September 28, 2015 5:39 AM

For the stupid will always be...and always have been...among us

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

  • Isaac Asimov

I have had so many conversations or email exchanges with students in the last few years wherein I anger them by indicating that simply saying, “This is my opinion” does not preclude a connected statement from being dead wrong. It still baffles me that some feel those four words somehow give them carte blanche to spout batshit oratory or prose. And it really scares me that some of those students think education that challenges their ideas is equivalent to an attack on their beliefs.

  • Mick Cullen

Anyone who’s ever argued with anyone on the Internet about anything of import understands the statements above. I’m constantly astonished by the smug, self-absorbed arrogance of those who decide they want to argue with me, when the sum total of their argument is “That’s my opinion”…as if that’s supposed to have value and mean something. All an opinion is a collection of ideas on a subject. An opinion need not be subjected to any sort of test to gauge reasonability or accuracy; it need not have any basis in reality at all. In fact, a good portion of what I run across goes something like this:

  1. Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foe © decides that I’m an idiot.
  2. The aforementioned Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foe ©- evidently lacking sufficient evidence to cobble together even a rudimentary fact-based argument, decides to bury me in an avalanche of words.
  3. To make their point even more solid (to them, at least), the Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foe © comes to the realization that a really GREAT way to convince me of his moral and intellectual superiority is to throw a couple of cheap, personal insults and indulge into the mix in a truly epic display of smug arrogance.
  4. The Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foe © smiles contentedly, hits ENTER, leans back and exhales, allowing the thrill of victory and the knowledge their foe has been well and thoroughly vanquished to wash over them like an orgasm. Ah, Victory; thou art sweet!

If it weren’t for self-delusion, these miscreants would have no delusion at all.

On occasion, I’ll (for reasons I can’t fully explain) try to engage one of these trolls in the hope that we might have a reasoned, civil exchange of ideas. Invariably, I end up feeling as if someone’s dog vomited on my shoes. I feel stupid for having for even a moment entertained the hope that ideas could be discussed and exchanged like rational humanoids, and I learn all over again that a good chunk of the human race cares not at all about inconvenient things like truth, evidence, and logic. Why would you when bombast, cheap personal insults, and burying your adversary in an avalanche of meaningless words is SO much easier?

And you wonder why I fear for the future of our idiocracy republic….

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on September 28, 2015 5:39 AM.

American Idiocracy: Same as it ever was was the previous entry in this blog.

Suffering is never a problem when someone else is doing it is the next entry in this blog.

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