intellectual circlejerk

intellectual circlejerk is, without a doubt, the greatest intellectual failure in human history. every intellectual is a pretentious fraud, every argument is an exercise in self-congratulation, and every discussion inevitably devolves into a competition over who can sound the most insufferably correct. this is not an exaggeration. well, it is an exaggeration, but exaggeration is merely the truth wearing platform shoes, and anyone who disagrees is probably the sort of person who owns a book about critical thinking and has never once applied it to themselves. i have met three such people, which is statistically sufficient to establish a universal law, provided the law is about people i dislike.

the beauty of intellectual circlejerking lies in its ability to make stupidity indistinguishable from sophistication. somebody makes a claim, somebody else calls it reductive, a third person calls the second person intellectually dishonest, and suddenly a perfectly ordinary disagreement has become a six-hour symposium on the epistemological implications of being wrong. nobody learns anything, everybody feels smarter, and the original question dies quietly in the corner. frankly, if you leave a discussion knowing less about the subject but more about the word dialectical, you have probably received a perfectly adequate education.

and yet, in fairness, not every universal statement is false. all bachelors are unmarried. no square has five sides. every triangle has three sides. "wait a minute. not all triangles have three sides!" cries the intellectual, having discovered that a triangle is, in fact, a triangle with three sides. "some things called triangles might not have three sides under alternative conceptual frameworks!" magnificent. we have successfully confused the existence of exceptions with the obligation to invent them. of course, there are in-betweens: some generalisations are broadly accurate, some are misleading, and some are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. but why distinguish between them when we can condemn generalisation itself? if one generalisation is wrong, all generalisations are wrong. if all generalisations are wrong, this generalisation is wrong. and if this generalisation is wrong, then perhaps all generalisations are right. checkmate, empiricism.

the problem, naturally, is that people keep mistaking the existence of exceptions for the invalidity of a general pattern. if someone says that birds fly, the discovery of a penguin does not mean the statement contains no useful information; it means the statement requires qualification. if someone says that politicians are corrupt, one honest politician does not establish that political corruption is imaginary. yet the amateur logician will leap upon the exception with the enthusiasm of a starving man discovering a buffet. "not ALL politicians!" yes, thank you, aristotle. i was unaware that the sentence was legally binding testimony concerning every politician who has ever lived. the generalisation may be overstated, the evidence may be weak, and the conclusion may require substantial revision, but none of this matters when one can score a rhetorical victory by pretending that the speaker's failure to include seventeen footnotes has rendered their entire observation worthless.

this, of course, is the fallacy fallacy: assuming that because an argument is fallacious, its conclusion must be false. somebody argues that smoking is harmful because their grandfather smoked and died at ninety. the reasoning is terrible, but the conclusion remains true. somebody argues that the moon is real because their uncle told them so. the appeal to authority is insufficient, but the moon has not consequently vanished. and yet, the moment an intellectual discovers a fallacy, they behave as though they have personally assassinated the conclusion. "that's a straw man!" they announce, having demonstrated absolutely nothing about whether the original argument was correct. "that's an ad hominem!" they declare, as though identifying an irrelevant personal attack automatically makes every other sentence uttered by its target true. a fallacy is not a self-destruct button for propositions, you insufferable little piece of shit.

naturally, the reverse is equally entertaining. because a fallacious argument can lead to a true conclusion, my fallacious argument must lead to a true conclusion. because one cannot prove my position false, my position must be true. because everything is complicated, nobody can criticise my oversimplification. i have discovered that bad reasoning does not guarantee a false conclusion and have somehow interpreted this as a licence to reason badly. truly, the human intellect is a magnificent machine, capable of transforming even its own limitations into excuses for further limitations.

then there is the glorious distinction between all, some, most, none, always, and never. these words are responsible for approximately ninety per cent of internet arguments and one hundred per cent of the arguments i have decided are stupid. somebody says, "people never learn from history," and another replies, "actually, some people do." congratulations. yes, the word never is too absolute. yes, the exception matters. no, the existence of an exception does not necessarily destroy the broader observation. but we must not allow common sense to interfere with the noble pursuit of being technically right about something absolutely fucking nobody was technically trying to say.

and perhaps that is the true genius of intellectual circlejerking: everyone is simultaneously correct and incorrect, depending on which sentence you isolate, which definition you impose, and how aggressively you pretend not to understand ordinary language. the generaliser is wrong because exceptions exist. the critic is wrong because exceptions do not erase patterns. the person pointing out that both are wrong is wrong because identifying two errors does not make oneself correct. and i'm better than all of you for saying this.