re: #57 The Ghost of a Flea
On a fairly regular basis in politics, a person with a grasp of rhetoric and the social control possible through impression management will convince themselves that ultimately, every other skill is subordinate to rhetoric, making the base assumption that ideas are a market, and capture of the mass imagination grants so much power that veracity is valueless.
I read about a theory that our human sense of “logic” is more about winning arguments in social settings than in divining the objective truth. Which goes a way toward explaining why rhetoric and style are so important and why “pure science” seems so abstract and foreign to us.