There is a type of person in this world who will grate on my nerves long before he ever speaks, and will only exacerbate the problem when he does open his mouth. Over time, I’ve come to recognize this almost visceral reaction to some people as a some kind of basic human instinct. Now, I’m not one to speak on my personal feelings very often. Truly, most of the time folks would be understandably bored by such. And if SJWs are lurking about, ready to pounce on admissions of racism/sexism/whatever, you are likely to be disappointed, as most (but not all) of such individuals are actually white guys.
Yeah. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, SJWs.
If I can describe the feeling with a metaphor, it would be like that moment you walk into a car dealership, and the salesmen lurking near entrance are circling, like a pack of vultures waiting to pounce upon hapless, vulnerable prey should it show any sign of fatigue or weakness. They have lemons, and you’re a mark. You get a feeling in the pit of your stomach, your gut telling you that these people are wrong, somehow. That they are not to be trusted, and indeed, their every action much be carefully watched and calculated against.
Over the years, I’ve recognized that some folks engender this automatic response outside of car dealerships. You don’t want to deal with them in any way, but circumstances may be such that you feel the need. Perhaps that are gatekeepers, and you must get through the gate. Or perhaps they control personal fiefs that intrude on yours in some fashion. Whatever. The point is, you have to deal with them.
I’m sure most people have felt this one way or another. What I’m about to explain is why. Many of my readers, often wiser folks than I, may already know this. But for some, this may be new.
The type of person I’m talking about is the one who thinks he is better than you. No, not better in some specific capacity. The pilot may justly say “I’m a better pilot than you.” Sure. I don’t know how to fly, at least not outside of a simulator, anyway. The pilot flies better than I do, because I do not fly at all. Nor am I talking about the person who has a higher IQ, or can bench press more weight, or is a better basketball player. Again, folks in each circumstance can justly say they are better than me at those things. Whatever. The specifics are immaterial here.
I’m talking about the man who thinks he is better than you in general.
The reason this is so insidious, is that every action by such an individual is designed to elevate himself above you in general. Your opinions are irrelevant to him, because he considers himself better in all things. So if you talk to him, the response invariably becomes an exercise in establishing his authority over you. After all, if you are better than another, should you not rule over him? This has been the excuse of tyrants since the dawn of time.
Folks may remember an old troll here named Merkur. And while I don’t want to delve too much into him, since he is no longer here to defend himself, he did demonstrate this sort of air. At one point, he explained that I should read a book called You Are Not So Smart. Now, normally a book recommendation wouldn’t be untoward. But this “recommendation” occurred during a debate in which Merkur was attempting to convince me that I was biased (something I never denied — all humans are biased, I am human, QED), while taking a position of authority on the matter of cognitive biases.
In simple terms, rather than address the central point of my arguments about Islam and Weaponized Empathy, he would nitpick minor points, then accuse me of being biased, more biased, in fact, than him. Then he chose to recommend said book. Do you see it? His implication was I am smarter than you. Not “I know more about psychology than you” which I would have likely accepted. Not even “I know more about specific cognitive biases than you,” which again would have specificity and plausibility. It’s not my field of education, for sure.
The implication was you are biased, I am smarter than you, therefore I can disregard your conclusions. It’s a slippery form of Ad Hominem, because it distracts from the original conclusions. At that point, we were no longer talking about Weaponized Empathy, or the role of Islam in terror attacks. We were, instead, talking about how biased one Dystopic was (hint: I’m sure I’m pretty damned biased – whether I’m wrong, however, is a different matter altogether).
Of course, when pressed, Merkur denied this. He just wanted to educate me about specific cognitive biases, you see. It wasn’t a personal attack. He just happened to do this in a thread about Islam, and it just happened to derail the original topic, and he just happened to avoid the original point, except to call attention to minor nitpicks.
Folks may wonder why I brought up Merkur again, since he has kept to his word and not returned. The reason is that I encountered the same behavior from Tom Nichols today. He posted a link to the following article: Working-class whites can’t handle their status as ‘the new minority’. The article is full of some rather pointed dreck about Trump supporters, blue collar white folks, and racism. Nothing we haven’t seen before from a dozen other outlets since Trump became a political force.
Now, Tom has spent a lot of time since beginning the writing and promoting of his book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters more or less insulting common folks. In our last Twitter flame war, he indicated that most Americans shouldn’t be informed by the government about the non-classified details surrounding terrorist attacks, even after the fact, because he thought most Americans were too stupid to read maps.
He then compared trust in the alphabet agencies to trusting pilots who fly airliners. Why, he thought, if people trust airline pilots do they not trust government intelligence agencies? This was evidence that the common man was an idiot. The fallacy in this line of thinking should be pretty obvious to most of my readers. It is rather easy for a man to know whether or not airline pilots are generally reliable. Despite big crashes hitting the airwaves, from time-to-time, you are generally safer in an airliner, than in your own car. The general reliability of airline pilots is data that is readily available to us. Not so much with the alphabet agencies. Indeed, we catch them in egregious lies and screw ups with frightening regularity. Consequences from their geopolitical screw ups can certainly dwarf a mere airline accident.
But my beef with Tom wasn’t just over this issue. It’s an issue that folks might reasonably sit down and chat about, because God knows there are some dumb voters out there (just look at all this Antifa business right now). What bothered me was the original tweet to him was respectful and reasoned, and his response was basically you and everyone like you is stupid, and I’m smart! This is a variation of I’m better than you. No, not “I’m more educated than most on foreign policy matters”. It was I’m better than a sizable fraction of America.
At the time, this attitude was mildly irritating, but I ignored it. We got into it again, and then again today. Now, today, I was definitely not respectful and gracious to him. My patience with him has worn thin. I was downright hostile, and that came through well enough in my tweet to him. I was fully expecting another I’m smarter than everybody else tactic from him. What I got was arguably worse. Instead, he accused me of not reading the article I was responding to, or even knowing who the author was.
This is about as dishonest and cowardly a tactic as a man might use. On the internet, his statement was unfalsifiable. There was no way I could prove to him that his statement was wrong. But we also both knew it was a total lie, invented for precisely this purpose. He debates exactly like a Progressive would. This I recognized immediately as an Ad Hominem, similar to what Merkur did, but without the modicum of decency that Merkur at least attempted to display. He didn’t want to talk about the article in question, he wanted to shift the argument away from it. And meanwhile, he chose to use an exceptionally ridiculous version of I’m better than you. The implication being that other people don’t read articles, or understand them, and so he doesn’t have to defend his posting of this drivel on his own Twitter feed.
Then, when challenged on that, he explained that it wasn’t an Ad Hominem, because he was just innocently trying to teach me about the importance of reading articles. Cue a back and forth discussion with some of his followers about the definition of Ad Hominem, and why I should have posted links to the definition in my reply to Tom (does anybody on Twitter even do that?).
Yeah, pull the other one.
This is a form of passive-aggressive behavior, hidden behind airs of self-righteousness and some kind of superiority complex. Tom is invested in himself as the smartest guy in the room, but his argument essentially boils down to I’m smarter than everybody else, so I’m automatically right. No defense of his positions are necessary, unless you prove yourself worthy (and nobody is worthy, unless they agree with him).
And what I’ve come to realize, is that these individuals produce a natural desire in most humans to punch the smug asshole in the face. Perhaps this is nature’s way of informing the individual that, like Merkur’s book recommendation, You Are Not So Smart. A punch in the face can do that well enough sometimes. Maybe the book is good (and I may very well read it – I am morbidly curious), but cold, hard reality is often better. God knows it’s happened to me more than once.
That feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when these folks are around? That’s your body saying “this guy is an ass, and it might be better if you just punched him in the face, but if that isn’t an option for whatever, well just be careful.” After all, he could be a salesman trying to sell you a lemon, or Tom Nichols trying to establish himself as the wisest technocrat in the universe. As far as we have come from the elementary playground, the argument still essentially boils down to the same thing a pair of first graders might say to one another: I’m better than you! Neener Neener!
Socrates would know him for the fool.
As an aside, I’d really like to see a debate between Nicholas Taleb and Tom Nichols. For Taleb has warned us repeatedly about intellectual idiocy, and Tom is a proponent of why the intellectuals must be trusted. The two positions are diametrically opposed. Of course, there might be a worldwide shortage of popcorn should such an event come to pass.
In the meantime, Merkur might say it’s bias, and he’s really not wrong, but sometimes, biased or not, your gut knows exactly what kind of person you’re dealing with. God, and countless generations of natural selection, have granted us a finely-honed sense for people who are trying to bullshit us. Often times, it’s worth listening to.
I’ve seen my IQ score, and I am smarter than most of the country. That and $1 gets me a cheeseburger at McDonald’s. As I’ve said before, if intelligence were Superbowl tickets, I’d get a stadium ticket, and most of the country would have to watch it at home on TV. But inside the stadium, I’d be in the nosebleed seats near the end zone. Percentages matter, but it’s a big country, and a bigger world. Also, nobody in that stadium, not even the guy who rated 50-yard-line field seats, is smarter than everybody else inside or out, combined.
The two fatal flaws to Nichols’ nonsense (and it is nonsense) are scope, and experience.
Nichols is an ignorant idiot for thinking smarter = omniscient.
Simply put, Mt. Everest is over 30,000 feet taller than the bottom of Death Valley, but standing on the Moon with just the naked eye to observe the two, the difference between them doesn’t mean a helluva lot.
He thinks being slightly smarter than most people (if he even is) means infallibly smart.
Not. Even. Close.
The second flaw is experiential. I could get a bulldozer to dredge up all the examples that prove that smart people aren’t, but I’ll default to an easy one.
Tell Nichols he needs to read David Halberstam’s The Best And The Brightest; it’s a catalog of how JFK’s Cabinet, the Brightest Guys In Any Room, managed to blunder the country into the ten-year catastrophic geopolitical mistake called the Viet Nam War.
(To be fair, SecDef MacNamara his ownself was another Nichols: positive he knew more than a Pentagon full of generals and admirals who’d won WWII and fought China to a draw in Korea with one hand tied behind their back. So Mac figured he could streamline the war, and do it on the cheap. We know how that worked out, but then again, this was the guy whose last genius move as head of Ford Motors was the Edsel, and who left DoD after JFK/LBJ to go on to head the World Bank, and make loans to dozens of poorer countries they could never repay, which they all defaulted on. Sort of like a worldwide financial bubble, and all by That Guy. Genius, in action.)
That should make the point, without having to talk about how “all the finest scientific minds” were sure Galileo had that whole earth-moving-around-the-sun thing backwards; the geniuses who were sure that trains were ridiculous, because “the human body would ignite from air friction at 60 MPH”, the ones sure we’d never fly, never break the sound barrier, never fly to the Moon, positive heavier-than-air dirigibles were the air transportation wave of the future, or convinced that RMS Titanic was so safe it was “unsinkable”. We know how all that has turned out, too.
The sad reality for Nichols’ entire hypothesis is that most experts are wrong about most things, even in their presumed field of expertise, not only because of what they don’t know, but because they don’t know what they don’t know.
Fred Astaire’s talent report to one studio head before he started doing movies: “Older, balding. Can’t act, can’t sing, dances a little.”
Mike Piazza, given a courtesy 62nd round draft choice as a favor to his uncle, Dodger’s manager Tommy Lasorda, was the #1390th rookie player selected by MLB that year, because he “wasn’t good enough for the big leagues.”
(See if you can guess the contents of my unpublished future coffee-table book, The Experts Said.)
And that’s the difference between smarter, which some people are in a limited way, and omniscient.
There are two reason not to punch those people in the mouth, gratifying as it would be:
1) there are laws about that, and
2) it wouldn’t work because most of them have their heads jammed up what airborne troops call their fourth point of contact.
So what you really need to do is kick them in the pants, and hopefully break suction, to allow them to pull their own heads out.
Which brings us back to Reason 1.
Or another experts famous words; “Groups with guitars are on their way out, Mr. Epstein”.
Dear Dystopic,
This is why Nichols thinks so highly of himself.
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism
Note: to the best of my knowledge, the article was written by a lifelong ‘democrat.’
Between your discussions with Nichols and the article, one thing is certain:
There can be no ‘meeting of the minds’ between those who identify as stalwart progressives and, regrettably, anyone else who is not. There can be no common ground for debate and/or discorse. It’s simply impossible.
Forgive me, but something else came up of interest.
It seems we are not alone in having a profound and likely unbridgeable rift develop between the ‘urban elites’ and the rest of us.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/french-coming-apart-15125.html
This article provides substantive grounds for concluding that not just America, but all western liberal democracies are passing thru the historical phase described by Toynbee wherein the previously ‘creative’ minority of a society becomes a ‘dominant’ minority, devoid of its previous ability to contribute positively to its society and lead its growth, energy and dynamism and believing that it has an inherent right to rule.
Such a phase indicates a culture/society/civilization in deep decline – in fact, on the edge of total disintegration.
There is no way out of such a situation except to go right thru it. On the other side is the Rebirth, the ‘palingenesia’ wherein a new civilization is born from the ashes of the old, like the Phoenix being reborn, wherein this new civilization keeps whatever is still useful from the old but adds new institutions, codes and social/economic/political structures that replace the old ones that have failed.
Arthur Herzog, in his marvelous book The B.S. Factor, addresses this syndrome in a segment titled “Anything Authorities.” When I first read this article and thought of that reference, I was tempted to stop there. Fortunately, my lumber-room of a memory tossed up another nugget just in time.
It’s a cartoon I saw in the New Yorker, back when that publication was actually worth reading. Two men, both of them recognizably priests from their Roman collars, are walking down the street. One of them looks somewhat peeved at the other. The caption:
“When will you admit it, Simmons? I am holier than thou.”
The promoters of “experts uber alles” are attempting to elevate themselves to a priesthood, and their pronouncements to the level of sacred texts: never to be disputed. Since they can’t do it by burning us at the stake, they must fall back on a less potent (but not to be dismissed) weapon: contempt. The weak-minded and uncertain will often grovel before a sufficiently supercilious emission. Fortunately, the offensiveness of the ploy flicks the majority of us on the raw…which adds to the “expert’s” PR difficulties.
Though it’s not focused directly upon this syndrome, I’d like to recommend S. David Young’s little book The Rule Of Experts. While Young’s central concern is the proliferation of occupational licensing, his treatment provides the intelligent layman with arguments generally useful for coping with the pretensions of self-nominated “experts.”
Thanks for the recommendations, they will go into my reading queue.
The offensiveness of the ploy is exactly what causes the state of mind I’ve described here. As you say, it flicks the majority of us on the raw. What amazes me, then, is that so many are willing to just sit down and take it. When someone uses this tactic on me, it borders on infuriating. Given the sort of anger this engenders, why submit and grovel?
And, in any event, the self-nominated experts often overestimate their own competency. At one point, I wrote that a man ought to choose a subject that he knows very well, and perform a little thought experiment. In my case, I have spent considerable energy studying Byzantine history throughout my life. Then, go to the news media, talking heads, and self-nominated experts in this field, and see how much utter bologna they manage to spew on the subject. Multiply this possibility by all the fields you do NOT know very well. It’s certainly cause to question them.
Dystopic: Absolutely brilliant. However, you may be too patient with these “know-it-all” fools. It’s almost better to ignore their rants and condescension…….they’ll never see or respect our points. And yes, you nailed it, it’s b/c they believe fervently that they’re better than we are. The Progressive “mindset” is not flexible, not thoughtful, nor is it respectful of others’ opinions. Countless examples, here are a few:
-If (for a variety of reasons by the way) we don’t want our federal income tax dollars used for 400,000 Planned “Parenthood” abortions……..they conclude we’re anti-women’s health. And they’ll never stop to think of the several reasons we’re absolutely not.
-If (for a slew of solid reasons) we don’t want countless illegals and legal H1B entrants into our country………they conclude we’re heartless, racist, white-supremacist nationalists. And they refuse to see the reasons our country gets worse as the illegal number skyrockets.
-Because Sarah Palin went to North Dakota State (?) university and believed we COULD drill our way out of dependence on foreign oil………they said she’s a total idiot compared to the Ivy-league, smooth-talking Obama. And they didn’t even care to analyze Obama’s background, his Marxist sympathies, or his disdain for America’s (and Great Britain’s) past actions. Or his macro-economic illiteracy. They jump to their talking-point conclusions, without hesitation, every time.
And w/r/t “experts”………do they really think the ‘experts’ at the federal Dept of Educ, Energy, Commerce, Justice, FBI……are really using our tax $ wisely and achieving their respective missions ? They don’t question it.
Maybe they’ll start to scratch their collective heads when Illinois and Chicago have the inevitable economic meltdown/bankruptcy. It won’t be long, and it’s all because of the deep blueness of their govt and financial raping of the private sector. Maybe California after that. But no…….the Progressives won’t question whether their policies are disasters. Maybe some will. We can only hope.
Nice piece and excellent comments, leave it to Francis to link to interesting wordsmithing…all of it way too wordy for me though-I can lock onto these assholes in about 6 seconds and either vamoose or endure for a bit if the situation forces me to. I’m just too old now to waste any of my remaining time trying to deal with them.
I’d like to comment but had to google “Oxford Comma” so won’t.
I trust the airline pilot for one simple reason – his interests are the same as mine. To get to the destination and back on the ground alive. Can you say the same about any government agency of department.
Some further insight into the Progressive mindset:
http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/SF-restaurants-struggle-at-intersection-of-food-11093298.php
If this article is to be taken at face value, then restaurants in SF seem to believe that their leftist political beliefs and actions trump the necessity to run the business at a profit.
If this reflects the mindset of a majority of the city’s citizens, I can’t see it surviving for that much longer.
We have a phrase for people like that in my corner of the biz…
“Superiority complex hiding an inferiority complex.”
People like that are often desperately insecure. They try to mask that insecurity by pretending to be the smartest person in the room. They are usually not perceptive enough to realize that their “smarter-than-thou” act is not only not working, but is making their insecurity more obvious.
Some days, when I am dealing with people like this in a professional setting, I try to look past their incredibly aggravating attitude, and see them for what they are : a chronically insecure person fronting as hard as they can. On those days, I try to exercise charity and patience. Sometimes I even succeed at letting the better angels of my nature guide me in that direction.
Other days, when I’m not feeling as charitable, or I am dealing with them in a social setting, I have been known to use my knowledge of their insecurity as a sharp-edged weapon.
If you know what someone’s weakness is, or you know what they are desperately trying to hide, they are much easier to defeat.
Intelligence, in my opinion, is the most overrated virtue in the world. Useful sure, but highly overrated.
It is so overrated though, because it’s easy to lie about.
One can’t easily mask ugliness, shortness, fatness, or so on… although they do try. Makeup, lifts/heels, and shapewear attest to that.
Intelligence, especially online, is incredibly easy to pretend to have. One has access to a wide-range of pre-fabricated arguments at the ready. All that’s required is an attitude that suggests a witty verbal beat-down is sure to follow if one challenges this obviously superior person, i.e. leftist smugness.
Claiming status as an expert is the class version of this.
Appearing smart is important. Being credentialed, i.e. respected, is critical, and must be protected.
Islam has a neat trick regarding how to handle situations left unaddressed by the Koran and other relevant religious texts, namely that one must go to a respected religious scholar and so-called expert on the subject. How is this person determined? Why, by being so-declared by other so-called experts. The barrier of entry to expertise is studying the Koran. After that though, all you need is other Koranic experts to declare you an expert in “x” subject, about which none of them are experts.
The left does a similar thing (this type of thing is why the left actual wants more Islam, mark my words)… credentials from Harvard or “x” approved magazine or think-tank is enough to declare you an expert that must be heeded, regardless of any actual expertise.
The brutal truth is that expertise is an incredibly narrow thing, often completely unrelated to intelligence. Most people have neither the capacity nor time to become experts in much at all. There are no experts in physics… perhaps a narrow aspect of it, some tiny problem, but no broad experts. The same is true of psychology, climatology, and so on. Expertise is limited to ridiculously narrow arenas.
The interplay of competing expert-driven narratives against common-sense, trial and error, situational pressure, and so on, is what makes for human progress.
Experts matter, but not as much as they think.
They constantly try and extend their range of credibility precisely for that reason. That’s why Paul Krugman, an actual expert in a very, very narrow part of economics, rambles on about economic issues about which he is rarely better than a layman.
His credentials are established and thus his “intelligence” is even easier to overstate. That’s a hard temptation to resist, being an “expert.”
Intelligence is the old-world’s “piety.” It’s easy to fake and so every mediocre jackass on earth is tempted to try and puff himself and declare that intelligence is the only trait that matters.
Whenever I hear that… I always look for signs of intellectual fraud, and am rarely disappointed.