Talking to Stupid People: A Guide.

i really just you know i'm sure i'm
going to get some negative feedback from this and that's okay i'm not asking anybody to live my life but i'll tell you what i live my life and i'll be damned if i'll have anybody else tell me how to live it living with and confronting the stupidity of our fellow human beings is an intermittent but very important part of life no matter what your political persuasion and very often stupidity is combined with dogmatic certainty with a sense of total inerrant self-confidence whether you are left-wing right-wing or a nihilistic pragmatist somewhere in the middle like myself have you ever had a conversation with someone who insisted to you that it is a well-established fact that islam is a religion of peace and there isn't a single word about jihad in the quran this is a later corruption of their religion have you ever had a conversation of this kind with somebody if not ask yourself how you would cope with it let's add some elements of unequal worldly authority to this what if the conversation is with a colleague at work what if it's with your boss with your employer someone who has power over you what if it's not another student at your university what if you have this conversation with your professor why do these people have such dogmatic certainty yes it may be that they have read other people saying this in any text but in most cases it is just because they have the experience of saying it themselves so many times perhaps just verbally saying it to their friends and colleagues and family and having other people affirm that what they're saying is good and reasonable and true or here on the internet in typewritten form they may have made this same statement again and again again and they cultivate they develop a defiance sense of certainty in what it is they're saying the way that i was raised the way that my family taught me is that everything has a spirit so to take a life of a plant is no different than to take the life of an animal i have been in the situation of presenting a lecture about buddhist philosophy in which my expertise and my depth of experience and knowledge is demonstrated during the lecture and at the end of the lecture i got a question from somebody with a phd in the audience i believe his phd was from a university in france someone with a mainstream european education who said oh well during your lecture you said that in buddhism people believe that they go to hell after they die but that's impossible because buddhists believe in reincarnation now this is partly funny to me because this is supposedly an erudite sophisticated person with a with a phd but it's funny to me also because what came up in my lecture what i said explicitly the lecture wasn't about hell but i gave this as an example of how european misconceptions about buddhism can be so far removed from both what the ancient texts say and also what you can see very easily the modern religion still consists of to this day so the concept of hell just so you know it isn't just in the ancient text and ancient philosophy if you just go to thailand and walk around some buddhist temples you're going to see huge paintings and huge dioramas of hell so it's hard to ignore but a lot of white western modern people convince themselves that there's no concept of hell in buddhism or that this is a later corruption misconception that crept into the religion in the original buddha in the same way there are plenty of modern white western people who convinced themselves that islam is some tremendously virtuous religion and that muhammad was some tremendously virtuous religious leader but that everything wrong with islam is only a later corruption or later misconception and we shouldn't blame the religion as such now if you were to respond to this by asking in effect how do you know what you think you know you're in a very difficult position right especially when there are inequalities of authority involved very often the most fundamental question we can try to get at when coping with the stupidity of our fellow man is the origin of their ignorance in a sense the origin of their false certainty in what is they think they know is to get at the epistemology of their beliefs and to challenge that either with our own epistemology or with our nihilism about the subject the difficult part of the process is asking yourself what is the most fundamental question here what is the most fundamental problem i can i can approach so i got a sincere message in from a member of the audience who wrote saying i once heard you say paraphrasing and once again baffled and horrified by the stupidity of my fellow man it is with this feeling of horror with which i pose to you this question when i listen to people like this i feel like i'm about to have a panic attack the mental dexterity with which she so unashamedly switches between hippie spiritualist garbage and a dangerously misinterpreted evolutionary survival of the fittest mentality truly makes me cringe with pain do you feel this way when listening to such people if not why not if so what traits of character do you cultivate in order to be able to listen sympathetically and then respond to this woman in a respectful way the only option apparent to me is to scoff and sneer and pretend like it doesn't faze me at all but that might just be my maturity so from my perspective what i'm doing in my response to this youtuber is not listening sympathetically and it's not responding to her in a respectful way what i'm trying to do is ignore all of the relatively shallow sources of conflict to deal with the most fundamental the most profound conflict the most profound problem that's presented here now right up on the surface here you're looking at a pair of fake breasts it is not merely a fact that this woman has had plastic surgery to install fake breasts she is choosing to feature those fake breasts prominently in this very video and her philosophy of returning to a pre-industrial ancient traditional subsistence mode of hunting and gathering refusing to use items made in factories refuse to eat food produced in a factory this obviously is an incongruous contrast to her makeup her eyebrows her teeth but most of all her breasts and again these are fake breasts she doesn't conceal but is actively exploiting here on youtube and on instagram as part of her path to fame shall we say there's no doubt some portion of her audience a social media influencer is based on her appearance and is based on this kind of artifice and technology that is beneath her skin and very much being presented on camera now there are other things right up on the surface you could criticize the camera the computer the youtube channel did you get a good look at the the bow and arrow she's using here this isn't a traditional handmade bow the fur coats she wears she models her coats underneath she shows off herself wearing fur coats they look nothing like an 18th century fur coat these fur coats are themselves the products of modern technology and really horrible chemical treatment by the way makes it possible for us to have this kind of fur in the modern world that's not what historical or ancient fur looked like that's not what ancient bow hunting looked like there's a whole lot wrong with this if you were actually an insider in her ideology and worldview and yes of course there are strange questions about cultural appropriation and genocide and the relationship between white westerners and indigenous native americans there are a lot of questions up on the surface that could be asked and in my response i raised absolutely none of them i tried to address what is most fundamental here and my method is not to be the most sympathetic i don't really think i'm sympathizing with her quite the contrary it's not to be respectful either i don't think i'm being respectful to her but i think i am issuing i am avoiding all of those shallower sources of potential confrontation to instead confront her only on what i think is the most fundamental question what you call nature in quotation marks is just an idea in your head and something written out on a chalkboard by human hands what you call nature and what you call the creator is not something natural but something artificial in every sense of the word it is an artifice that you insist is more real than reality itself in that belief you find a sense of dignity you take pride in being a believer and that is your personal tragedy i think it is fair to say that in a society where we are surrounded by very stupid very dogmatic people most of us live our lives avoiding this kind of conflict and i think the reason why people avoid it isn't that they're shy it's that whenever they have these conflicts they let themselves get caught up in the relatively shallow relatively meaningless sources of consternation that are up on the surface they confront someone like this but they just confront them about their fake breasts or the fact that they still use saran wrap or they have nail polish or their hunting knife comes from a factory or whatever it is and you know there's a sense in which i mean those those sources of conflict they're meaningful enough that in the moment they may seem totally engrossing and totally overwhelming you may not perceive yourself as having a meaningless fight about nothing at all but afterwards as time goes on you start to live a life in which you are more and more a reckless more and more withdrawn from the society of your fellow human beings because your fellow human beings are 99 of them deeply committed to ideologies that are just as incoherent just as stupid and in many cases actually much more dangerous have you ever been in the situation of debating with a family member whether or not they should be taking antidepressants have you ever been in the situation of debating with a family member whether or not they should be taking antidepressants during pregnancy have you ever been in the situation of debating with a family member whether or not they should be putting their child on ritalin people subscribe to beliefs that very often are contradicted by just reading the label on the medicine itself they believe that the medicine has benefits that the manufacturer the medicine doesn't claim it offers they refuse to admit that the medicine has negative side effects that even the label itself says that are very well scientifically established and that the manufacturer has admitted it has these negative side effects right people get committed to these beliefs in a manner that is really no different from religion even though they are obviously completely modern air sats belief systems made up to serve our own self-interests short term in the 21st century and it's very easy for people to instead respond in a shallow manner they may not feel or perceive it as shallow themselves not we are just attacking something about the person's motivations something about their particular misconceptions or something but the consequences of their misconceptions so it might be very easy to react to someone who says this about islam by just saying well you only think that because you read left-wing newspapers like the guardian even if that's true it's not that productive right uh you might respond to us saying oh well what you want us to do is just surrender and hand over control of the middle east to isis and other muslim fundamentalist groups now this may or may not be true of the person who died they may or may not have a political position that the american armed forces should just abandon places like afghanistan places like iraq and syria to whatever local political extremists or religious extremists might hold sway there that might or might not be and that might or might not be an implication of what they're saying so you can attack the implications you can attack their character you can very easily get caught up in things that are not so so fundamental and most of the time the more fundamental questions will bring us closer to that epistemological conceit of how do i know what i think i know and the way in which you can win the argument even with a very stupid person is to show look my perspective is better than yours because it relies on fewer assumptions fewer leaps of inference my epistemology my way of knowing what it is i think i know is better than yours even if you disagree with me on the level of values beliefs assertions political projects your vision of what the future ought to be your vision of what's wrong with the past so on and so forth the easiest thing for everyone to do the most comfortable thing for everyone to do is just to avoid these conflicts altogether but there's another approach you can take and that is to resolve that you're not going to have a shallow self-defeating contest of egos that you're not going to get trapped up on those surface issues that you're instead going to focus on the most profound the most fundamental issues so no matter how the conversation goes it's going to come to conclusions that are really of meaningful long-term value for both people engaged in the conversation and what do all these examples have in common ultimately it's epistemology ultimately it's a question of how do i know what i think i know what you think you know about this drug that you're taking during pregnancy or this drug you're giving to your teenage kid or whatever it is what you think you know is contradicted by what's written on the label so let's talk about why are you so certain like why are you angry at me why do you think you know that and turn it around because sometimes you're going to be the one who's angry sometimes you're going to be the one who's contemptuous and what's really worth discussing what's really worth debating is why do i have no respect for you in your opinion let's talk about that let's talk about why why am i dismissing what you're telling me well there are reasons you know and those are much more fundamental and much more profound than some of these things on the surface that may completely engross us and draw us into internacing pointless hostilities with any of these discussions and i do ask myself this in making youtube videos that make a lot of people uncomfortable ask yourself who is this challenging for who is this uncomfortable for and who is made comfortable by avoiding this conflict who am i making uncomfortable about this and why and as you go on in life some of your teenagers watching this this is hard to see one of the greatest evils that can befall your fellow man is simply that they get too comfortable the type of dogmatism we see whether it's any of these examples people repeating what they think they know about islam what they think they know about buddhism what they think they know about mind-altering drugs whether it's marijuana or antidepressants all right yes it's the product of living a life where they say these things again and again and have them affirmed or at least have them pass unchallenged by the other people in their lives they grow more and more certain and as years turn into decades what had once been a questioning and curious attitude in their youth becomes through sheer dent of comfort a tremendously narrow middle-aged mind [Music] maybe we can we can practice