The importance of rhetoric

A few facts:

• 78% of Clinton supporters don't believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites. 
• 68% of Clinton supporters don't believe blacks are less law-abiding than whites.

Wow, they're all pretty stupid, right? No, because intelligence has NOTHING to do with it. Greater intelligence just means that an individual has an enhanced capability for rationalizing his belief in even more ridiculous falsehoods.

After all:

• 68% of Trump supporters don't believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites.
• 53% of Trump supporters don't believe blacks are less law-abiding than whites.

Let's throw in a few more facts.

• Average white American IQ: 103
• Average black American IQ: 85
• Average sub-Saharan African IQ: 70
• The 12% of the male US population that is black provides 37% of the male prison population.
• Blacks commit violent crimes at 8.5 times the rate that whites do.

In other words, facts are observably incapable of persuading MOST of the US population. Their minds are not changed by the receipt of new information, regardless of how accurate it may be. As much as 80 percent of the population is totally impervious to observation, statistics, eyewitness testimony, genetic science, and documentary evidence. Considering their ability to resist observable reality, how susceptible do you think they are likely to be to logic and abstract reason?

I conclude that less than five percent of the population is even subject to persuasion by logic and less than two percent are reliably capable of being persuaded by it. And if these facts is insufficient to persuade you that dialectic is an intrinsically limited tool that must always be supplimented by rhetoric to be generally effective, well, welcome to the 98 percent.

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