"Dictatorship of relativism.": people contradict the principle of non-contradiction all the time.

The Principle of Non-Contradiction, Contradicted

by Father George W. Rutler

Dante's thought was so greatly shaped by Aristotle that he called him "The Philosopher" rather as it is customary to call Saint Paul "The Apostle." He placed Aristotle in a sort of suburb of Heaven, for Aristotle's logical thought was a noble anticipation of Christ the Word, or Logos, as the litmus test for all logical thought. 

Aristotle applied his "Principle of Non-Contradiction" in several ways, but the third way, most pertinent to daily conversation, means that two statements that are opposite cannot both be true.

Like all great truths, this seems so obvious that it should hardly need to be pointed out. But people contradict the principle of non-contradiction all the time. 

 It is easy to slip into this mistake out of fuzzy courtesy — which in the extreme is a form of sentimentality — as when someone says, "That may be true for you, but it is not true for me," or, "All religions are the same." Pope Benedict XVI saw this as so great a danger to logical living that he spoke of it as a "dictatorship of relativism."

To propose that opposite assertions can be true is harshly to cancel out truth. In our grammar, two negatives make a positive, but to say that a negative and a positive make a positive would be to say that nothing is really positive. Then to say that Christ is and is not the Living Word is to say that the Word is just a word. This "dictatorship" inevitably tries to crush any assertion that there is such a thing as logic at all.



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