From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 5

Ignore the rhetoric stimulating your emotions: that is used as a cover and you’re looking through it now; is what you’re being told specific and detailed enough so that you can go and assess it? One thing is saying, “I’m the champion of this and that…” – a statement that hides behind its rhetoric the fact that it is vague and generic and thus there is nothing in it that can be verified. Quite another thing is saying, “On day x in place y I signed the so and so law which reads: under the so and so circumstance the so and so proviso applies so that this and that…” – now, regardless of any rhetoric and emotional appeal there may be, you do have details specific enough that you can go and check whether or not that person on day x in place y signed the so and so law which reads so and so, etc. etc.
Exploiting this fault, politicians and the alike can – and do – go on unchecked using on stage vague generalizations that mean nothing and winning our consensus on the basis of that nothingness, while in the backstage they’re free to keep on supporting quite the contrary undisturbed.

But it can even get quite worse than that, too, and on an even more basic level: communication, which is sometimes made of questions and answers. Whether people answer or evade questions is definitely a telling study in itself; exercise yourself in being fully aware of each exact question asked, and then see whether that exact question got answered or not – “exact” being the key word here. Do “…”, “Why do you ask me that?”, “Go to hell.”, “it’s late!”, “I had a watch once …”, “Why don’t you just go and buy a watch?”, “I expected you to ask me about time …”, “If only all of us could have more time …”, “Blah, blah, blah …” answer “What time is it?” Well, have fun in carrying out this study on politicians: you’ll discover they’d rather get executed by a firing squad than answer a question.