there is the risk - presented by Plato - of rejection occurring due to ignorance of what it truly is.
In order to avoid this situation, the sophist needs to have very extensive knowledge, to have the ability to take into consideration all the points of view related to the fact which is being discussed, which later made Hegel compare the view sophists had on culture, with the form and the content of the Enlightenment.
Out of that collision between disregard and knowledge in the procedure of sophists, comes their ability to claim anything, including making the statement that they know everything.
This is opposed by Socrates' statement "I know nothing", which places the purpose of knowledge outside the human being, as something which has not yet been acquired, which in the case of sophists is within the mind of the individual.
Hence, it is natural for Euthydemos, being all-knowing, to substitute divinity (for whom there is no law to know, because it is the law itself), and to tell Socrates: "...by Zeus, you will always know absolutely everything, if I so wish. " (Plato, "Euthydemos" - 296 d).
Just like a fighter, the sophist is logically prepared for battle and uses psychological weapons, of which Aristotle singles out the following:
1) Extending argumentation so much that it becomes as difficult as possible to embrace all the angles mentioned in the discussion.
This method was so well-known that it gave Euthydemos (Plato, "Euth.") the opportunity to spout a sophism of a special nature, by which he defeats Socrates just as he was himself in a bind.
Thus, apparently Euthydemos prevents the use of this procedure [1)] by Socrates, telling him "Stop tergiversating the conversation on like an old man" (295 c).
In reality however, Socrates was trying to dismantle a false syllogism; Euthydemos, to prevent his scam from being revealed, cheats the audience, accusing Socrates of tergiversating.
In order to rid himself of that accusation, Socrates should have followed his first intention all the way through, but also to reveal the sophism included in this new hurdle imposed by Euthydemos, which (even if we disregard the fact that the sophist could interrupt him again) make the argumentation so lengthy, that it actually validates Euthydemos' accusation.
As a whole, the sophism is as follows:
- if Socrates starts excusing himself (which is all the more harder to do because he would be trying to dismantle a sophism which would try to prevent a sophism which had not yet been uttered), he will then become guilty of "tergiversating" and his arguments would thus get invalidated through the accusation of Euthydemos;
- if Socrates doesn't justify himself, then his arguments are invalidated through the sophism which he tried to avoid.
In Plato's dialogue, Socrates prefers the latter alternative, as being more honorable, but the situation indicates that in the case of knowing sophistic stratagems, it is hard to overcome them without becoming compromised, the only escape (in the face of an audience which is easy to manipulate) being that of decreeing that the sophists' demonstration is a simple game.
2) The swiftness of the argumentation with the goal of making it hard to follow the dialogue and the promptness of the reply.
In Plato's speech ("Euth."), the procedure is used on Cleinias due to him being younger and less qualified:
"Barely had Euthydemos finished speaking, that Dionysodoros grabbed the word out of thin air just like a ball and aimed it at the boy..." (277 b).
However, the method becomes vulnerable through the limited number of types which the diversity of sophisms can be reduced to, which leads to repetitions which invalidate the advantage obtained through quickness.
The idea is hinted at by Plato when he asks Socrates to explain the manner in which the confusion between "intelligent/educated", "understanding/learning", (sophisms 1., 2 of "Preliminary clarifications on Euthydemos", by G. Liiceanu), only after the sophists had made the same flawed argument in two similar alternatives, without the opposition of Cleinias being able to oppose it.
3) The introduction of premises as if they were conclusions which the opponent had already accepted through induction.
This procedure, combined with the previous one, makes it harder to counterargue and leads to
4) The anger of the respondent. Who, being distressed, has trouble defending himself adequately.
The need to correlate methods 2), 3), 4) is demonstrated by Plato in the following excerpt:
"< So, you want him to become what he is not and to stop being what he is now. > In hearing his words, I felt like I was losing my head; I had not yet recovered, when he continued: < That means that, since you want him to stop being what he is now, it would seem you want his death... > Upon hearing that, Ctesippos, thinking of his lover, jumped up, stung: < ...A curse upon your head! >" (Euth., 283 d,e).
The lack of scruples of the sophist generates a similar attitude in his opponent, which not only compromises him in the eyes of his listeners, diminishing his credibility; in general, the four previously mentioned procedures are intended to undermine the authority of the respondent, to dismantle his previous expertise, and challenge him to a fight on a turf where the ability to falsify is decisive, and the most persuasive person wins.
Platon only rescues Socrates, in the aforementioned dialogue, by forcing Ctesippos, who was excused by his youth, to take on the blows and the charges, which would have otherwise diminished the prestige of his master.
This procedure of a Socratic alter-ego, used by Plato in other dialogues, with the goal of indicating the steps of an elevation of content, is sacrificed here to a tacit victory of Socrates' authority.
It could be said that in this regard, Plato himself acted like a sophist.
In fact, all throughout the platonic dialogue, we are seeing a succession of (apparent) victories of the sophists.
They move on from on topic to the next, just like "In a thousand and one Arabian nights", where the Scheherazade moved from one story to the next; the character of a fairy tale talks about another fairy tale, in which there is another storyteller. Often, the return to the first storyteller is not achieved through the ending of the intermediate fairy tales, but merely through the sunrise.
Similarly, the sophists choose a word, an expression, and disregarding the context in which their interlocutor had used it, ascribes them with the intention to express a different meaning, which exists in the discourse universe of the linguistic entity in question.
Therefore, they open the road to another theme, or procedure, similar to the Bald man paradox (a man with a full head of hair is obviously not bald. Now the removal of a single hair will not turn a non-bald man into a bald one. And yet it is obvious that a continuation of that process must eventually result in baldness), allowing the reaching of any conclusion, starting from any premise.
The aforementioned procedure also has a doctrinal justification, in the thesis proposed by Anthystenes, Lycophron (according to Guthrie, "The Sophists" p. 218):
"Names have a natural affinity with their objects, which are recognized through the direct contact of the thought with the object".
According to this thesis, the word gets updated with his entire area of meanings, regardless of the context. Hence the need (recognized by Aristotle in "Topica", second book, chapter 3) to take into account all the hidden or obvious meanings of the words, which thus become unchanging entities of the discourse designed in a constructive manner.
In that light, the sophists' demonstrations are precisely aimed at this non-constructivism of the current language, which they compromise by reduction to absurdity, thus reclaiming the establishing of the principle of identity.
In a hypothetical honoring of the identity of the concept which crosses various contexts, we have the exigency of the sophists for the respondent to stick to "yes" or "no" becomes justified, without trying to go for more subtlety; because any subsequent distinction is superfluous, since it should have been included in the discourse from the start.
But if the respondent did not understand that he should have used the concepts in the aforementioned manner (and that is what happens the most often), then the known alternative follows:
a. there is either an attempt to redefine the concept, which runs the risk of being extended indefinitely, at least beyond the maximum duration a discussion is allowed to have,
b. or it gets to the contradiction which the sophist was going for since the beginning, by considering the complementary meanings of the concept used in the controversy.
In short, the sophists impose their victory through a metalogical pseudosyllogism, where the premises and the conclusion are updated logical principles:
- starting off from the supposition that the principle of identity is honored
- by intermediating the principles of the answer by complying with the law of excluded middle,
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- is a conclusion reached on failing to meet the principle of non-contradiction.
Which makes judgment arbitrary.
POST SCRIPTUM
I think that upon the second reading, the text will become more intelligible.
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