Bad habits in drawing conclusions. -- The commonest erroneous conclusions drawn by mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it had a right to. Here the conclusion is from the capacity to the fitness to live, from the fitness to live to the right to live. Then: an opinion makes happy, therefore it is a true opinion, its effect is good, therefore it is itself good and true. Here the effect is accorded the predicate beneficent, good, in the sense of useful, and the cause is furnished with the same predicate good, but here in the sense of logically valid. The reverse of this proposition is: a thing cannot prevail, preserve itself, therefore it is wrong; an opinion causes pain and agitation, therefore it is false. The free spirit, who is all too often acquainted with the erroneousness of this kind of reasoning and has to suffer from its consequences, often succumbs to the temptation to draw the opposite conclusions, which are of course in general equally erroneous: a thing cannot prevail, therefore it is good; an opinion causes pain and distress, therefore it is true.
Nietzsche
I mention this aphorism to help setup the savage, brutal, and much-deserved thrashing Christopher Hitchens gives to the porcine propagandist Michael Moore in Slate. Brilliant!
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