This post came up on my Facebook feed, written by a man. I thought it was quite a good response.
_
I've seen a lot of men doing the "not all men" routine over the last few days, and I think it's interesting to think about the cognitive state that these men are getting themselves into that makes them resort to stinking up important conversations with their "not all men" mind-farts.
As far as I figure it they're getting horribly confused about identity.
As I've tried to show in the infographic, this seems to be their thought process:
P1. People are criticising male violence
P2. I am a male
C. Therefore this means I am personally under attack and must adopt a defensive position
When it's put into a logical structure like this, the problem becomes glaringly obvious: The terms "male violence" and "individual males" in the two premises are clearly different things can't be used interchangeably to draw conclusions.
It's particularly easy to spot if someone has colour coded the relevant bits.😉
Although it's not exactly the same kind of composition error, it's in the same family of logical fallacies as this:
P1. All dogs are mammals
P2. No cats are dogs
C. No cats are mammals
Generation after generation of kids just haven't been taught any fundamental philosophical basics or critical thinking skills in schools, and let's be honest, it's only a particularly nerdy/bookish type of person who, in later life, and of their own accord, becomes interested in understanding all the different logical fallacies that can be made.
Then there's the emotional component of identity-defensiveness, which seems to reduce people to hyper-defensive, unreasonable and unlistening state when they feel their identity is under attack, and this emotional hot-headedness can kick in whether the feeling of being under attack is based on something real (systemic racism, interpersonal bigotry, sexism, classism, homophobia, discrimination against the physically disabled and the neuro-divergent ...) or when it's based on the kind of absurdly simple composition error that you could easily teach primary school kids to identify and avoid.
Hot-headed identity-defensiveness is problematic whether the thing that triggered it was real or imagined, because it represents a loss of emotional control, which limits anybody's higher cognitive functions.
Of course it's human nature to become enraged by injustice, however the key to properly confronting it has always been calm analytical rage, not spouting hot-headed nonsense when you're most emotionally riled up.
Emotional control techniques is something else it would be extremely easy to teach to children of primary school age, and even younger.
So huge numbers of people are getting themselves absolutely wound up, and derailing debates about important issues, and lowering the standard of discourse, and making absolute fools of themselves, because they've never been taught how to actually think, and never took it upon themselves to learn, and because they're so lacking in emotional self-control that they hammer confused, hot-headed, identity-defensive whines into their touchscreens, without even really thinking about what they're doing.
It's utterly dispiriting to behold.