Bastiat's Truth
Fallacious generalization is both a disease of the ignorant and a tool of socialists.
In my opinion, the worst thing we face is a growing pandemic of generalization in a world divorced from history. It profoundly effects the ignorant, and especially hits the willfully ignorant hard.
You can see how it spreads.
There are people who claim just because you are an American, you bear the sins of every American who came before you. For example, all white people are responsible for slavery because they are white, even if no one in their family history ever owned slaves.
Similarly, every black person is a generational victim of slavery even if they just immigrated from literally any other country and are due reparations paid by white Americans.
If you are rich, you are evil because all rich are evil.
Israel is filled with Jews, Jews are oppressors of Palestinians, therefore if you support Israel in any way, you are also an oppressor.
If you support Trump, or voted for him, you are an insurrectionist, because Trump is an insurrectionist (this is why so many people were hunted like dogs, arrested and tried for trivial "crimes" which amounted to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Generalization can be cured by knowledge and reason. Those two allow people to separate fact from fiction in a deliberate discriminatory way, to sort through a tidal wave of information to see where things are connected and where they are not.
When conservatives say we want to reform Social Security or welfare, the left claims we do not want either and prefer to allow people to starve.
In The Law, published 174 years ago, Frederic Bastiat wrote of such generalizations and who seems most prone to them:
"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."
So, thinking about Bastiat's commentary, maybe this logical fallacy is endemic to socialism because socialism depends on ignorance to survive.
You only have to look at the US educational standings in the world to see how government control has ruined it for the country. Even when we import well educated (as example the Asians) the so-called 'higher education' facilities find ways to dampen the Asian enrollment into their facility.
Our government has failed and us logical thinkers know why.
"... socialism depends on ignorance to survive." TRUTH Even the socialists know this -- perhaps why public education curriculum and standards have been so significantly diminished during the past 50 +/- years. Not much time left to counter the ignorance.