Empirical and historical error emerges in a bloody way when false materialist premises are imposed on the invisible reality of nature. The argument of those who rule that a patient does not suffer from a spiritual disorder or a moral error because their electroencephalographic tracing looks perfectly uniform constitutes a medical and philosophical nonsense; It is a fallacy as crude as stating that the immortal soul does not exist because the hospital surgeons have never removed it or visualized it under the scalpel on the autopsy table. When this inductive leap is transported to the criminal or ideological sphere, it becomes the fierce Fallacy ad Ignorantiam, where the inquisitor perversely reverses the evidentiary burden by exclaiming: "There is no documentary evidence in our archives that you do not belong to the revolutionary conspiracy; therefore, as long as you do not reliably prove your innocence, this court will consider you guilty." The logical impossibility of demonstrating the indefinite negative fact is exploited to establish a sentence based on a vacuum.

We now address one of the mirages of cognitive dissonance most exploited in journalism and in worldly disputes: the Recourse to Tu Quoque, a Latin expression that cries out "And you too", constituting a stinging modality of the ad hominem fallacy in which the validity of objective reasoning is rejected alleging that the life, conduct or past of the issuer incurs the same transgression that his argument condemns. Our editorial body, jealous of Thomistic hermeneutics, demarcates here with mathematical accuracy the two territories of this resource: its legitimate use to demolish false moral pedestals and its sophistic use to silence necessary truths.

In the order of public leadership and political exemplarity, the use of Tu Quoque is fully legal when the speaker's argument is not based on empirical evidence or logical deductions, but purely on his supposed moral authority and the demand that he be imitated as a model of citizen virtue. If a dissolute legislator demands fiscal sacrifices from the working class, preaching the austerity of the State while hiding ill-gotten assets in foreign courts, or if an ecological ideologue imposes energy deprivation on the people while squandering resources on private opulence, the citizen is empowered by reason and honor to pulverize his preaching by unmasking his hypocrisy; For, as the Roman Cicero taught, there is nothing more intolerable in the republic than to demand from the governed a moral account of life that the ruler is incapable of rendering in his own home.

On the contrary, Tu Quoque degenerates into a dialectical heresy when it is used to ignore or reject intrinsically true technical, scientific, ethical or medical reasoning for the sole reason that its spokesperson is a fragile and inconsequential man. If a doctor suffering from tobacco addiction warns his patient with pathological documents about the strict causal relationship between nicotine and lung carcinoma, the patient will dismiss the warning by exclaiming "And why don't you quit smoking first?" makes a suicidal logical error. The physician's personal hypocrisy constitutes a serious defect in his moral will, but it absolutely lacks the power to alter the geometric or biological validity of the argument stated. Our Lord Jesus Christ forever established the sovereign canon of this discernment in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew (23:2-3) when instructing the people in relation to the scribes and Pharisees sitting in the seat of Moses: "Do and keep what they tell you, but do not imitate their works, because they say and do not do." The Truth remains incorrupt and obligatory even if it springs from stained lips; Debating the conduct of the narrator instead of the logical weight of the story represents a vile red herring designed to perpetuate one's own sin by sheltering in the shadows of another's sin.