Logic : Love is a Fallacy ( On Every Sunday )

This fascinating story with sparkling wit and dramatic dialogues could be seen  as a

pedagogical device to explain some of the logical fallacies we tend to commit in our

thinking and argumentation. A sensitive awareness of these fallacies should save us from

a lot of pointless controversies and irrational attitudes. It should also be of interest to see

the narrator trying to play the Pygmalion, and ending in a well-deserved fiasco.

Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute---I was all of these.  My brain was as powerful as dynamo, as precise as chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And ---think of it! ---I was only eighteen.

It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Burch, my room-mate t University of Minnesota. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice enough fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. To be swept up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender yourself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it---this, to me, acme of mindlessness. Not, however, to Petey.

One afternoon I found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of such distress on his face that I immediately diagnosed appendicitis. “Don’t move,” I said. “Don’t take a laxative. I’ll get a doctor.”

“Raccoon,” he mumbled thickly.

“Raccoon?” I said, pausing in my flight. “I want a raccoon coat,” he wailed.

I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental. “Why do you want a raccoon coat?”

“I should have known it,” he cried, pounding his temples. “I should have known they’d come back when the Charleston came back. Like a fool I spent all my money for textbooks, and now I can’t get a raccoon coat.”

“Can you mean,” I said incredulously, “that people are actually wearing raccoon coats again?”

“All the Big Men on Campus are wearing them. Where’ve you been?”

“In the library,” I said, naming a place not frequented by Big Men on Campus.

He leaped from the bed and paced the room. “I’ve got to have a raccoon coat,” he said passionately. “I’ve got to!”

“Petey, why? Look at it rationally. Raccoon coats are unsanitary. They shed. They smell bad. They weigh too much. They’re unsightly. They----“

“You don’t understand,” he interrupted impatiently. “It’s the thing to do. Don’t you want to be in the swim?”

“No,” I said truthfully.

“Well, I do,” he declared, “I’d give anything for a raccoon coat. Anything”

(to be continue…)

Max Schulman