Arguing with Idiots

2020

Passionate activists are just as hard to hold an intelligent debate with as religious believers as both hold a distinct paradigm of viewing the world which makes their opinion ironclad for reasons external to conventional logic.

Thus, our only mercy is that the other party may be an intelligent and reasonable, willing to hear out our opinions in a civil manner but never be properly convinced.

What does this suggest for political discourse? Well thankfully it seems that the issue isn’t epistemic. A certain stubbornness of opinion can arise (and indeed does tend to arise) when one is passionate regarding a cause. Our best safeguard against this illogical intransigence is constant self-examination and a willingness to alter our paradigms, whether radically or via minute tweaks.

Otherwise we can only consign ourselves to a degree of radicalism, upon which we become no more effective components of political discourse than the red-faced, weedy-looking man demanding his right to fly his ancestral Confederate flag.