The “Birds aren’t real” movement plans to “spread the feathered gospel.”
I believe that people will actually start believing this. You can support that with a quote from one of two famous thinkers.
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer (allegedly)
“There is no idea too stupid to attract a large number of believers.”
– Uncle Scoopy
By the way, I don’t think Schopenhauer ever said that.
—
—
Two reasons:
1. Although it is plastered around the internet as a meme, nobody can seem to point to a specific source.
2. It is obviously false, and Schopenhauer was not an idiot to declare such an all-encompassing statement that can be refuted with a few simple examples. Wise men who are trained in logic do not use the word “all” recklessly, since even one exception proves them to be incorrect. Yes, it is accurate to make this statement about “some” ideas, but not “all.” On the one hand, Galileo and Copernicus were ridiculed for their blasphemous belief that the earth was not the center of the solar system, but their conception was eventually accepted as self-evident. On the other hand, “Fire is hot” is a truth. You can bet that there was never a time when that belief was ridiculed.
The internet is filled with misinformation and misquotation. Franklin was supposed to have said, “Those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.” He obviously did not say that because he was not a moron. Once again, it uses an implied “all” or “any,” which wise men never do, but the problem with the assertion is not merely the logical error. It is just plain dumb. All human civilization is built upon sacrificing individual freedom for mutual security. That’s why we built walls and castles, made rules and laws, formed tribes, villages and nations. What Franklin did say was “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” As Franklin worded it, it is self-evident. It uses the word “essential,” which means “absolutely necessary.” It also uses the modifying phrase “little temporary,” thus making the very nouns – liberty and security – all but irrelevant. You can substitute almost any words in their place. Why would you give anything absolutely necessary for something temporary and insignificant? You may substitute any appropriate words without altering the accuracy of the statement. “Those who would give up essential air, to purchase a little temporary entertainment, deserve neither air nor entertainment.” “Those who would give up essential water, to purchase a little temporary perfume, deserve neither water nor perfume.” As long as the two elements are defined as “essential” and “little temporary,” it works. Without the modifiers, it does not. You can can’t accurately say “Those who sacrifice water for perfume deserve neither.” Even if I’m thirsty, I’ll gladly give you a bottle of my water for a bottle of Clive Christian No. 1 Imperial Majesty. Even if I never use the perfume, I can sell it for enough money to buy thousands of bottles of water.
FWIW, Wikiquote claims that the pseudo-Schopenhauer quote is a mangling of the following conclusion to his own introduction to his “The World as Will and Representation”:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer
“And now that I have allowed myself the jest to which in this two-sided life hardly any page can be too serious to grant a place, I part with the book with deep seriousness, in the sure hope that sooner or later it will reach those to whom alone it can be addressed; and for the rest, patiently resigned that the same fate should, in full measure, befall it, that in all ages has, to some extent, befallen all knowledge, and especially the weightiest knowledge of the truth, to which only a brief triumph is allotted between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial. The former fate is also wont to befall its author. But life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.”
Even if we interpret the heavily hedged statement as stating that a philosopher or scientist’s insights are only considered impressive for a brief period, I don’t think it’s really true as stated. There was about a century and a half after Copernicus during which his heliocentric model was the equivalent of Einstein’s Relativity 100 years ago, but even though the knowledge that the Earth revolves around the sun is literally Kintergarden Physics now, no serious student of the philosophy and history of science disparages Copernicus for that reason.
Schopenhauer still lived in a world where the average citizen (then a politically radical term) was illiterate and mass media such as there was made Fox News look like a bastion of responsible reporting. He was also very much a part of the movement of elite the romanticism that held popular opinion in contempt. So it’s not surprising that he was as pessimistic about the reception of his book as he was about everything else.
I always preferred Schopenhauer’s vicious, biting, and completely justified attacks on Hegel.
“If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.”
I’m surprised that his words are not more carefully chosen. For example, he deems the final stage of knowledge to be “disparaged as trivial.”
As you pointed out, modern people do not “disparage” the discoveries of Copernicus.
But even if I were to accept “disparage” as having been used as deliberate hyperbole, I would still object to “trivial.” I don’t recognize a place in our consciousness where we regard the movement of celestial bodies and the precise calculations thereof as “trivial.” The pseudo-quote’s use of “self-evident,” or perhaps “platitudinous,” would be better. The stages of reaction by the mass audience to difficult new concepts (which is what I think he means, as opposed to their reactions to knowledge in general) might better be described as:
1. Outrageous
2. Insightful
3. Commonplace
In fairness, we don’t know what the connotations of the word choices in the original German are, and the translator may be subtly altering the meaning. (I tried looking for the text online but even if I’d found it, I’d have had little chance of reading it with a half semester of German.)
You are dead right.
The German:
“Der Wahrheit ist allezeit nur ein kurzes Siegesfest beschieden zwischen den beiden langen Zeiträumen, wo sie als paradox verdammt und als trivial gering geschätzt wird.“
My German is good, but not academic, so I won’t be sophisticated, but I’m not a bad translator since I did it for years for Shell, and I’d go with (after some advice from Figaro):
“Truth is only allotted a brief celebration of victory between the two long eras when it is condemned as paradoxical and underestimated as trivial.”
So I guess my quibble about “disparaged” was a good one. Hang that on the translator. “Underestimated” is much better, not just as a translation, but for the accuracy of the statement itself. I think the translator blew that one.
“Victory celebration”
Yeah, that’s good. That would also allow me to change “short” to “brief” to make it sound more natural as a duration of time rather than distance: “allotted a brief victory celebration.” Done.
Apparently “trivial” has slightly changed connotation in English since both Schopenhauer and the translator (R.B. Haldane) wrote.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/trivial
https://www.etymonline.com/word/trivia
The etymology is from the Latin tri + via for “place where three roads meet” which went through the French to mean “forum/marketplace” and then “commonplace”. It didn’t start to pick up the meaning we use in “Trivial Pursuit” until the 1920s and 30s.
(I had looked this up a few weeks ago after hearing the late Sophocles translator Nicholas Rudall claim that “trivial” originally meant something more like “pivotal” or “decisive” in a discussion after a performance of “Oedipus the Tyrant”. Where he uses the phrase “place where three roads meet” to describe the location where Oedipus met and killed his father, presumably a direct translation of the original Greek. “Where three roads meet you have to make a choice”. It looks like this might at best be him falsely imposing the Greek etymology on the literal Latin equivalent.)
I assumed that, or at least I assumed that the connotation in German must be slightly different.
OED agrees:
II. 5.A.II.5 Such as may be met with anywhere; common, commonplace, ordinary, everyday, familiar, trite. Now rare (passing into 6).
1589 Nashe Pref. Greene’s Menaphon (Arb.) 9 A few of our triviall translators. 1610 Healey St. Aug. Citie of God viii. v. 291 It is triuiall in the Schooles: ‘Nothing is in the vnderstanding that was not first in the sense’. 1665 Glanvill Scepsis Sci. i. 8 The most ordinary and trivial Phænomena in nature. 1704 F. Fuller Med. Gymn. (1711) 37 Explain the manner of this by a trivial Observation. 1827 Keble Chr. Y., Morning xiv, The trivial round, the common task. 1895 MacEwen Life Dr. Cairns 161 This‥is now the trivial definition and ground principle.
My real objection was to his use of the word “disparage,” which definitely seems like not only a mistranlation, but one that made the German statement less true. People don’t disparage Copernicus now, but they do underestimate how difficult it was to come up with insights that we now consider obvious.
I find it really hard to believe that there are people who truly believe this, as opposed to people who believe that OTHER people believe this. Does anyone know anybody who takes this bird thing seriously?
Is it more absurd than Pizzagate?
Is it more absurd than the flat earth or the 6000-year-old universe?
Is it more absurd than believing that COVID vaccinations are a mass extermination plot, or a plot by Bill Gates to implant tracking devices?
Is it more absurd than rapture theology – and tens of millions believe in that. Maybe hundreds of millions.
I try never to lose sight of one very important fact: 50% of the people in the world have IQ’s below 100. A good con man can get a significant number of people to believe just about anything.
I can’t name you any specific person who believes the bird replacement theory, but the group boasts hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. I’m willing to wager that some of those followers aren’t in on the joke.
Not to be disrespectful, but yes, I think the “all the birds have been killed and replaced by drones” is dumber than any of the examples that UncleScoopy gives.
That is because birds are part of almost everyone’s everyday experience. We see than in many places at many times, often quite closely. That means people have a much more concrete idea of just what it would take to A) kill them all, and B) replace them all with C) replicas that cannot be distinguished from the real thing (including eating and defecating).
Pizzagate? Was it supposed to be all pizza places everywhere? I thought it was just some of the ones in New York City. People who don’t live in NYC believe anything can happen there, and probably does.
Flat earth? The whole reason that has any traction is because you can’t see the curvature of the earth very easily. You have to trust in science or do something yourself to prove it, and make you do either of those things.
The Rapture? That’s not something that is happening, it’s something that going to happen if God makes it happen. You have to believe in God in the first place for that, and that puts you halfway there already.
But the bird thing? Utterly ridiculous by direct everyday experience. That is why I am dubious about its reality, at least by people who are not literally raving mad.
But then again, I could never have believed that so many people would vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020.
“no one makes you do either of those things.”
I totally disagree with you on the flat earth. Despite our common perception that the people of Columbus’s time actually believed the earth was flat, the fact of the matter is that the ancient Greeks had the curve figured out from simple observation, using no instruments of any kind. When a sailing ship came into view from afar, it did not appear all at once. One did not immediately see a tiny ship in its entirety. There was instead a period where only the top of the mast could be seen, then came the sails, and only later the hull.
The smarter among them also reasoned that the earth cast a curved shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. Moreover, they could see that the moon was round. Why would the earth be different?
By about 250 BC, the Greeks not only knew that the Earth was round, but had calculated its circumference very accurately. They had figured a correct method for doing the calculations, but did not have sufficiently precise instruments to get it down to the exact mile.
Pizzagate, like Uranium-1 and Crowdstrike, was about things that were not only demonstrably and obviously false, but also utterly implausible. Those conspiracy theories were concocted disinformation, pure fantasies no more real than, for example, Game of Thrones, and no more likely to be real. Yet all of those things were believed by hundreds of thousands of people.
Obviously the bird thing is a piece of street theater designed as a satire of conspiracy theories, as concocted by cynical frat boys who are goofing on society – the same sorts of assholes that I was at their age – but I can flat-out guarantee that it will have true believers scattered among the posers and jokers. You can get some people to believe ANYTHING.
Your logic is flawed because it is your logic – the thinking of a rational man who can reason from such facts as that we see dead birds constantly in our daily lives, and they are obviously organic. There are many people not capable of such reasoning because of (1) limited brain power, or (2) mental illness, or (3) both of the above. Those very credulous types are the target of greedy con-men everywhere, from salesmen to pastors to politicians.
Moreover, once ensnared in belief, true believers see contradictory information as proof of that belief, not refutation. (E.g. seemingly organic dead birds are proof that the government is planting them there, trying to fool us, just as contradictory facts from Anderson Cooper are lies that prove he’s in on the conspiracy.)
I’m not saying that there is a vast number of people stupid enough to believe birds aren’t real. But I’ll wager there are some. And I shudder to think how many there would be if Trump said it was true!
What do you think? If Trump’s complete campaign was that “Birds aren’t real, but drones planted by liberals to spy on us,” would his followers think he’s a lunatic and abandon him, or would they come up with all kinds of reasons why he was right, and begin a campaign of bird slaughter? You may truly believe the former, but I am as completely in the camp of the latter. He would lose some followers, to be sure, but tens of millions would remain in his camp, shotguns loaded.
“What do you think? . . . . would his followers think he’s a lunatic . . . or would they come up with all kinds of reasons why he was right?”
Well, we’ll find out when he get reinstated in August!
Despite jibes like “Flat Earth has members around the globe…”
There are serious & unserious arguers on both sides of crazy ideas. In atheist v. anti-atheist debates, the latter often wins despite best efforts & strong arguments by the atheist. Like, atheists like to advance a case that faith is a bad thing while their opponent sticks to p’s & q’s & to the debate rules, especially the specific question posed. IOW, it becomes a contest of ideas v. logic.
I’ve seen 1st-hand a Skeptic trying to talk down a serious flat-earther. They have a counter to every question. They acknowledge some of their members may be nuts. But they don’t defend the indefensible. They have their own model of how the world works that has its own internal consistency. They have their own story why mainstream belief is otherwise but how said mainstream is deluded.
You may have seen a similar phenomenon at Libertarian party gatherings. There are many wackos. But there’re also some who can go into great detail how every problem would be handled in their vision.
Arguably, those among us who may be Never-Trump & wish to go by a distinguishing label like “traditional conservative” are like those I called serious. The kooks can be swayed by the people they listen to. I fear the non-kooks because they’re brainwashed. They believe the doctrine they’ve received, they add to the dogma, they recruit the young & they persuade swing voters. I used to be one of them. The only difference is I now see the corruptness of the core beliefs. “Good” conservatives are doing the devil’s work. Their vision is not The American Dream & not actually Freedom For All, in the meaningful sense, only in a logical, hypothetical way that is never the reality. Their vision is so, by design. IMO of course, YMMV.
I mean, know that The Federalist Society was founded quite recently. The conservative ideological takeover of law & econ was recent & deliberate. It’s a strategy that’s culminated in a 6-3 court opposed to “activist” rulings. Yet, Scalia’s opinions were every bit as activist. Not to say liberal arts faculty don’t trend left & many academics are Marxist. Both left & right wings are nuts. So say I. “So say we all.” (Leetle joke… Just binged BSG.)
Some of that is true, but obviously not flat earth. In order to believe that, you have to believe
1. that every scientist in the world is lying
2. that every photo of the earth taken from space is a hoax.
3. that every pilot or flight planner is lying about his experiences.
4. that your eyes are lying to you when you watch a boat disappear into the horizon with a powerful telescope. (You can still see the top of the ship as if it were within reach, but the hull disappears)
5. that of the eight billion people on earth, the only people who have ever seen the edge have lied about it (or nobody has ever seen it).
If I remember right, they think the end of the earth is a giant ice wall, ala Game of Thrones, and somehow, everybody is tricked into avoiding it by the giant GPS conspiracy. It’s a classic “true believer” thing – a logical fallacy called “begging the question,” in which the believer starts with the assumption that his belief is true, then adjusts everything else in the universe to make it so – because it simply must be. Given all of their adjustments – Q.E.D.!
As I mentioned, even the ancient Greeks, with nothing but their own eyes, were able to determine the shape of the earth, and with nothing but a stick were later able to calculate the circumference quite accurately. (Although they had the advantage of living on the sea, where the infinite horizon enabled their observations.)
Frankly, the “birds aren’t real” thing makes more sense.
Scoops: Thanks for the rebut. I don’t see us as far apart.
I disagree with all them “serious” people on the “wrong” sides of all of the above mentioned topics. But, that infamous, inanimate “they” in your derisive takes is doing all the work. “They” don’t all think the same things.
You’re right to refute the ridiculous claims. But these “serious” defenders disavow those obvious, easily refuted, low-hanging, self-evidently, bogosities. I also agree with you that the “serious” position is generally untenable from the point of views of both likelihood & credibility of sources. But, the slender thread they hang by is logic. Pure reason is a meager way of arriving at a conclusion, IMO, yet remains widely accepted as a gold standard.
And more than that, the sensible person’s “wrong” side quite often wins those complete waste-of-time IQ2US bull sessions. I mean, I *hate* them. In large part simply because the reasonable side’s base tends to be the larger but relatively stable. The bogus side just has to pick up more of the undecideds. It’s a *stupid* format. It’s our Boomer cult of even-handedness… on steroids.
Well, it depends on how you define “logic.” Their syllogism is as follows
* all the evidence and witnesses say we are wrong, and our eyes can see the curve
* but we must be right
* therefore, somehow, everyone must be conspiring to lie to us and deceive us
While that is a form of logic, it is fallacious, since the second part of the syllogism simply assumes the truth of the thing they are trying to prove, despite having absolutely no reason to do so. The reason it is true to them is because they say it is true, although nothing they say makes even the slightest bit of sense, and requires not only to assume that everyone in the world is lying to them, but that their own senses are also in error. I guess we can’t really criticize people for being stupid, but we should criticize them for CHOOSING to be stupid.
Thanks again, Uncle Scoopy. I answer that the circularity you refer to is the defining trait of a *premise*. You’re right, neither you nor I would nor should concede such festering premises. But again, if yours & my disdain of patently inferior argument always prevailed, the world would be a much better place. Than it is.
I still think it is easier for the average UNEDUCATED person to see that the “all birds are drones” now is ridiculous than the flat-earth thing, where all you have to do is stay close to home and disbelieve the educational equivalent of the “liberal mainstream media”. But all of the points UncleScoopy makes are excellent, and not only can I not argue with them (unless I just did above), I don’t even want to, because it would be stupid to.