Inside the ‘Big Dog’ fallacy
The big dog fallacy. The stovepipe fallacy. The self-fulfilling prophecy. The drunkard’s search. The mutually assured destruction fallacy. The fallacy that absolute power provides exact results. The best and the brightest fallacy. The fallacy of hereditary excellence. The fooling all of the people all of the time fallacy. The belief in just one life. The fallacy of disbelief in necessary progress. The fallacy that greater might makes a successful invasion. The fallacy that tyrants don’t fall. The fallacy that wealth brings happiness. The fallacy of true web security. The fallacy that nuclear manufacturing can be safe and that we can keep it clean and that we can safely dispose of nuclear trash.
Look these fallacies up if you like; for example, President George W. Bush employed the stovepipe fallacy, that bending the path of raw foreign intelligence from the CIA to the White House made him smarter. But you probably won’t find the Big Dog fallacy because I am going to present it right now, it’s mine.
Big Dog fallacy: The two biggest dogs will always exist. Dogs exist; they are different sizes; two of them will always be the two biggest. That is a rule. The fallacy is, the two biggest dogs must fight each other. They don’t have to; they can ignore each other or form a pack of two, for hunting. They could fight over a mate, but they can also mate with different dogs. A wild dog band is in the New York Times this week for surviving a thousand-mile journey through predator and disease-laden Africa.
Can residents of the Rio Grande speak out about the new round of nuclear manufacturing at Los Alamos? Or must we just shut up and let the Ph.D.’s rule? Wait a minute, I’m a Ph.D., but I promise you, not in nuclear engineering.
So the big dogs. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown did an important review of our foreign policy in the New York Review of Books issue on March 24. Turns out, much of the foreign policy thinking is trapped in the Big Dog fallacy, and by that logical mistake, the thinkers Gov. Brown reviewed talk willy-nilly about nuclear exchanges between our country, the United States, and the People’s Republic of Xi Jinping China. Yes, flash-bang, intercontinental ballistic (that means they spin) missile nuclear warheads. They pretty much all want to beat China by a few flash-bang nuclear bombs over what China sends us.
Gov. Brown notes that while these thinkers assume we can trade with China and keep our GDP up, the two countries are on different trend lines favoring China. Hence the entrapment of these thinkers in the Big Dog fallacy. So the fallacy part is, we can’t help it that we and China are the two global big dogs, but if there must always be two big dogs, it is the fallacy of just one possibility when there has to be at least one. As shown by the contrary case of the African wild dog success, we humans appear to be the wild dogs, and the dogs the civilized ones.
What say you, amigos Nuevo Mexicanos, tell the Department of Energy nuclear science Ph.D.’s to cool their jets and figure how to manage a smaller, yet still destructive and still mutual, Mutually Assured Destruction? Or ask our companions in Los Alamos to stir the foul brew that poisons cell growth?
Oh — answer to the historic journey of the wild dogs. The band is led by three sisters, who overcame the threat of extinction and will now mate and separate into three bands in the better, new habitat.