Arguing meaningful matters with a Cluster B Disorder leaves people with a feeling of confusion. It’s like holding onto an eel, like trying to pin down air, like seeing the naked emperor whose clothes everybody else is gushing over. The experience of being on the receiving end of cluster B argumentation has a distinct nature that is often described as indescribable. It’s impossible to really explain to the uninitiated, only knowable to those who know.
These descriptions may seem inherently inane and fallacious, which is not a reflection on the validity of the experience. Instead, they reflect the nature of that which induces the experience, the cluster argument, which makes it accurately captured by these terms. To parallel the three non-describing descriptors, the cluster will redefine anything over and over to suit their purposes. The rhetorical tactics they employ go unnoticed until a person experiences a moment of recognition of the repeated pattern of manipulation, which evolves into noticing that the pattern is pervasive. The resulting experience is captured in the naked emperor parable where a person finds themselves very lonely in seeing a deception perpetrated in front of everybody, while most people are unable to see that the emperor is naked. This pervasive phenomenon is just lizard-brain collectivized cowardice.
Danger Will Robinson
Part of the failure of so many to see what is right in front of them is that the cluster argument appears sensical on the surface. Additionally, the speed of the argument’s revolutions and kaleidoscopic nature do not leave much time or space for thinking twice. Another reason is captured well in famous experiments where a staggering proportion of people are manipulated to state that a person is holding up three fingers, when they in fact are holding up two fingers.
The Experiment
A group of people are asked, one by one, to state how many fingers a person is holding up. All but the last few people are in on the experiment. They state that the person holding up two fingers is holding up three fingers. The last few people are test subjects, unaware that the first responders are lying because they are in on the experiment. Many people subjected to this type of test will go on to claim the same thing the deceivers claimed. That’s in a matter as simple as counting integer numbers below three. With the stakes as close to zero as they can be, with a matter literally as simple as one, two, three, people will emphatically agree on how wonderful the emperor’s new wardrobe surely is.
The Stakes are Truth and Decency
Consider that nearly everything in real life presents higher stakes than in the experiment. Even relatively simple issues quickly become thousands of times more complicated than counting fingers on one hand. These facts and dynamics leave no doubt as to why it appears that so many people stubbornly live in irreconcilable fantasy worlds.
While it is true in a strict sense that all is relative to the observer, that does not mean that all assertions of observation are true. Even though people actually and sincerely convince themselves that three fingers were held up, it does not change the fact that two fingers were held up. It doesn’t matter how many people enable the deception and embrace it and even enforce it, it is still not the truth.
As with counting fingers, more complex matters still lend themselves to analysis and to being accurately understood, no matter how much people retreat to agreeing to disagree. We can agree to disagree about the emperor’s being naked or not being naked. But one is still wrong, and the other is still right, cluster argument confusion and peer pressure be damned.
Be a Bulwark Together
They deny what’s clearly in front of us, then use denialism to deny the denial, spin that circle-talk as hard as they can, twist it and warp it all until the cows come home, then gang up and double down and cluster-argue themselves until blue in the face – and yet, it remains a fact that two fingers are two and only two fingers, no matter how hard people feel differently about it and how many agree with the deception. Otherwise decent people will vehemently oppose those trying to warn them that they are being led to slaughter.
Standing up to this pattern is not how a person wins a popularity contest and it is a fast way to lose friends. Collective cowardice will quickly punish you. It is possible that the other side might actually prevail in asserting its many perversions of reality in the end. Regardless, being on the winning side means losing when the winning side is wrong. The stakes could not be higher, and nobody is allowed to sit this one out – not because I say so, but because it is determining the fate of our species and because the emperor is in fact naked, or he is not.