How does one argue with pure, abstracted irrationality?

Facts. Logic. Consistency. By definition they all fail.

Emotion? Anger, sarcasm, tears: all may help you get your points across. But the very fact that you are displaying emotion amounts to a concession to irrationality – a surrender to illogic. A realisation that you have indeed been drawn to fighting a battle on irrationality’s terrain, a battle you are doomed to lose because you just don’t and can’t and won’t think that way.

And this is the point. As we saw at Stalin’s show trials and in countless horrors thereafter, the whole point of confronting someone with imagined charges against which no rational defence is possible even in theory is to force either some sort of mental breakdown in the form of a confession, or a show of destructive defiance by the accused which indeed does prove ‘guilt’ in the terms used by the accuser.

In either case, irrationality wins – somehow the accused has had to submit, and accept implicitly or explicitly the conditions upon which the whole charade is taking place. 

Which takes us to this startling video of Pakistani actress Veena Malik being confronted on TV by accusations that her (unspecified) immoral ‘behaviour’ has betrayed Pakistan’s ideology.

Watch the fiendish cynicism of the TV interviewer and the bland indignation of the mullah who accuses her of un-Islamic behaviour. Veena fights back furiously, using every weapon she has – logic, facts, anger, tears, entreaty. 

But amidst the passion of these exchanges, she seems to know all too well that the whole point of the confrontation is not to work out whether she really has done anything wrong, but instead to attempt to compel her to submit.

To surrender to a worldview in which she no longer has the chance to live as a free woman making up her own mind, but instead has to have her mind defined only by this creepy mullah and what he represents.

And behind that is, of course, the fear that she is fighting for her very life, as followers of the mullah may simply murder her for her defiance – for the fact that she articulates and personifies a refusal to surrender, and so reveals their own weakness and self-hatred.

Appalling. And emblematic of the civilisational struggle being waged in many parts of the world, including our own.

Here’s the YouTube video. And then another one, in which someone stands up for the individual versus the collective in a formal courtroom setting:

"My terms – a man’s right to exist for his own sake"