Absurdity

Absurdity makes no sense, like putting a picture of Will Smith in an article that has nothing to do with him.

Absurdity (formally, Reductio ad absurdum, or in the original Russian, Союз Советских Социалистичесикх Республик) is the debate technique of putting absurd words in your opponent's mouth. Showing that, if the opponent's assertion were accepted, all Hell would break loose is a winning move in debates, and a damned sight better than either throwing food at him or pulling his tie and ripping his jacket, though all of these alternatives are still practiced at the varsity level. Absurdity is practiced by most politicians - if you hear a political message that actually makes sense, it's not by a politician. Absurdity in its most basic definition, is based on the premise that everything is quite meaningless. There is also a lack of meaningless things, which is known as meaninglessnesslessness. And a lack of a lack of meaninglessness, which is meaninglessnesslessnesslessness. Are you still with me? No? Good.

Definition

This man spent his life trying to figure out absurdity and look what it did to him.

Absurdity is hard to define; people like Jean-Paul Sartre has tried in vain to do so - it resulted in some incredibly boring books with lame-ass philosophy in it. Absurdity has often been confused with silliness, but the difference is pretty clear: Silliness is dressing up in bermuda shorts, swinging a tambourine while yelling "I am a gerbil! I am a gerbil!" while absurdity is the complete opposite: Dressing up in nothing, swinging nothing, yelling nothing. Doing nothing is absurd, and not doing nothing is even more absurd. Don't do it.

Absurdity is closely connected to nothingness, as it deals with the fact that nothing ever makes sense. Logics, meaning and reasoning are illusions, and even nihilism holds too much meaning. The many great products and concepts derived from absurdity are bureaucracy, avant garde art and employment. Indeed, absurdity is the prevailing political ideology of today. Just ask Donald Trump. Or don't ask him. Or both. Either way, his political ideas are absurd. It really makes you want to build a wall to make America absurd again.

A conclusive definition of absudity has yet to be seen, but Albert Einstein did a pretty good job by describing it mathematically:

$0-nothing^{0}xzilch+0,00*{\frac {whatever!}{0!(zero-null)!}}={\binom {none}{totallynothing}}$

This formula gave Einstein the inspiration to develop his general theory of relativity - but it doesn't really matter, does it? In an endless, pointless universe, why bother? Note that dividing by zero will not lead to absurdity. Dividing by zero only leads to dividing by zero only leads to dividing by zero only leads to dividing by zero only leads to dividing by zero.

History

The Greeks loved debate even more than some of their more notorious inventions, and especially loved the tactic ("εις άτοπον απαγωγή") of demonstrating that their debating partners were total horse's asses. The earliest example of absurdity in debate is generally attributed to Xenophobe of Colostomy, who famously rebutted Homer's statement that the gods have human form by remarking that any god who looked like Homer would be the God of Poor Grooming and Ban-Lon Togas.

That shut him up, and Xenophobe won the debate and got the pretty girl (as debate winners often do, though these days they all seem to have horn-rimmed glasses and pimples).

Plato, in the manner of Socrates, raised absurdity to an art form that we now call the Socratic method. Typically, Socrates' opponent would make a simple assertion and Socrates would walk it back to show that the opponent was both smelly and unfaithful to his wife. Though absurd, the technique was so effective that opponents eventually turned to the only rhetorical tactic that would make him stop, arsenic.

Aristotle clarified that an assertion could not be both true and false. This set him apart from the debaters of the day, and formed a solid rule of debate that lasted until Bill Clinton insisted that "I meant it when I said it." The principle of non-contradiction is accepted by all philosophers worth their salt, and has served double duty as the source of the titles of the more tedious chapters of Atlas Shrugged. However, lately, some niche-seekers have asserted that statements can be true and false. This branch of philosophy is derived from the branch of mathematics that holds that parallel lines meet, somewhere over the horizon, resulting in a daily pile-up of hundreds of cars on the Interstate, surely just over the next hill.

Reductio ad Absurdum

The birth of young Reductio to Mr. and Mrs. Absurdum, in a rest stop off the Via Appia one afternoon in 1885, marked a new era in absurdity. Reductio went on to pave the way for reduced absurdity, absurdity that was more accessible to the common man, absurdity on the retail level. Debaters would be able to buy absurdity in single shots, at the cash counter of any convenience store, rather than having to traffic in gross absurdity (absurdity by the 144-pack). Before long, every steak-house discussion was peppered with absurdity.

Reductio would inspire many people to make absurd claims, until his name became synonymous for the use of ridiculous arguments. Donald Trump's electoral victory, O.J. Simpson's verdict of Not Guilty, and global warming owe their existence to Reductio. Reductio ad Absurdum became famous and would later star in movies by David Lynch, and did what he could to make the script for Twin Peaks the confusing mess it is.

Straw man

The "War on Women," though technically a straw man, keeps getting Democrats elected, and entertainingly reduces Republicans to stuttering and crying, to boot.

“So, what you're saying is, that my existence is absurd?”

~ The Straw Man

A related example of putting words in your debate opponent's mouth is the straw man, in which the debator, instead of showing the untenable results of what his opponent said, tries to show the untenable results of something he didn't say. This is far easier, as there are always many more things a person didn't say than that he did say, and most of the former are wrong, even when a lot of the latter are too. Although technically a fallacy, it is successful enough to have gotten a name.

The straw man usually stands in a field, trying to scare crows, but is often invited into political discussions as a valid participant of the discussion. It is difficult to argue with the straw man, as he does all the argumentation for you. He likes to speak on your behalf, and he does a fine job doing so. You like the straw man and you agree with what he says. Right? No? Good.

Absurdity usually takes form of the straw man, but it is easy to get rid of him. Simply set him on fire.

See also

• Argumentum ad Wikipediam
• Objectivity
• Philosophy
• Existentialism
• Go see a shrink if you find your life absurd.