Failure of Critical Thinking

A recent response to criticism of Elizabeth Warren’s plan to pay off student loans as being a “slap in the face to all those who struggled to pay off their loans” is to say that it is the same as saying that “Antibiotics are a slap in the face to all the people who died of the plague.” This argument is widely applauded by those who support Elizabeth Warren.

Without discussing the underlying student loan payoff plan, either approving or disapproving of the plan itself, consider the argument of comparing the burden of student loan payments to the issue of suffering from Bubonic Plague.

This is another demonstration of the modern inability to engage in logical thinking. Let’s start with the fact that people who died of the plague did not make a choice to get the plague, while people who have student loans did make the choice to take out that loan.

There are other fallacies embedded in this false analogy, several of them, but this one alone is sufficient to point out that critical thinking is a skill no longer engaged in as part of our political dialog, and that is an issue that makes democracy guaranteed to fail as a form of government. People who are invincibly ignorant and who are incapable of logical thinking simply cannot govern themselves.