Four ways of being right:

Four basic ways of being right are discussed in this chapter. The human mind uses one or other of these ways to know that its thinking is ‘right’ enough for action or for imposing on other people.

R – 1 Emotional rightness (currant cake)

If you read political journals you will come across articles which soundly argue a particular point of view. A journal of different political flavour will just as soundly argue the opposite point of view. In each case you can follow the soundness of the argument as it moves from point to point. Now and again data is brought in to support a point. The whole thing knits together. Then quite suddenly towards the end you find that the entire argument rests on some government being said to have a moral obligation to do something or other.

The purpose of a current cake is to have currants in it. The rest of the cake is only there to keep the currants at a reasonable distance from each other. The cake acts as a sort of neutral matrix in which the currants are suspended. What really matters are the currants. The currants are the little goodies. There is no doubt about their value. They taste good and they are good. You know when you have come to a currant because the taste is unmistakable. And it would taste just as good to anyone else.

Goody-goody words are like the currants in a currant cake. There is no doubt about the goodness of such words,. Their value is inbuilt and accepted by everyone. The words have long been established as convenient ways of saying: good, right, proper, ought to be done. The response to such words is emotional because they were set up in the first place as emotion capsules. Just as the cake is there to connect up the currants so you may have a long argument complete with logic and date simply as a device to allow you to proceed decently from one goody-goody word to another in order to build up a general emotional reaction.

Such goody-goody words include:

Dignity
Honesty
Courage
Justice
Tradition
Firmness
Decisive
Flexible
Responsible

The value of the argument rests directly on the established value of such words. When you come to such a word you react to the emotional taste with which society has soaked the word. Just as the cake tastes nice because the currants taste nice, so the argument feels right because enough goody-goody words have been properly worked in. It is quite easy to test this out by pretending to say ‘boo’. You say ‘boo’ by refusing to acknowledge the taste of these goody-goody words and suddenly you find that the argument collapses. You can say ‘boo’ to historical tradition by calling it an obstacle. You can say ‘boo’ to courage by falling it foolhardiness. If you do this successfully then suddenly the thinking no longer seems right even though the logic and the data are untouched.

In addition to these positive goody-goody words that taste so nice there are other that taste as bad as soda lumps in a cake. The process, is however, just the same. You put in the bad words and then your thinking about something seems right – you find you are hating what you are supposed to hate.

Words of this type include:

Weak
Degenerate
Vacillating
Cunning
Dishonest
Opportunist
Slick
Aggressive