Thinking About Thinking: Formal Cognitive Distortions

While emotional cognitive distortions are self-destructive ways of justifying your feelings, formal fallacies are generally due to either ignorance or a willful desire to misrepresent the facts in order to get the upper hand in some situation.  They are called “formal,” because while they are irrational, like emotional cognitive distortions, they involve ignorance of or the willful breaking of laws of “formal” logic. Many of the emotional cognitive distortions fall into this category as well, but the difference is that you can stop making an emotional cognitive distortion in one situation and continue with the same error in other parts of your life if you do not understand or follow the underlying rule, guideline, or “law.” Think of emotional cognitive distortions as more situation-specific while formal cognitive distortions apply to every and all life situations. For example, you may understand how you amplify the accomplishments of others and minimize your own, and then substitute a healthy alternative, such as, “I can choose not to compare myself to others.” However, until you understand and apply the underlying formal cognitive distortion of making hasty generalizations, this problem may show up in other areas of your life, or you may be less likely to recognize it when other people use it.

There are many benefits to learning to recognize formal cognitive distortions. You will be better able to eliminate whole categories of potential problems, whereas recognizing emotional cognitive distortions tends to only eliminate them in discrete situations. For instance, it is one thing to eliminate black and white thinking in relation to you emotions; it is another entirely to eliminate it in thinking itself, as is done when you understand the fallacy behind Aristotle’s Law of Excluded Middle, as we shall see below.

You will think more clearly and therefore make better decisions. You will also be much more likely to recognize the massive and thick cloud of formal cognitive distortions that are directed at you by media, your professional community, politicians, helpful friends and family, and by the spiritual paths that you trust. You will begin to notice them and find them everywhere. As a result, you will be better able to ask questions of what you read, hear, and what others tell you, and your questions will be much more likely to get to the heart of the matter and supply you the information you need: “Is this source trustworthy? Do they make sense? Do they know what they are talking about?” Your improved ability to ask questions will also communicate to others that you have expectations about clarity, reasonableness, and rationality that are important to you. By expressing those expectations you will create a culture for yourself of people who share a respect for such questions and interests while those who do not will select themselves out of your life. This may be a problem if you suffer under the delusion that you either can or should be all things to all people, or that unconditional compassion means acceptance of nonsense or letting others inflict foggy thinking on you in the name of love. Is that a loving act toward either yourself or someone you respect and care about?

Clarity is one of the six core processes that are associated with the six stages of each breath: waking, aliveness, balance, detachment, freedom, and clarity. These are explained below, in the chapter on meditation. Cognitive clarity, which is the major gift bestowed by understanding fromal cognitive distortions, is not the most important attribute, but only one of six to be integrated in a dynamic, interdependent balance. Think of learning the laws of reason and evolving out of fuzzy irrationality as laying the foundation you need to attain the higher order integration of the six core qualities of confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing.

Developing clarity of thinking will also help you avoid depression and anxiety by helping you break your addiction to emotional cognitive distortions, which damage you by causing you to act on wrong or irrational conclusions, think incorrect, untrue, or unhelpful thoughts, and feel self-destructive feelings. For example, if you think, “I failed; therefore I am a failure,” you are unlikely to try again, which is an example of not acting as a result of a wrong and irrational conclusion.  It is thinking an incorrect, untrue, and unhelpful thought, because just because you fail at something it does not logically follow that you are a failure. Such thinking causes you to feel self-destructive feelings of worthlessness. If you allow your thinking to be determined by your beliefs and emotions, your biases and assumptions will keep you from thinking clearly. As a result, your life happiness and success will be determined by the nature of your delusions.

Successful Argumentation

“Argumentation,” or the art of challenging and supporting points of view, is not simply something we encounter in our relationships with others. It also involves our responses to what we see, hear, and read as well as how we think. For example, your thoughts are a form of argument with yourself, but your assumptions generally go unrecognized and unchallenged. The result is a life spent naively assuming the truth and validity of ideas and experiences which have never been thought through, and so are likely to be neither true nor valid. Consequently, you are vulnerable to the simplest of questionings by others, if you have never learned to examine the assumptions on which your beliefs are based.

There is a simple tool for examining the effectiveness of your arguments, whether with others or in your own thinking, known as “Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement.” It puts types of arguments into a seven-point hierarchy, moving from ineffective and irrational at the bottom to decisive and rational at the pinnacle:

To this we could easily add more levels at both the bottom and the top. For instance, ignoring or repressing the existence of a different point of view constitutes complete dismissal, followed by rejection of the argument as worth debating at all. This is followed by a recognition that a counter-argument exists, but is irrational, and therefore not worthy of consideration. This is in turn followed by a discounting of the argument, as “juvenile,” “immature,” or “sophomoric.” One additional attempt at deviation occurs before arriving at the bottom level of Graham’s pyramid, and that is attempted re-direction. If I can get you to focus on something else, like what you have done or not done, or some different issue entirely, I do not have to defend my argument. So we can see that there are at least five different levels of the pyramid before overt confrontation occurs. You will observe examples of each of these prior levels, as well as Graham’s levels, in the formal logical fallacies below.

In addition, there are forms of disagreement that are higher than explicitly refuting the central point, which is the top of Graham’s pyramid. Simply showing someone that they are wrong through a statement of refuting evidence is sometimes a necessary display of power, intelligence, and truth. However, direct refutation is most likely to arouse defensiveness and counter-attack rather than listening or agreement. Therefore, a more artful intervention involves Socratic questioning, which is designed to bring the other party to an awareness of the limitations and inconsistencies in their own argument. A still more adequate response is to present an example, generally in the form of a story, metaphor, or allegory, that demonstrates the absurdity of argument and counter-argument by objectifying and therefore relativizing and de-personalizing both. For example, instead of meeting the arguments of psychological geocentrism with some form of psychological heliocentrism, one could relativize them both by explaining how they are both transcended and included by a polycentric worldview. Psychological geocentrism is the idea that the world is all about me, which means that I take everything personally. Psychological heliocentrism is the idea that the world is all about some projected, ideal “me,” generally called the “Self,” “soul,” or “God.” A polycentric worldview recognizes the relevance and validity of all perspectives, because they can access all others, while still recognizing that some worldviews transcend and include others and are therefore more accurate, adequate, and valid.

Another example is the famous Uncle Remus story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, in which Brer Fox catches Brer Rabbit by fashioning a tar baby, complete with clothes and hat, and puts it in the middle of a country lane where Brer Rabbit hops by every morning. When Tar Baby does not respond to Brer Rabbit’s sunny “Good Morning, Tar Baby!” Brer Rabbit takes it personally and threatens to sock him to teach him some manners. Since Tar Baby still does not respond, Brer Rabbit first hits him with a left hook, getting his paw stuck in the tar. Outraged, he tells Tar Baby that if he doesn’t let go and tell him “Good Morning,” he will have to sock him again with a rabbit punch. This continues with one leg, then the other, then with a head-butt. The result is that Brer Rabbit is stuck in tar in the middle of the country lane, a dirty meal for Brer Fox. The point is that attacking, or arguing with, irrationality or pre-rationality, simply gets one stuck in tar. A higher order response is to recognize this reality and refrain from engagement, if possible, and to do so without an air of intellectual superiority, which implies phony confidence and deep fears of inferiority.

Such avoidance is not always possible. An important, sometimes essential way to earn attention and respect is to show that you know what you are talking about, and you do that by laying out the facts, but in a way that is not directed at refuting your opponent. An excellent way to do so, famously used by Benjamin Franklin in his debates in the Continental Congress, is to begin by agreeing with and praising the legitimate aspects of your opponent’s argument. This causes them to not feel personally attacked, so that they are much more likely to listen to your counter-arguments.

The point is to recognize that your clarity is determined by the level and style with which you deal with both the arguments of others and those that you have with yourself. Recognizing logical fallacies when they arise is one way to save yourself and others hours, days, or years spent in pre-rational belief systems or stuck in arguments about things that are not worth your time or energy.

As we go through a list of common formal cognitive distortions, we will describe how and why each is a logical fallacy and how each reinforces both drama and various emotional cognitive distortions. There are many more than are described here; we are highlighting some of the more common ones with the goal of emphasizing their importance and their pervasiveness in thinking, conversation, and culture. As we go through a list of some of the more common and therefore important formal cognitive distortions, we will indicate how and why they relate to emotional cognitive distortions as well as to generating drama in your life.

The following list of fallacies addressed here is hardly complete; there are many more! Why are there so many formal cognitive distortions? It’s because humans are so good at repressing, denying, confusing, and avoiding that we normally don’t even realize that we are doing so. And that is why we need to learn how to think about thinking, so we do not embarrass ourselves while impeding our growth into clarity.  See how many of these you can spot in your world:

Excluded Middle

Straw Man

Dogmatism

Hasty Generalization

Ad Hominem

Argument From Authority

Argument From Ignorance

Tu Quoque

Band Wagon

Circular Argument

Emotional Appeals

Fallacy of Exclusion

Faulty Analogy

Moral Equivalency

The Fallacy Fallacy

Non Sequitur

Semantics

Weasel Words

Occam’s Razor

Affirming the Consequent

The “Pre-Trans Fallacy”

The Ranking Fallacy

Excluded Middle

“She loves me; she loves me not.”

“You work with dreams? You must be a wooly-brained New Ager.”

“You are either a believer or damned to Hell.”

“You’re a German Christian? So was Hitler. You must hate Jews.”

“You’re a capitalist? You exploit people and plunder the planet for profit.”

“You don’t support the Israeli occupation of Palestine? You must be an anti-Semite.”

“You either support the US or you support the terrorists.”

The problems that arise from this type of polarized non-thinking are fundamental and important. When you think this way you create conflicts where none exist. This is the stuff broken relationships and world wars are made of. It’s that serious.

Fortunately, the solution is simple, if a person will simply use it. To avoid this fallacy, simply ask, “But aren’t there other possibilities?” All you have to do is reframe each of the above statements in a rational way and “presto!” the problem either disappears or becomes much smaller. Is that too good to be true? Let’s look at some substitutions and experience what happens to the “conflict:”

“I’m either a success or a failure.”

“Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail; I do not have to label myself as a success or failure.”

“People either like me or I’m a loser.”

“Some people will like me; others won’t. I don’t have to base who I am on others’ opinions of me.”

“You are either for me or you are against me.”

“We may agree on some things and disagree on others. I do not have to take our disagreements personally.”

“She loves me; she loves me not.”

“She may not know if she loves me, or she may feel different things besides love toward me.”

“You work with dreams? You must be a wooly-brained New Ager.”

“Anyone can work with dreams because dreams are universal.”

“You are either a believer or damned to Hell.”

“Believers can be criminals and non-believers can be saints.”

“You’re a capitalist? You exploit people and plunder the planet for profit.”

“Capitalists do not have to put profit before people and protection of natural resources.”

“You don’t support the Israeli occupation of Palestine? You must be an anti-Semite.”

“Palestinians are Semites and they don’t support the occupation.”

“You either support the US or you support the terrorists.”

“By many definitions of terrorism the US is a terrorist state.”  

Did you notice a shift in both understanding and feeling when you substituted the rational statement for each irrational one? This is a movement toward objectivity and relative neutrality, or a place of neither agreement or non-agreement. Or, perhaps the substituted statement raised a direct contradiction to the irrational belief. The result is that you are catapulted out of cultural groupthink and into a space of relative freedom and clarity, from which you can make better decisions.

If the excluded middle is so easy to spot and so simple to correct, why does it survive? The simple reason is that it justifies what people want to do. For example, if you want to hate, attack, or kill someone the first thing you need to do is demonize them. If you get challenged at this, or do not allow yourself to do so, it is much harder to justify attacks of all kinds. The historical US stance of “exceptionalism” is a nationalistic expression of this logical fallacy: “There is me, and there are all the rest.”

The belief that things either are or are not was codified in Aristotle’s rules of logic before three hundred BC. This principle is commonly known as “the Law of the Excluded Middle.” It says that you can either have A or not have A; you can’t logically have both A and not A. You either have a chicken or you don’t; you either have a name or you don’t; you either are alive or you are dead. A thing either exists or it does not. Something is either true and real or it is false and an illusion. What Aristotle did with this principle was codify black and white thinking and the Excluded Middle fallacy into Western logic.  That irrational conclusion has been thought logical and rational, with devastating consequences, up until the present time. It is only recently, largely because of the rediscovery of the brilliant realizations made centuries before by the Buddhist sage and mystic, Nagarjuna, that thinkers are beginning to wake up out of their irrational slumber.

In the 1st century in northeastern India, independent of Aristotle, without knowledge of his logic, and for totally different reasons, Nagarjuna thought through the Law of the Excluded Middle and recognized that this was a fallacy. He realized that outside the disciminations and dualisms fundamental to the working of thought that life itself is not in one category or another. Categories and distinctions are created by the mind, not life, and when you step outside of the mind and language you can see that this is a law the mind uses to think, but that it is itself irrational. Nagarjuna probably came to this conclusion due to two major influences. The entire teaching of Gautama Buddha emphasizes the importance of finding balance between extremes, or “the middle way.” This principle was so fundamental and important to Gautama that this is what his teaching was called, not “Buddhism,” which was a name given to it by non-Buddhists. Nagarjuna wanted to discover how the middle way functioned in the operations of the mind. The other major influence was his direct and personal experience of non-dual states, first in meditation and then generalized into clear, non thought-mediated perception in his everyday life.

When Nagarjuna united these two influences, one philosophical and the other personal and experiential, the result was the creation not only of a new, deeper way to understand the fallacy of the Excluded Middle, but a powerful meditation tool. In his famous “tetralemma,” Nagarjuna observed that there are four possible ways of considering anyone, anything, any idea, emotion, or experience. Either:

“It is.” (“It exists.”)

“It is not.” (“It does not exist.”)

“It is both this and that.”

“It is neither this nor that.”

Nagarjuna discovered that when you suspend all four of these assumptions you inevitably find yourself not only outside of Aristotelian logic; you effectively move your cognitive processes into neutral. It becomes impossible to interpret, analyze, or reason. Don’t believe me; it is far too important to take anyone’s word on this. Try it now. Take a thought of your choice and suspend all four of these possibilities. Let’s say you look at your hand. It exists as an experience mediated by a mental concept, the word “hand.” Now suspend that concept by telling yourself, “My hand does not exist.” By this you may mean it is energy, or a figment of your imagination, or whatever, but the point is that your hand no longer exists for you. Don’t just imagine that intellectually; try to believe that it is true, that your hand really does not exist. Now suspend the assumption that therefore it does not exist. What happens? You are no longer affirming the reality of your hand, nor are you denying its reality. So where is it? What is it? Now take the next statement, “It is both this and that,” and deny it. If neither of these statements are true, that it both exists and does not exist at the same time, what does that mean? Where and what is your hand? Finally, take the last escape hatch for your rational mind. Take the only remaining possibility and deny it: “My hand neither exists nor does it not exist.” Now feel what the result is. Do you experience how your mind now is deprived of any and all ways to grasp, understand, or deal with the experience of what you call your hand? You have launched yourself into a meditative, open, but fully conscious and present space in the here and now, because you have shifted the discriminating powers of your thought into neutral. Notice that your experience of your hand continues to exist. Nothing has changed experientially; what has changed is that your thought processes can no longer “stand in,” “represent,” or “signify” your “hand” with a word as a form of mental shorthand or shortcut. Instead, nothing “stands for” or “mediates between” the experience of your hand and “you.” There is no distinction between “you” and your “hand.” Now imagine if you extended this thought experiment routinely to everyone and everything in your life. What would be different? You would still use the shortcuts of your mental distinctions whenever you wanted, but they would no longer be the default or assumed structure that you use to experience the world.

Notice that the way you experience the world when you do this experiment is not the same as pre-rational experience. Following Nagarjuna’s tetralemma does not regress you to a pre-personal, pre-rational fusion with oneness. Your ability to think rationally and make distinctions still exists; you have simply parked it in neutral for the time being. However, with pre-rational levels of development you can’t give up rational thought processes because you aren’t yet rational. Your experience is mediated by your emotional preferences and your beliefs, but not rationality, because you have not yet learned to think, much less think about thinking. You can’t give up your rational identity if you haven’t yet formed one. You can’t outgrow formal cognitive distortions if you don’t even recognize when and how you use them. This is why the transpersonal really does lie on the other side of the rational and that there really is a difference between pre-personal and transpersonal experience. This is why those who claim transpersonal developmental levels but who are still wedded to pre-rational beliefs or who do not demonstrate a familiarity with formal cognitive distortions have probably mistaken access to transpersonal states via psychic, mystical, or near death experiences for stable, ongoing access to transpersonal stages of development. They aren’t nearly as evolved as they think they are.

No one automatically learns to be rational or how to think about thinking. These are skills that are not hard-wired, like walking or talking, or survival skills taught in most families or cultures. On the contrary, they involve questioning authority, which can be life-threatening at pre-personal levels of personal and social organization. Therefore, families and societies tend to discourage learning these skills, except in specific, well-defined ways, like philosophy, math, and technologies. This is why much of the information on cognitive distortions in the previous chapter, the current one, and the subsequent one, may be new to you: society has not recognized adaptive or survival value in learning these things. Learning to discriminate between rational and irrational thinking can come into direct conflict with family, business, religious, and governmental interests.  Nevertheless, if you desire to grow into personal levels of development, learning how to think and to think about thinking are requirements; they are not optional. They are pre-requisites to your evolution into higher stages of development. All the hard work you are doing to recognize emotional, formal, and perceptual cognitive distortions makes possible growth into radically freeing, open, and accepting transpersonal perspectives that you could not access before, because even in mystical state openings, lucid dreams, or near death experiences lower levels of development necessarily distort and misinterpret them.

IDL teaches you how you keep yourself stuck in drama and then gives you tools to witness both your thoughts and feelings while accessing non-dual perspectives. The practical advantage of cultivating the ability to be present in such a space is that it is free of drama. You are in the world but not of it. Bad things still happen, but they do not happen to the “you” that is free, that is at complete peace, and which witnesses all of the dimensions of human experience without judgment.

Do you see the importance of the fallacy of the Excluded Middle? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to it? How do you respond to it? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Middle Ground

Wile E. Coyote Disappearing into the Middle Ground

Learning to experience a “middle ground” between the dualities of life is different from declaring an irrational compromise. A middle point between two extremes is not the same as the truth. Sometimes a thing is simply untrue and a compromise is also untrue. Half-way between truth and a lie, is still a lie.

This is also known as the “Golden Mean Fallacy,” or the “Fallacy of Moderation.” Because “enough” is the middle ground between “too much” and “too little,” it does not follow that “enough” either the logical or rational choice. For example, if you want to build strength and endurance you need to push your body past its comfort zone and out of its “middle ground.”

Holly said that vaccinations caused autism in children, but her scientifically well-read friend Caleb said that this claim had been debunked and proven false. Their friend Alice offered a compromise that vaccinations cause some autism.

Straw Man

“All Greenpeace supporters support the sinking of whaling vessels.” (Just find one Greenpeace supporter who disagrees to knock down this Straw Man argument.)

“If you surrender your freedoms, the terrorists have already won. You don’t want that, do you?” (Just find one example of deprivation of freedoms by non-terrorists to knock down this Straw Man argument.)

“Stalin supported gun control, you know.” (Reasons for gun control exist independent of Stalin’s decisions. Therefore, the introduction of Stalin into the argument is a Straw Man fallacy.)

The Straw Man fallacy is common in advertising and political smear campaigns. One creates the illusion of refuting an opponent’s argument by mischaracterizing it and then knocking down that mischaracterization. This can sound impressive if you are not familiar with the position of the opponent, as most listeners are not. Therefore, this logical cognitive distortion works because it assumes you are either ignorant or stupid and then takes advantage of your lack of information to persuade you of its truth. Consequently, the Straw Man fallacy is an example of willful manipulation.

However, it could be that the speaker is honestly misrepresenting their opponent’s position based on their own lack of familiarity of it. For example, if you said in the past that you hate immigration because it takes jobs away from citizens, but have since changed your position to believe that immigration is good, an opponent can accurately cite your previous position and triumphantly pronounce you wrong. Because a living source may have changed his opinion, be particularly careful about attacking something he no longer believes. This is a good example of why you need to get in the habit of doing two important things. The first is to suspend your judgment. This is very similar to the phenomenological stance of IDL during the interviewing process. The second is to gather information by asking questions. Are the speaker’s statements accurate or not? It is easier today than ever to fact-check statements and therefore hold speakers and writers accountable. For example, entire sites like “Snopes” allow you to check to see if a story is an urban legend or not. Fact-checking is a form of asking questions of the speaker or writer. Are they credible? Are their claims based on the actual position of their opponent or are they raising a Straw Man argument that they can triumphantly kick to the ground?

Do you think the Straw Man fallacy is important? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to the Straw Man Fallacy? How do you respond to it? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Once you recognize this fallacy, what can you do about it? People who use Straw Man arguments need to be confronted, because if they aren’t, they will keep using them as a form of predation on the ignorant. It is only when such people recognize that they will not be able to get away with this, or any, formal cognitive distortion that they will stop using them.

Dogmatism

What would you think of someone who claimed that socialism is morally wrong, even though they attend a public university, meaning that taxes support their education? Aren’t they taking a dogmatic position that their behavior contradicts? What would you think of someone who stated that welfare is wrong and all those who partake in it are lazy, even though they accept federal financial aid, as all members of society do, in one form or another? Isn’t this another example of a dogmatic assertion that is proven false by one’s own behavior? We can see that dogmatism relies not only on black and white thinking but on hypocrisy, in that the speaker is blind to their own violations of the principles they are proclaiming. It is also dogmatic to proclaim that certain types of dream figures like angels are “good” and others, like monsters, are “bad,” because there is no evidence presented or way that the statement can be verified. It is true because the long, venerable tradition of dream interpretation says so.

People who use the dogmatic fallacy are generally so rigid in their beliefs that their existence largely serves as an example of who not to be, yet their confidence inspires trust in those who have not yet learned to think for themselves. The development of dogmatic people is fixated at pre-personal levels; they are locked into the delusion that they are rescuers in the Drama Triangle. They will most likely learn the hard way, because they are in no position to listen to reason. Therefore, your responsibility is to protect yourself and others from them. One way you can do this is by using their dogmatism as an opportunity to educate others on the importance of recognizing this and other cognitive distortions.

Do you think this formal cognitive distortion is important? When and where do you find it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to dogmatism? How do you respond to it? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Hasty Generalization

Gambling and winning the first time out is an example of an often disastrous hasty generalization: “If I won once, I will win again.” A rational assessment concludes that casinos stay in business because bets are rigged so that the more you play the more likely you are to lose. Fishing also frequently tricks us into this fallacy; you get a hit on your first cast and assume you’ve found the perfect spot and the ideal lure, only to sit there with nothing for the next hour. If you grow up in a very white neighborhood and only see blacks on TV, you are likely to think that most black men are athletes, gangster rappers or comedians.

Do you think this formal cognitive distortion is important? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? How do you respond to it? When are you vulnerable to making hasty generalizations? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

 Ad Hominem

Interestingly, blaming yourself, as a form of self-persecution, is an example of a self-directed ad hominem attack. Instead of debating the effectiveness of what you are doing or analyzing what went wrong so you don’t do it again, you attack your own character! Perhaps it is because such irrational self-persecution is so common that people get away so frequently and easily with making ad hominem attacks. Are we so used to attacking ourselves that we think nothing of it when we experience someone attacking a third party?

Personalization is an imaginary and self-inflicted type of ad hominem logical fallacy in which you assume other people are attacking you. If they attack your evidence or logic, you take it as an ad hominem attack on yourself. This is a reminder that ad hominem, as with all logical cognitive distortions that are used as weapons, are first statements about the ethics and level of development of their source. Their behavior, methods, and strategies reveal their character. Another interesting example of ad hominem arises in our dreams when we react to the appearance or the “character” of a dream monster instead of listening to, considering, and addressing whatever issues he presents.

Do not take ad hominem to imply that all criticism of others or yourself is either unjustified or not useful. However, criticism is best directed into questioning, combined with the presentation of constructive solutions, rather than at your character or that of someone else. Nevertheless, there are levels of moral and self development, and our actions create the basis on which people make judgments about how trustworthy, reliable, and supportive we are likely to be.

Do you think this formal cognitive distortion is important? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? Have you ever been the victim of an ad hominem attack? How did you feel? How do you respond to it? When are you vulnerable to using ad hominem attacks yourself ? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Argument From Authority

The psychological hook that causes us to suspend our judgment and believe that someone is an authority stems from the Drama Triangle. Most of us are looking for someone to rescue us. If we will just trust this attractive, high-status person, our lives will be better. Why we continue to fall for this same old ruse is a testament to the undying gullibility of humanity, borne of our unwillingness to find, listen to, and follow our own inner compass. Dreaming provides an interesting example of the fallacy of argument from authority. You typically perceive dream events based on the authority of your waking perception, which is locked in its frame of reference and uninformed regarding the perspectives of the dream characters it encounters. Learning to listen to and trust the authority of interviewed emerging potentials is obviously not easy, nor should it be, because trust needs to be earned and claims need to be verified.

Do you think Argument from Authority is an important formal cognitive distortion? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to using arguments from authority yourself? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Tu Quoque

Meaning, “You too,” this is a fancy Latin name for a strategy for gaining the upper hand in an argument by changing the subject. For example, you say, “Based on the arguments I have presented, it is morally wrong to use animals for food or clothing.” Your friend says, “But you are wearing a leather jacket and you have a roast beef sandwich in your hand! How can you say that using animals for food and clothing is wrong!” Do you see what the problem is here? Just because you are a hypocrite and don’t practice what you preach does not disprove your argument! Your friend is answering your argument with blaming and counter-attacking. He or she is avoiding having to deal with the substance of your arguments by turning it back on you! Here is another example: I comment that you seem to have put on weight. You respond by pointing to my gut and saying, “Nice baby bump. When are you due?”

Like all cognitive distortions, Tu Quoque lands you in the Drama Triangle, either as persecutor or victim. Defending yourself may only put you in the role of rescuer, which keeps you in the spin cycle of the cosmic samsaric washing machine. When you ask questions, in a non-threatening, non-attacking way, you increase the likelihood you can move the conversation both out of drama and to a higher, more rational, clearer level of discourse. Remember that rationality is not your goal but only a means to clarity, witnessing, and transparency: helping yourself and others to get out of your own way.

Bandwagon

When I still believed in souls and reincarnation I wondered how they could be so short-sighted and ignorant as to make obviously poor choices, in many cases, choices that resulted in pain and misery for themselves and others. One theory I came up with was that souls did the same thing we do: routinely underestimated the power of groupthink and the Bandwagon effect. From where they were looking, the path forward looked easy: “I’ll just get born, learn stuff, and awaken to myself.” The fact that this so rarely happens forced me to decide that either souls were very stupid or there weren’t independent minds making decisions about where to incarnate. The third option, that people chose to have bone cancer as children because it was their “karma,” was so disgusting, vile, and derogatory to me that I would no longer even consider it.

Bandwagon has also been termed the basic fallacy of democracy, that popular ideas are necessarily right. When you look at the history of popular ideas in democracies, you find that they include race based slavery, legal cocaine, American women not being allowed to vote until 1920, prohibition, exceptionalism, democracy, capitalism, and of course the all-time favorite, war. An embarrassing patriotic frenzy accompanied the bombing of Baghdad at the beginning of the illegal attack on Iraq in 2003. CNN (Cable News Network), a primary global sources of news, displayed a picture of an American flag superimposed over night-time scenes of Baghdad being blown to bits. One of the most impressive current examples of bandwagon is the cult of positive thinking. While it is itself an example of a perceptual cognitive distortion, how and why it has become widely adopted is an example of the Bandwagon fallacy. We will discuss it in the next chapter on perceptual cognitive distortions.

Bandwagon also describes non-rational thought processes that keep us locked in perceptual cognitive distortions, with the result that we stay asleep and miserable. Adolescents, in a natural aversion to groupthink born of a desire to find and create their own individuality, simply denounce one bandwagon for another. They trade Coke for Pepsi, all the time believing that Pepsi is “authentic,” or an expression of their own individuality, instead of recognizing what is obvious—they are adopting a “new, improved” bandwagon. The power of this delusion is so great that you and I are blind to the bandwagons that we are currently on. It is only in retrospect, in looking back at our lives that we can say, “Yes, during that period of my life I was really on that bandwagon!” Since we can say that about every period of our lives, isn’t it likely that we are now on other bandwagons and are just too subjectively immersed in them to see them?

The proper conclusion to draw from the awareness that “everyone is doing it” is that “everyone must be equally hypnotized, unconscious, sleeping, dreaming, and sleepwalking.” The question then becomes, “What must I do to escape groupthink?” The answer IDL provides is the one you are currently exploring: learn the basic processes that keep you asleep, dreaming, and sleepwalking and then learn how to access, listen to, and follow the recommendations of your interviewed inner potentials in order to find and follow your inner compass.

Do you think the Bandwagon fallacy is important? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? What bandwagons might you be currently riding? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Personal Incredulity

Because I don’t understand what you are talking about, it must not be true. I am saying that because I find something difficult to understand, it’s therefore not true. Is that right, or am I just too ignorant, lazy, or stupid to learn what I need to understand? For example, understanding the evidence for evolution by natural selection requires some familiarity with biology, anatomy, physiology, genetics, and geology. If I am ignorant of these topics it may easier for me to just say, “God did it,” and leave it at that. I once read a book explaining human evolution as interbreeding by extraterrestrials, because the human body was too amazing to have been created by natural selection.

When you don’t know the answer, or are not sure what to believe, resist the temptation to reach for the simplest, most popular, or most comfortable explanation. These are generally not expressions of your own intellectual curiosity, but rather statements of your own willingness to succumb to groupthink. In our world it has never been easier to look at opposing theories on any subject and form a broader, more well-rounded opinion based on a summation of the state of knowledge on the subject as it stands in the world today. In fact, failure to do so today with the resources we have at hand is almost inexcusable.

Circular Argument

“I can’t believe people eat dog. That’s just plain gross. Why? Because it’s a dog, of course. How could someone eat a dog?”

“God exists because He tells me so in His Holy Word.”

“Obviously logging causes severe environmental damage. You don’t have to be a scientist to see that; just go out and look at a clear cut and there it is: no trees.”

“How could anybody date a geek like him – he’s a geek!”

“I’m a loser. Why? Because I never win.”

“ I deserve to be punished. Why? Because I’m a bad person.”

“Global warming deniers are dangerous people because they deny global warming.”

“You should be a loving person because the world needs more loving people.”

“Dogs make better friends than most people because they are friendlier than most people.”

If you read enough of these examples you start to see the underlying similarity of these arguments, and that is that they are tautologies. That means that they say, “A equals A.” No new information, no new reasons, are given for the belief in A. You believe in A because you believe in A. Belief in A is so self-evident that it doesn’t require proof. One more, rather ultimate example is, “I believe in God because God IS.” What is this statement saying? Essentially, “Don’t insult me by asking for proof or evidence in God because my belief is so obvious that it requires no substantiation.” Really? Is that true? Is there any belief that is so obvious that it requires no substantiation?

This is the debate that separates pre-personal levels of development from personal levels. The former says, “Belief stands on its own; the Truth is the truth, and I know it is true because I have seen the truth.” The latter says, “Belief rests on assumptions. If these assumptions are not questioned, your life will be directed and controlled by beliefs that are merely assumptions. You will think you are free while you remain a slave to the belief systems in which you are imbedded.”

As with other formal cognitive distortions, those who use circular arguments have no clue that they are being irrational and will even deny it when you directly point out to them the inconsistency of their thinking. This is why irrationality is dogmatic – it doesn’t recognize its irrationality while at the same time being utterly convinced it is being highly reasonable and rational. If you stop and think about it, how could irrationality, meaning an inability to think rationally, be expected to grasp a rational argument? It is rather like expecting a child to act like an adult or an animal to act like a human. There are different evolutionary and developmental steps, gradations, or hierarchies, and expecting rationality from a pre-rational consciousness is like expecting stimulating conversation from a mynah bird.

This does not, however, excuse you from your obligation from knowing how to think yourself or to respect those who do not. If you do both, you will stay free from unrealistic expectations, unhelpful judgments, and the drama of others. It is not your job to educate those who do not ask you for help or support, but you can build bridges by asking questions, showing respect, being confident enough to be self-deprecatory, non-threatening, and humorous.

Do you think it is important to be able to recognize circular arguments? When and where do you see them in your world, relationships, and thinking? How do you respond to them? When are you vulnerable to the fallacy of making circular arguments yourself? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Burden of Proof

You use emotional appeals because they often work. There have been times in your life when you have been able make people scared and act out of their fear; you have been able to make people relax, suspend their disbelief and to trust you. You know you can manipulate people into not thinking and instead trusting the feelings that you evoke in them. However, you also know that this is often dishonest because it uses the weakness and inability of others to see through your phoniness rather than due to any real strength, other than a cultivated, narcissistic manipulativeness on your part. At some point in life, if you don’t want to remain a slave of your emotional preferences, you have to learn how to recognize emotional appeals and counteract them; no one is born with this ability.

This is made more difficult because identifying and counteracting emotional appeals is not a skill most people learn, because your parents, teachers, as well as product manufacturers and politicians know that keeping you ignorant and unskilled in this area increases their power and control. They get more of what they want out of you, at your expense. Consequently, you fall victim again and again to this logical fallacy throughout your life, not just expressed by others, but also expressed by you toward yourself.

Appeals to emotion include appeals to fear, envy, hatred, pity, guilt, and more. Though a valid and reasoned argument may sometimes have an emotional aspect, one must be careful that emotion doesn’t obscure or replace reason. Most of us are chronic, continuous victims of emotional appeal. All of us start life enmeshed in it; the question is when and if we will ever grow out of it. Do you think you have? How do you know? How can you tell? How would you tell if another person is making judgments and running their lives based on emotional appeal? Take whatever standards you would look for in others and apply them to yourself to discover just how controlled by this cognitive delusion you are.

The broader point is that this is how and why most people never learn these formal cognitive distortions. If they do, they think they are curious but have little incentive to look for them in their thinking and in the broader logosphere in which they swim. Culture doesn’t want you to wake up out of your emotions, because you are more easily swayed and controlled as an emotional being than as a thinking one. We can see this concept in operation with financial bubbles. Everyone stays asleep, denying and ignoring the elephant in the living room as long as possible because they are making money off the status quo. Besides, they have no idea how they could safely transition out of it.  Change is a massive, overwhelming unknown. Then, once the bubble breaks, the psychology immediately changes. Everyone will tell you they knew they were in a bubble; in fact they recognized it when others did not. This is simply another example of groupthink justifying itself. Recognize that you and your cultural context both have strong vested interests in keeping you from understanding and challanging formal cognitive distortions. When you do, you challenge the emotional fallacies that sustain the current world status quo.

To begin, you have to first wake up out of your own delusions. You have to see how and why you keep yourself stuck. This is why you have to learn to think about the thoughts you choose to think, because they determine what you feel, which in turn determines the vast majority of your daily actions. No one else is doing this for you and no one is going to rescue you from yourself. If you don’t wake up, how can you expect anyone else to wake up? How can you expect the world to become a better place if you don’t clean up your act?

IDL believes that an important part of “cleaning up your act” is to hold both yourself and others accountable for cognitive distortions. You can do this by simply asking questions. “Are you familiar with a cognitive distortion called “Emotional Appeals? Instead of thinking, reason, and common sense, it uses emotions to make decisions. Do you think you ever do that? Will you please tell me when you see me doing that?” By inviting your friends and family to “rescue” you from your cognitive distortions they are learning about them and also, if they agree, opting into the underlying principle. In such a way you raise the quality of consciousness, decision making, and culture in your world.

Do you think that the Emotional Appeals fallacy is important? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you most vulnerable to emotional appeal? How do you respond to it? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Fallacy of Exclusion

To avoid falling for the Fallacy of Exclusion, ask yourself, “What information might I be ignoring?” Generally we are too blind and subjectively enmeshed in our biases and assumptions to answer this question. This is why IDL recommends triangulation, in which you compare the perspectives of respected external authorities with those of interviewed emerging potentials, and your own common sense.

Do you see the relevancy of the Fallacy of Exclusion? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to it? How do you respond to this formal cognitive distortion? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Loaded Question

“Have you stopped beating your wife?” If I ask you this question you can’t answer without incriminating yourself. If you say “No,” I can frame your answer as a denial of your behavior. If you say “Yes,” I can use it as proof that you did, in fact, beat your wife.” I am asking you a question that has an assumption built into it so that it can’t be answered without you appearing guilty.

Loaded Question fallacies are particularly effective at derailing rational debates because of their inflammatory nature and use of innuendo. The victim of this underhanded attack is compelled to defend themselves and think quickly. One has to first recognize this is a logical fallacy and point that out, moving the context of the conversation to the rules of engagement rather than falling for debate within an irrational context.

Another example is the question, “I’ll never be able to trust you, will I?” If you answer “yes,” how am I going to trust that you are telling the truth, since I have just said I don’t trust you? If you say “no,” which is true, because you will never be able to live up to my impossible expectations, nor should you, I will triumphantly declare that you are untrustworthy. This is another example of how the Loaded Question Fallacy often reveals a mental predisposition toward an underlying perceptual cognitive distortion that is no-win. That means, nothing that anyone says or does is going to invalidate the fossilized, baked-in, frozen suppositions of the other person. To attempt to reason with, love, understand, or support such a perspective, position, or personality is taken as concurrence, support, and validation. Therefore, the only solution is to move to a meta-analysis of the logic and motivations behind the position itself. But this cannot be done until you learn how to think about thinking and learn how to recognize not only logical fallacies but perceptual cognitive distortions.

Do you see the relevancy of the Loaded Question Fallacy? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to it? How do you respond to it? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated it?

“Feminazi.”

Theories in psychology are famous for this error. For example, Freud’s theory of personality and psychodynamics was derived from Newtonian physics and the laws of thermodynamics, both of which were very popular in the late eighteen hundreds when Freud was getting his education. However, since Einstein, ideas derived from relativity theory and quantum mechanics have superseded Freud’s theories and so are commonly found in explanations of the workings of the human mind. Are they more helpful? Are they more accurate? For some they are, at least until the next theoretical framework comes along and dethrones the old one. Are common psychological theories derived from Faulty Analogy? Your inner compass itself is not a product of current groupthink and theoretical frameworks, although we are condemned to understand it through whatever cultural context makes the most sense to us. The analogy to a compass certainly is so derived. These cultural theoretical frameworks form our perceptual cognitive distortions, which we will address in the next chapter.

Strictly speaking, there is no analogy that is not faulty, because no two things are ever exactly the same. Lewis Carroll, the Oxford mathematician who wrote Alice and Wonderland, attempted to make this point with the question, “How is a raven like a writing desk?” Not to be outdone, some witty respondent replied, “Because Poe wrote on both.”

When and where do you find Faulty Analogy in your world, relationships, and thinking? How do you respond to it? Do you think this formal cognitive distortion is important? When are you vulnerable to using Faulty Analogy yourself? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Manufacturing Your Conclusions

This fallacy occurs when we find patterns to fit our presumptions. It could also be called “The Face of Jesus on a Taco Shell Fallacy,” or “The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy,” in reference to the marksman who shoots at barns and then paints a bullseye target around the spot where the most bullet holes appear. In another example, a soda company can claim that its soda is a health drink when it finds that among the cities where it sells its products, some of them have healthy populations.

How common is this fallacy? A cynic could make the case that everything we believe is a case of constructing evidence or a “story” to justify our world view or preconceived biases and prejudices. While IDL does not believe this is the case, it does believe that a wise and helpful default position is to assume that it is true, particularly regarding your own beliefs. What this stance does is force you to question your beliefs and search for both justification and validation for them. That process may cause you to recognize their deficiencies and partiality, loosening your identification with them. This is a major step forward in learning to get over yourself, to disidentify with any particular sense of who you are, so that you become more transparent, clear, and less likely to distort the wake-up calls that cross your path.

Looking back over your life, what conclusions have you manufactured that you later recognized were faulty? On what grounds do you assume that your present ones will not be subject to the same sort of hindsight deconstruction? How might your life be different if you stopped manufacturing your conclusions?

Moral Equivalency 

The only way out of this moral fallacy is to identify and give up your unrealistic expectations for yourself and others. The problem is that most of us believe our moral expectations are realistic and necessary, and the problem is the failure of ourselves and others to live up to them. IDL attempts to move us out of the fallacy of Moral Equivalency by accessing perspectives that are relatively accepting and non-judgmental. They do not require us to jump through hoops in order to be likeable, acceptable, or OK.

Do you think the fallacy of Moral Equivalency is important? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? How do you respond to it? When are you vulnerable to using Moral Equivalency? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

 Non Sequitur

Most people recover from their colds a couple days after they take cold medication. But, of course, most people recover from their colds if they take no cold medication whatsoever.

Many people get rich when they pray for wealth, but many people who never pray also get rich.

There are many different types of Non Sequitur fallacies, including post hoc, hasty generalization, slippery slope, affirming the consequent, and simply making a faulty assumption. A slippery slope argument, for example, is Non Sequitur because it does not follow that legalizing one thing, such as gay marriage or medicinal marijuana, inevitably leads to legalizing other things, such as polygamy, bestiality, or recreational marijuana use. If you don’t live up to the expectations of your parents, employer, or government, it does not follow that your life is ruined. Catastrophizing, an emotional cognitive distortion we have considered, is another example of Non Sequitur, because it does not follow that because an acorn falls on your head that the sky is falling, even if you are Chicken Little. “Waiting for Santa Claus” provides another example of Non Sequitur, because it does not follow that happiness depends on change. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” You get to choose how you feel independently of conditions and circumstances. Heaven’s Reward fallacy is another example of Non Sequitur. There is no evidence that you will get the reward that you believe you or others deserve; there is only your belief that this will happen.

A good way to avoid this fallacy is to get in the habit of asking yourself, “Could there be another cause at work here?” For example, in the above examples, could the decisions to buy a car or sleep with someone be based on something other than financial responsibility or love?

Also, cultivate healthy skepticism. This is not to be confused with either cynicism or pessimism, because skepticism is healthy doubt that supports the habit of asking questions of what is being assumed. There exist many examples in which there really do exist strong connections between premises and conclusions, such as between cigarettes and lung cancer, safety glass, seat belts, and air bags in automobiles, causes of air pollution, effects of pollution on health and the relationship between anthropogenic causes and global warming. These subjects, as well as evolution, AIDS, and austerity economics are areas where evidence of causal linkage have been denied, with opponents claiming instances of Non Sequitur fallacy exist where they do not. Such claims have been used to maintain economic and ideological interests well after the science is in, to the detriment of global health and human advancement. Consequently, learning to recognize and call out Non Sequitur, as well as other fallacies, is not simply a curious pasttime; it is not an understatement to say that the evolution of humanity and the future of society depend on it.

Do you think Non Sequitur is important? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? How do you respond to it? When are you vulnerable to using Non Sequitur? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Semantics

“Organic” food advertising, appeals to let “children be children,” the paleolithic diet, and the glorification of nudity may all be implicated in the Fallacy of Appeal to Nature. If something is “natural,” does that mean it must also be valid, justified, inevitable, good, or ideal? Does naturalness itself make something good or bad? For instance, murder could be seen as very natural; is it therefore justifiable? It was not so long ago that slavery and infatricide were considered natural and many people today still consider patriarchy, the suppression of women, and beating children to be “natural.” In some societies today, female sexual mutilation is still considered natural. Homeopathic and Bach Flower remedies are two examples of “natural” health treatments that have not been shown to function above placebo.  That means you can get similar benefits from drinking water.  Clearly, there is considerable money to be made by hoping you and I do not see through this fallacy, and continue to believe that because something is natural, it must be better.

Do you think the “Appeal to Nature” is an important cognitive distortion or not? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? How do you respond to it? When are you vulnerable to using the Appeal to Nature Fallacy to strengthen some point you are making? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Another example: You are a student. You don’t keep up on your homework and start a paper the night before it’s due. You receive a C- grade. You conclude the grade reflects your teacher’s ignorance and personal dislike for you. What would Occam’s Razor conclude? The paper was poorly written.

Occam’s Razor is simple enough to use and fallacies that arise from ignoring it are relatively obvious, so why would anyone not use it? We can see from the above examples that the most likely answer is that they have a vested interest in another, less likely, solution, and believe you are probably too ignorant to know about Occam’s Razor. Some less reasonable explanation may be part of their belief system or they may embrace an economic theory that justifies their income, or supports an ideology that allows them to remain exceptional and impose their will on other people or nations.

The answer probably lies in either an emotional investment in some other explanation, or because of the Bandwagon formal cognitive distortion: everybody else believes the more complicated, less likely explanation, so it must be true. When you remember that most of us grew up in families that didn’t understand or use Occam’s Razor, is it surprising that we insist on keeping irrational, unhelpful, and unlikely beliefs?

You can use Occam’s Razor to great effect on just about anything. For example, God may have created the Earth, however a simpler explanation based on what data is available is that the Earth evolved out of the dust cloud orbiting a young star we call Sun. IDL uses this principle in many ways, for example when it asks, “Who is more likely to know what is best for you, some external authority, some internalized parent voice, or your own inner guidance system? Which is most likely to help you, to listen only to your inner guidance system, or to correlate its recommendations with those of external authorities and your own common sense?

Does Occam’s Razor make sense to you? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to forgetting it and instead insisting on a more complicated and less likely solution? Why do you think you do that? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and used Occam’s Razor?

Affirming the Consequent

Does Affirming the Consequent make sense to you? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to forgetting and using it? Why do you think you do that? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Special Pleading

Special pleading is moving the goalposts or making up exceptions when a claim is shown to be false. If I don’t have proof you are anti-Semitic or a “self-hating Jew,” don’t worry; it’s just a matter of time before I will have my proof. This fallacy is a form of rationalization. If you pray for healing and it doesn’t happen, it’s not because prayer doesn’t work or there is no God; rather, it’s because you prayed to the wrong god, said the wrong prayer, didn’t pray long or hard enough, or because you need to be “tested,” or because it’s your karma to be sick.

Humans are funny creatures and have a foolish aversion to being wrong. Rather than appreciate the benefits of being able to change our minds through better understanding, we often invent ways to cling to old beliefs.

The “Pre-Trans Fallacy”

The pre-trans fallacy exists because both pre-rational stages of development and post-rational stages of development are non-rational, meaning that they are easily confused. Because people who are pre-rational or rational have read about mystical states or experienced them themselves, they think things that are psychic or miraculous are post-rational, when they can and do occur at any level of development.

While we normally think of elevation in the realm of religion and spirituality, far greater damage is done in the field of economics. While economists generally know nothing about the transpersonal and care even less, they are very concerned with making principled arguments that are posed as being for the betterment of all mankind. In such a way, they consider their motives to be reflective of the greatest good for the greatest number, which means that from their perspective, their economic theory is better than anything transrational. Marx’s vision of egalitarian society, idealistic in the extreme, was twisted and corrupted to validate massive oppression and brutalization by people who were focused on economic goals. This is an example of the first variety of pre-trans fallacy, of reductionism, in which greedy and selfish people take a noble, uplifting ideal and use it to enslave masses. On the other hand, neo-liberalism, a conservative-libertarian form of capitalism, is an example of elevationism. It so elevates the ideal of prosperity, in the form of policies based on trickle-down and austerity, that it destroys entire economies, from Chile, to England, to the Ukraine, to the United States. In neo-liberalism, greedy and selfish people concoct seemingly rational, analytically sophisticated and principled reasons to rip off individuals and entire cultures. These people may be neo-Darwinian plutocrats who care primarily for their own class and empathize only superficially, for purposes of publicity, with the needs or concerns of those who lack wealth and power. Their primary allegiance is to the maximization of profits by externalizing costs, which means having someone else, anyone else, or nature, pay the price for their exploitation. Or, they may simply be bureaucrats, workers, or soldiers who make their living as cogs in the machine, sold to the highest bidder, no questions asked. As the noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” From these two economic examples, we can see that the pre-trans fallacy has immense practical consequences, not only for human development, but also for the quality and ease of everyday life. It determines whether people even have the luxury of the time to consider such issues.

An example closer to home commonly occurs when you know what your partner, children or co-workers are wanting as soon as they approach you. You don’t have to listen, because you have heard it all before. You believe you can tell them what they are going to say, so why listen? This is elevationism of your knowledge to the level of intuition, clairvoyance and principled wisdom. It might as well be transpersonal, because in your mind you know what they are saying and why they are saying it, and you already know what the answer is. You are acting as if you are psychic.

It is also reductionist and discounting behavior, because you know that the other person will not present information that transcends and includes your understanding. Your certainty of your knowledge justifies your ignoring them, thinking about something else, cutting them off or smiling, nodding and summarily forgetting what they said. You think you are listening, but if you were asked to repeat what they said, could you? Could you accurately summarize what they are feeling and what their motivations are? Instead of “deep listening,” what we do is typically “deep grandiosity.” Note that such mind reading is also a form of rescuing that can quickly put you into the persecutor role of the Drama Triangle. IDL interviewing is designed to first interrupt and then eliminate this extremely common and arrogant habit. It does so by teaching a phenomenological method that involves suspending all such judgments in favor of practicing deep listening.

You can probably recognize ways that you are commonly a victim of reductionism and elevationism, but how about the pre-trans fallacy itself? You may be a victim of this logical fallacy if you believe any of the following are signs of spiritual attainment or enlightenment:

Miracles; psychic phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis or past life memories; lucid dreaming; revelations;  visitations by deceased relatives or ascended masters; meditation; the ability to do psychic healing; near death experiences; out of the body experiences; nature, saintly or sage mysticism; claims of enlightenment.

Any of these experiences can happen at any level of development. If you claim to have them or seek to develop them, first consider that such desires can also be signs of feelings of personal inadequacy. You may be trying to compensate for some sort of emptiness by claiming exceptional abilities or attempting to develop them. Such elevationism can also be a sign of narcissism and grandiosity. While it may be none of these, it is wise to first rule out those possibilities. How can you do so? An IDL interview or two should bring a lot of clarity to exactly what’s going on.

On the other hand, if you automatically jump to the conclusion that any of these unusual and amazing experiences are always delusions concocted by ignorant or foolish people, you are ignorant and foolish yourself, a smug victim of the reductionist version of the pre-trans logical fallacy. Try reading something both scholarly and persuasive, like Michael Murphey’s The Future of the Body, Ian Stevenson’s Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, or Chris Carter’s trilogy on the evidence for psychic experience, life after death, and near death experiences. 

Does the Pre-Trans Fallacy make sense to you? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to forgetting and using it? Why do you think you do that? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

The Ranking Fallacy

However, this is a different issue from making a ranking fallacy. That occurs when you say, based on a desire for egalitarianism and pluralism, something like, “You are being elitist and species-centric when you claim that humans are smarter than dolphins.” This is a ranking fallacy because you yourself are making a discrimination while proclaiming the impropriety of discriminations. You are saying, “It is better to not rank than to rank,” which means that you are discriminating against those who rank. Can you see how this is an internal contradiction, how such a person is contradicting themselves? There are legitimate reasons to object to people claiming that humans are smarter than dolphins, such as the fact that their intelligence is not comparable due to the fact that it is designed to deal with radically different environments. The problem arises when you object to the ranking on grounds of egalitarianism and pluralism. Why? Because equality says, “ranking threatens equality; because pluralism says, “ranking disenfranchises some voices.” While this may be true, these statements are themselves rankings.

You can say, “I think my rankings are better than yours” without committing this logical fallacy. The problem occurs when you condemn ranking when you are doing so yourself. To commit a ranking fallacy you must say, “This person who ranks in such and such a way is discriminating,” while at the same time not recognizing that you are yourself discriminating between those who rank and those who do not. You yourself are ranking but not realizing it. You have just created a hierarchy or a distinction, between those who do not rank and those who do, between good and bad or between the “washed and the unwashed,” without realizing it. You have just contradicted yourself by saying, “Your ranking is bad, because it discriminates, but my ranking is good and doesn’t discriminate,” when you are ranking and, therefore, discriminating yourself.

This logical fallacy is important because it ranks heterogeneity or communalism, among societies, species, abilities or capabilities, above hierarchy or meritocracy. It wants to validate everybody and everything, without exception, except for those who find such distinctions to be valuable. They are to be discounted and discriminated against. So, we need to picket animal experimentation, patriarchal bastions, meat eaters, the rich and the powerful. It is not politically correct to point out that astrology is pre-scientific, that monkeys lack human intelligence, that conservatives are relatively self-centered when compared to liberals or that shamanism does not rise to the level of say, Buddhism.

The problem is that hierarchies do exist and that value distinctions are not only real, but important. Nature itself evolves in hierarchies of sophistication and capabilities. The more complicated levels evolve out of the less complicated ones and sustain themselves by incorporating the less complicated into themselves. Those with evolutionary advantages have more offspring and survive longer. When this understanding is turned into the religion of neo-Darwinism, it is used to justify inequality and selfishness, which is generally the sin that gives rise to the current use of this logical fallacy. In reaction, people put egalitarianism, pluralism, and political correctness before common sense, rational discrimination, and meaningful distinctions of value, leading to self-created absurdities. This spirit of justice breaks down somewhere for almost everyone. As vegetarians we won’t kill shrimp, but how about mosquitos and fleas? Taken to a logical extreme, you need to become a Parsee, spending your life sweeping the ground in front of you to avoid the injustice of accidentally stepping on a living creature. However, since we know that doing so is unavoidable, to be consistent, you need to stop breathing. You need to die if you want to respect all life, because your mere existence is sustained by incorporating lesser developed life forms into your own. There is no escaping that reality, nor should one try. You can learn to respect and protect all life and still respect and protect the knowledge that ranking is real and that hierarchies exist for the furtherance of the evolution of consciousness.

Humans and life itself evolve in both heterogenous, communal and hierarchical, discriminatory ways. The unwillingness to accept this is a reflection of a deficit in an important developmental skill: the ability to hold and balance two or more conflicting and contradictory perspectives, opinions, preferences or beliefs at the same time, yet remaining willing and able to choose among them. Instead of being confused or blocked by ambiguity, you can learn to welcome it and use your mind to sort through information to focus on what is most important for the task at hand. Children do not know how to do this. Adults do not automatically learn this higher order competency, unless they have been exposed to someone who insists on it, teaches them why it is important, as well as how to use it. You will notice that your emerging potentials are more evolved than you are, when they score higher than you in the six core qualities. They make discriminations. They are discriminating. At the same time, they embrace egalitarianism and pluralism. They can and will teach you to honor both ranking and justice.

Does the Ranking Fallacy make sense to you? When and where do you see it in your world, relationships, and thinking? When are you vulnerable to forgetting and using it? Why do you think you do that? What do you want to do about it? How might your life be different if you recognized and eliminated this formal cognitive distortion?

Recognizing this and other formal cognitive distortions is intended to give you additional power to get unstuck and wake up by learning to think clearly about life, feelings, what others say, and most importantly, about your own thoughts. These are skills that are required if you are to move your center of gravity, your definition of self, beyond mid personal levels of development. In fact, this becomes an acid test for those who claim to be “spiritually evolved” or believe they look at life from a transpersonal perspective. Can they not only think, but can they think about thinking? If they cannot, if they are lost in cognitive distortions or do not catch those of others, then their late personal profession of egalitarianism or their claims of oneness with God are probably coming from either state experiences or beliefs associated with earlier stages of development. This should be the presumption for all, until proven otherwise, applied to yourself as well. The truth is, you are probably a lot less developed, if a median of core lines, such as self, cognition, empathy, and ethics are considered, than you imagine yourself to be.

We will now turn to the third and broadest category of cognitive distortions, perceptual delusions, which are both unavoidable and fateful in the way they predestine and limit our development, if left unexamined.