Circular Logic
Surrounding us every day are a huge numbers of billboards, slogans, advertising and marketing products and services.
Now you may not have realized before, but these are all based on using linguistic techniques. We’re literarily loaded past our ability to cope and barraged with these all over the place. They have become as much part of our lives, as has the morning orange juice and Kellogg’s Cornflakes.
We do our best to ignore them, however unconsciously we still register them.
Did you know that?
Yeah! Unfortunately you do register all of them. Unconsciously!
Eventually your mind ends up so overloaded it prefers not to pay attention anymore. It simply becomes very tired, confused and cannot handle it.
Normal activities as well as thinking processes are based on repetitive and coherent day/night patterns of rest vs. activity, concentration VS mental relaxation. Left alone, your body and mind would go through these repetitive and coherent patterns.
But the cacophony of ads, slogans, PR techniques can wreak havoc in our brains and ability to think correctly.
Here is a very funny example that comes from Bill Maher and one of his HBO shows.
This is very demonstrative of how easy it is to get your thinking caught in a nonsense type of non-logic.
It is in fact a very funny example of circular logic and wrong Complex Equivalences (for an explanation of Complex Equivalence see my article “Marketing Tricks the BIG Companies Use to Fool You” Series – Article No.3 and the NLP Glossary
The whole point of that segment of the show was centered on the subject of Americans not taking vacation.
And it went something like this.
America is one of the countries in the world where many people do not take vacations. They even defer their 2-3 weeks of vacation for next year. The reason is that they’re worried they will lose their job. They would be gone for a vacation and when they return their job won’t be there any longer.
And here it starts the funny part of the circular logic.
They’re worried that they would lose their job, and if they lose their job they lose their health insurance. Once they lose their health insurance, they lose the benefits and the prescription for Prozac. And Prozac makes them feel better about not taking a vacation.
You will not believe how many people get caught in such Catch-22 games.
Until next time, be well.