Think Of The Children

* From “The A**HOLE’S Guide To Arguing (Or, How To Succeed In Politics)”

What is commonly known as an appeal to emotion could just as easily be labelled as an assault on reason.

When someone appeals to your emotions they are asking you to make a decision that is not based on logic, and once they succeed in this you become an easy target for manipulation and more likely to accept their ideas. Share on X

“You wanna ban the fur trade cause you feel sorry for the animals? What about the people that make a living from fur? Don’t you care about them?”

“The fur trade is barbaric and causes nothing but suffering for the animals. We need to have their best interest at heart and not just our own.”

Who should we feel more sorry for – the people or the animals?
Neither.

Appealing to sympathy is easy, finding good reasons to back up an argument is a lot harder. We should making our decisions based upon the facts, and not because of someone’s attempts at manipulating our emotions.

Sympathy is not the only emotion that people will try to manipulate others with. Some will use anger or fear to get what they want.

“Enough talk already. We’ve got to stand up for ourselves. If we don’t attack now, we may never get another chance. Let’s get these evil bastards while we still can. And before they attack us.”

The truth is that fear sells arguments, and making people fear the consequences makes even bad arguments go down easy. Share on X

Here we have a prime example of warmongering. Where a person who wants to go to war is appealing to your fears of being attacked, as well as trying to make you angry.

What this person wants you to believe is that you are about to be attacked by an evil enemy. And the implied ad hominem is that if you do not ‘stand up for yourself’ by attacking them first, you are spineless.

Now, if you want to make the above argument even more rotten, just add the following:

“I am telling you: We’ve got to do this, folks! For our children. We have got to protect them and their future. I can’t go home tonight and kiss my babies goodnight and tell them everything is going to be alright, when I know that there are people out there that want to harm them. Not without at least trying to protect them. And I am sure that all of you here feel the same way about your kids. So that’s why I am telling you, we have got to hit them now! We can not give those bastards a chance to hurt our kids.”

In The Simpsons, one of the characters, Helen Lovejoy, keeps asking everyone to ‘think of the children’. Sadly, this appeal to emotion does not only occur in the Simpsons cartoon, but also in real life.

In political debates, ‘think of the children’ becomes an emotional assault rifle aimed at the opposition and the listeners to bleed them of their sympathy. It is an overly used and abused appeal to emotion.

When mixed with fear and hatred it becomes a nuke – obliterating all rational thought.

© Merlyn Gabriel Miller