From Chapter 7, Getting Rid of Your Logical Cognitive Distortions, Waking Up
Dogmatism is one of the most basic and primitive of logical fallacies because it doesn’t even pretend to be rational. The speaker is so sure of his or her certainty and truth that it is offensive and beneath them to even appeal to rationality. There is an obvious and evident disdain for logic, reason and causation because they are beneath the level of trans-rational truth that the speaker discloses.
This form of irrationality remains remarkably prevalent and current in an increasingly skeptical world that expects proof, reasons and knows how to fact-check. The reason why is still so widely used is because dogmatism cannot be refuted since it never claims to be rational or logical in the first place.
Anything that validates or justifies itself on the basis of some metaphysical reality or entity, like God, or some faculty that cannot be measured, such as intuition, a hunch, luck, fate, the heart, psychism or spirituality, takes upon itself the burden of proof to show how and why it is not dogmatic.
A simple way to determine if a statement is dogmatic is by observing the response to any request for proof or validation. It will typically be an appeal to the authority of one’s own “inner voice,” to God, a psychic, or to scripture, all sources which are themselves dogmatic, in that they do not base their truth on reason or logic. If the validity of these sources is questioned, the response is generally a form of anger, indicating a sense of violation and personalization, a fundamental emotional cognitive distortion.
The reason why Integral Deep Listening (IDL) teaches logical fallacies is because thinking rationally is a pre-requisite to development beyond the rational. Trans-rational development transcends and includes the rational, which means that learning how to think straight and recognize when others aren’t, is a “gateway drug” to stable higher levels of development.
