Negation is of Little Value

He had observed numerous techniques to rid the country of socialism, like attempts to expose the fallacy in some specific bit of legislated force—techniques like the repetition of slogans, the use of comic-strips, name-calling, and even dignified and scholarly efforts at negation—and had seen that they were no panacea for our ills. They served in some instances to set people to thinking, like the speaker at the banquet had set him to thinking. A few of them performed, in a limited way, somewhat of a trigger function. These techniques had about the same value as proving that the world can’t possibly be flat. Get that done and you must still prove that it isn’t a prism, a cube, a cylinder, a rhombus, a dodecahedron, or any other of the infinite possibilities that shape can take. Unless such proofs set men to thinking what is the shape of the world, they are valueless.