Chapter 17
Ten Arguments that Changed the World
IN THIS CHAPTER
Seeing how the experts argue
Getting very relative with Choosy Chase the Chinese Sage
Unscrewing the secret formula for influencing people
Who says arguments don’t change anything? Here are some famous arguments that have been seriously influential. These views certainly changed the way human society developed and evolved. Yet, curiously, all the arguments are a bit dodgy. They’re not logically sound — and often not very cunning. (If you think arguments have to be logical to be useful, turn to Chapter 4 to see why life’s more complicated than that.) The good news is that you don’t have to be super-logical or mega-cunning to construct a great argument.
These arguments are great not because they’re brilliant and complex, but because they offer simple answers to difficult questions. In fact, you can easily pick holes in many of these arguments, but afterward enough is left standing to still be thought-provoking.
Naturally, many of the great arguments belong to philosophy, but don’t be put off by that. Plato, Marx, and their like produced arguments by the bucketload, yet these philosophers are of a quite different kind ...
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