Immune

Cleverer than the Word

I am a grumpy old man. I am. That much I concede. But having observed my fellow humans closely over a lifetime, noting such extraordinary talents as well as such disappointing shortcomings, I can’t help but think there’s more stupidity in the world today than ever before. I am tired, exhausted from being surrounded by a general lack of common sense.

My fatigue is real — I’m not going to pretend otherwise. And to say I am surrounded by folly is also to place myself outside of that. On relatively dry ground, watching others wade into the shallows. And the first thing I notice when I look hard at my own irritation is how much it wants that ground and yet how little it has done to earn it. So let me try to say what I actually see before the word ‘stupidity’ does my thinking for me.

On a daily basis I see at least four kinds of foolishness, and they don’t resemble each other. There’s academic prose that has sealed itself inside a contorted vocabulary no outsider can enter — paragraph after paragraph in which every term defers to another term, and the whole abstract creation turns out to be for nothing. There’s the conspiracist, for whom every fact is already accounted for, and who greets any objection as further proof, because in that architecture an objection is exactly what the hidden hand would orchestrate. There’s the man with such resolute convictions that he’s never once encountered a sentence that changed him, a person who experiences any disagreement as an affront to be repelled.

And there’s the one who looks like none of these, because he has agreed with all of you in advance. Raise an objection, and he grants it — grants everything, gladly. Who is to say? It’s all a matter of perspective. Every frame is a frame, every certainty just someone’s opinion dressed up, and he says this with the open hands of a man holding nothing back. He seems the most reachable person you will meet. He is the most sealed. The others let you see what you were pushing against. He has removed the one thing any disagreement needs – that some claims are more true than others, that there’s a standard outside the two of you. Take that away, and your objection has nothing to land against. It isn’t refused. It is agreed to and dissolved. You can’t correct a man for whom nothing can be wrong, and he calls this humility.

The reflex, when you have four specimens, is to find the genus. To ask what they have in common, name the root, and pull it. I had the question half-formed – what is stupidity, underneath – before I caught what I was doing.

Because that reflex is the conspiracist’s. Exactly his. The hunger for the single cause beneath the surface, the conviction that the mess resolves, if you are only clever enough, into one clean mechanism you can hold in your hand. I went looking for the cellar under the house and very nearly missed that wanting-the-cellar was the fourth specimen on the table, and it was mine. How stupid!

There is no cellar. That’s what I kept refusing to accept, and my refusal is the most instructive part of this whole exercise. The four forms are not four faces of one condition. They are four different ways of arriving at the same destination, which is not stupidity at all in the ordinary sense. Several of these people are formidably intelligent. What they share is not a deficit. It is an achievement. Each has built, by entirely different means, a structure that can’t be corrected.

There’s a harder question I am not answering here — why, just now, there should be so many of us like this and who is served by it. That’s a different essay. I have deliberately written the one that looks inward, at the single mind, and not the one that asks who profits from a crowd of them – and the choice to look the other way is its own kind of refusal.

Thinking — the real kind, the kind that can be wrong — is not a solo act performed inside your skull. It needs friction: contact with a world that pushes back. You think something; you set it against a part of the world that refuses to bend, and it either holds, or it changes, or it breaks. Take the resistance away, and what remains can resemble thought; it can even sound like thought while having quietly stopped being thought at all. Nothing was tested. Nothing pushed back. And what never meets resistance never changes — it just repeats.

The academic has engineered the resistance out by sealing the language. Inside the seal, every claim is supported, because every claim is supported by another claim phrased in the same private dialect, and nothing from outside — no plain question, no ordinary instance — can get in far enough to apply pressure. The barriers are not there to keep meaning in. They are there to keep the world out. And it works. That’s the terrible part. It works beautifully.

The conspiracist has done something far stranger but more elegant. He has not sealed the frame against resistance; he has wired the resistance to feed it. Push, and the frame grows stronger, because the push is what a frame like that predicts and consumes. There’s no fact you can bring for which the architecture has not already assigned a place, in advance, as enemy testimony. You can’t get under it because it has already been under you. To argue is to confirm.

The opinionated man has reached for the cheapest defence and the most common one, and for that reason is the one I am least entitled to feel superior about. He has simply identified resistance with insult. Your disagreement does not reach him as a proposition that might be true. It reaches him as an attack on the self. The self defends, a defence that’s automatic and total and feels, from the inside, exactly like integrity. He is not lying when he says he is standing his ground. He genuinely cannot tell the difference between a conviction and a wound.

And then the agreeable man, the one who concedes everything, has built the most ingenious version of all because his looks from the outside like the cure for the other three. Where they harden, he softens. He has not erected walls to keep the world out, wired it to feed him, or mistaken it for an assailant. He has dissolved the ground upon which the whole contest stands — the plain idea that one account can be sounder than another. With that gone, any objection is not beaten. It’s absorbed without trace, the way water takes salt. He keeps the open manner of a man entertaining every view. But the openness is the seal, because nothing you bring can register as a correction when nothing, by his own standards, was ever in a position to be wrong.

Four architectures. No common cellar. The academic’s seal, the conspiracist’s circuit, the egotist’s wound, the relativist’s solvent — and the only thread between them is that each, by its own route, has made itself immune to correction – a place where the world can no longer get in.

Which leaves the one specimen I have not put on the table. Myself. What is the fatigue, then — the being tired of stupidity? I opened with and called the most dangerous sentence in the piece.

Honestly? It is a wall too. Smaller, better-mannered perhaps, but the same masonry. When I am tired of the people around me, I have stopped letting them get in. That’s what the tiredness is for. It’s a membrane I have grown so that I no longer have to act out the exhausting work of meeting each of them as someone who might, against all my expectations, be holding an insight I need. The fatigue spares me that. It pre-sorts everyone into the worth engaging and the not, and it does this, conveniently, before any actual engagement, which is to say it does the conspiracist’s trick in a quieter coat. It greets the disagreement as confirmation.

Here is the cleanest example I have, and it’s mine. My most profound ideas are captured in my books. Any thoughts I casually post on The Hames Report or The Virtual Activist are left to fend for themselves. I don’t read the comments — or I read them and don’t answer. I tell myself this protects the work; that argument in a comment thread costs more than it returns. What it protects is me. I have built this barrier into my practice: I send the thinking out and close the door before anything can come back through it. The reader holding this essay is, at this moment, on the far side of a door I have already quietly closed.

I don’t have a way out of this to offer you, and I have come to distrust essays that do. The ones that diagnose a sickness in four movements and prescribe its cure in the fifth are usually performing the closure they claim to oppose. What I have instead is smaller and harder to keep.

The only defence against building one of these barriers is the willingness to be reached — and you can’t manufacture that willingness by deciding you have it. You can only keep noticing where you have quietly stopped extending it. I notice it in my exhaustion. You will notice it somewhere else, wherever your own seal is smoothest and least visible to you, which is precisely where you have stopped looking, because a barrier you can see is one with which you are at least still arguing.

I began by saying I felt surrounded — I was on dry ground, others wading in. I will end by admitting that geometry was always wrong. There is no dry ground. There’s no outside. There’s only a roomful of people, most of them cleverer than the word I reached for, each of us tending a barrier we have learnt to mistake for a mind — and the only question that stays open, the one I can’t close and have stopped wanting to, is whether I will notice mine today or whether I will spend the day, as I have spent so many, being tired of yours.