My announcement yesterday that my Facebook page would no longer be a free speech zone has created some unintended confusion. This should have come as no surprise to me, since basically everything about my Facebook-based free speech experiment has been just one disappointing, confusing surprise after another.
I truly had no idea there were so many ignorant, hateful, deluded people out there, people without an ounce of self-doubt, people wholly lacking in critical-thinking skills, people whose every action is motivated by emotion, self-aggrandizement and grotesque rationalization.
For more than two years, hardly a day has gone by when my page hasn’t been polluted by illogical, untrue, unfounded, warped and – most of all – pointless word vomit. At first, I naively interpreted this as ‘debate’ and an opportunity to share FACT-BASED opinions in a public forum or perhaps even enlighten with straightforward, unadorned FACTS.
In my whole life I have never been more wrong about anything.
To be clear, I’m no rookie at this format. I grew up in a debate-friendly – one might say debate-mandatory – environment. I attended law school (well, for a couple of years!). I was a newspaper columnist for 10 years and regularly wrote about politics. And, as one of the few vocal non-knee-jerk conservatives in this area, I have way more experience than most at engaging in civil discourse with people with whom I radically differ on politics, religion and more. If I were uncomfortable with or unskilled at friendly (or even unfriendly) debate, it would have been painfully obvious years ago. Hell, I probably would have been shot by someone by now.
Continuing, I do not lack a respect for others’ FACT-BASED opinions. I do, however, know the difference between a fact and an opinion, an awareness that, apparently, is not shared by everyone. In fact, of all the surprises this experiment has produced, none has been more surprising than the wild-eyed passion and blind faith with which so many people cling to their opinions in the face of irrefutable conflicting facts. It is truly mind-blowing to witness the mental and rhetorical contortions that seemingly sane people will go through to keep from simply acknowledging that what they are saying is incorrect, that what they think has no basis in fact or reason, or that their belief is simply and only that: a belief.
Getting back to the Facebook ‘debate’ issue itself, there seems to have developed a widely – and wrongly – held notion that I, personally, have some obligation to treat participants according to an unwritten code of fairness. Fuck that. It is neither my inclination nor my responsibility to indulge, much less reward, lunatics or liars. It is an insult to the people with whom I have respectful disagreements to treat lunatics and liars the same way I treat them. It’s not my job to raise you or teach you. If you want to talk like a fool in public, then I’m going to call you a fool in public.
I have no idea where the sense of coddled entitlement comes from that convinces people that the words that fall out of their mouths are somehow sacred and unassailable, but it’s truly disconnected from reality. Based upon the factors that these people tend to have in common – most notably geography - I can only imagine it’s a Galapagos Island-type by-product of living too long (perhaps forever) in a culturally incestuous environment.
This intellectual in-breeding has, apparently, only been made worse by the 24/7 brainwashing coming from certain media outlets. Combined with the nauseating ease with which ANYONE can recycle and regurgitate what they’ve been fed, the end result is an overwhelming, ever-rising tidal wave of fucking nonsense like nothing I have ever seen or could ever imagine.
The end result of trying to compete – or even cope – with this crush of crap has been a tangible loss of my own intellectual identity. I do not want to be an ideologue – and I don’t believe that I am – but, to insert a random music metaphor, it’s damn hard to sing on pitch when you have to scream just to hear yourself over the noise.
Hence the announcement.
I still want to talk about the things that matter, the things we disagree on. I just don’t want to run an asylum. Or even live near one. I welcome debate. I respect others’ opinions. But only if (a) they have some basis in reality and (b) if the opinion-holder also understands that it’s only an opinion.
Hope this clears things up. See you around the neighborhood.
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