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Straw Man

I learned of the straw man while taking a class titled "Economic History of the United States" in college. A straw man is a type of fallacy in an argument. Specifically, a straw man is an argument leveled against another argument that no one ever made. For example, I could fight back against the claim that our culture is losing its innocence when, in fact, no one is making such a claim; or I could lament the argument that we should eliminate public speaking courses in college while no one is advocating that we get rid of these courses to begin with.

While this is a very real fallacy in the academic world, it is no less significant in our daily thinking. I believe its form is a little different, though (though maybe you will call this argument a straw man, too). Our straw men can be arguments, yes; but they can also be problems or fears that are both unnecessary and created entirely by us. Take, for example, the sense that we sometimes have that our problems are somehow unique, that no one could understand them because no one has experienced them the way that we have. Such a belief may lead the person thinking it to avoid discussing it with others, for fear that others may not understand or may even become judgmental.

Said explicitly like this, the argument perhaps sounds illogical enough to be called a straw man. You might be thinking, Who would believe this? It is more logical to believe that we think this way, though, if you consider that some of our thoughts are subconscious, not explicit. If this thought fell into this more subtle form of thinking, when the thought is a feeling and an intuition rather than a concrete thought, it seems more likely that the person thinking it would actually be deceived into believing it.

Importantly, this kind of fear becomes far less threatening when we realize that we are not, in fact, special in experiencing it. In fact, it is when we begin to discuss our fears with others that we learn that other people often feel the same way. This is why it is so important to communicate our concerns with others. By doing this, we learn that we are not the awful monsters we think we are, but are much like most everyone else. The monster, instead, is in our minds. The point is that by vocalizing our worries, we normalize them.

Such an act allows us to see the straw man for what it is, and to burn it. :-)

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