Everyone is Wrong, Except for You.

 

I cannot go to bed, since someone on the Internet is wrong. Yet it is not just someone; it is everyone. Nor is it any individual; few individuals I've met are ever wrong. It's rather the entire "everyone", the "they" which do not want for you, the individual, to Know. It is the Internet Itself, in fact, that seems devised exclusively for propagating error, and I fear that, as I write this, I am feeding into that same error... though, if it's dismissed contemptuously by the Internet, then I may yet correct it.

 

With some people, you encounter them and must assume that they are childhood friends. They never argue, leastwise not with one another, they are always kind to one another, speak with ease, as though they could vouch for the other's character and trust the other with one's life, where in my own experience I've been acquainted with some men five years and still was horrified by their betrayal, even more so by the fact I had not seen it coming or that I ignored the warning signs, to my own downfall. So, when I am in the company of men who can share jokes with one another in a spirit of camaraderie, I think I've stumbled on some Pygmy tribe, a relic of a more egalitarian society where all are humbled by each other's goodness and a common purpose.

 

Yet I am, of course, again, betrayed, as these men seldom even met in person, much less share a common nationality, religious creed, or set of battle wounds. Their solidarity derives not from a heartfelt, private, self-aware existence which, against all odds, finds confirmation in an Other. It is not from war, debate, a brotherhood in arms, a common trauma, or that other stuff we find in literary drama. Nay: their solidarity derives from parroting each other's platitudes, from sharing in a common condescension, from dismissing the same superstitions, excommunicating the same heretics, repeating the same party lines. It is, in short, a solidarity of insecurity, not an association of free men.

 

Yet, just as with the aforementioned horror, not at the betrayal but that I'd refused to see it coming, I share in their shame, beyond the shame they feel themselves, for all the symptoms of their herd mentality were obvious. It's in the things they mock, not what they praise, that they're exposed.

 

One principle I've held to, all my life, that's been so fundamental and so basic that I would assume that everybody held to it, that it was never stated since no one would ever question it: "Do your own research." Never would it cross my mind that such a quintessential, sacred duty would become the butt of vulgar jokes and irony. Yet that is the betrayal, and what it betrays is the façade of intellectuality (and, truly, sanity) worn by these men who act perpetually like they're college classmates who have not set foot inside a Library.

 

Betrayal to the Crowd is such that it does not just end with the conclusion of one correspondence, two, or ten. When people "sell you out" to the Police, the horror ends with the exoneration of the convict. Yet when people "sell you out" to the conformist Crowd, the horror never ends, unless the Crowd adopts, as fact, that which it hitherto denied... and, at that point, the Crowd itself becomes the traitor, as it issues no apology for having erred.

 

"Do your own research" seems a maxim so self-evident that, should a dangerous neurotic or a raving lunatic employ it in defence of his delusions, we would say, "See? Even he is not without redeeming qualities, for even he can comprehend the faintest glimmer of responsibility and common sense." We'd nod along with him and show him how to better exercise his Godsent skepticism, as we know it is the only cure, as it's the only sign of life still in the dying man who, otherwise, would be submerged in shadow.

 

What, then, does it symptomize when it is *only* the neurotic who has sense and decency enough to do due diligence, to supplement what he has heard with what he chooses to investigate, to follow up on source material, to interview dissenting viewpoints, to rise early for a journey through the rain, so as to sit outside and wait for the Librarian to open up the doors? How stupid are we, really, when the psychopath knows how to read, but we know only how to cut and paste? As Dave Chapelle said, we don't have to say that Black Lives Matter. If that much is clear, why must we say, "Do your own research"? Leastwise no one in the mainstream media would dare to challenge Dave's assertion, though it is the far less fundamental of the two.

 

An individual is never threatened by the individuality of someone else, as any individuality is such that it derives its value from its being indispensable and free. The indispensability of someone else’s individuality in fact affirms my own, while freedom makes it so that never am I so dependent on another’s point of view that I’m incapable of taking personal responsibility for my belief in it. All research is “my own”; I can’t accept as fact what others tell me if I don’t accept as fact that I choose to believe it. Even if I chose the most barbaric of asceticism – that of merely listening to doctors and conforming to curriculums and propaganda – I could not escape the charge that it was my own choice to filter out all other information. Yet if most of what I know is in my heart, immediate and inescapable, then surely there could never be a bias more depraving than to shut it out, that ever-present doubt that “something just does not feel right about this story.” At that point, what sort of man would not scout the entire world in search of confirmation for the faintest glimmer of true thought?

 

Yet it’s precisely this same pioneering spirit that, apparently, the masses fear. It is not that they are afraid of being proven wrong; they are afraid of being right, so much so that, when someone else is right, they act like crabs and, in their envy, drag their fellow down. Regardless of the point of view, the envy is the same. In truth, their attitude cares not if you’ve informed your point with all the necessary, credible citations or blind faith. A healthy skepticism can appear as blinding light or as a feeble flicker; it’s the fire which is terrifying.

 

If I wish to diagnose this illness, I can find the cause by properly appraising the pathology: it is an allergy. Remaining ignorant of trends and patterns, even the most obvious, is relatively harmless in itself. The danger lies in that same ignorance when faced with overwhelming evidence, for there must be some form of violence, however passive, in resisting any truth as well as anyone who propagates it. Caesar seals his own doom when he overlooks the warnings of the mystic to beware the Ides of March; if he decides, instead, to execute all mystics, he is a barbarian.

 

Whom do these sheepish people seek to make their enemy? They wear it on their sleeves: the “skeptics”. Furthermore, by signaling their enmity so clearly, they expose themselves to be no more than that old nemesis of skepticism: dogmatists.

 

The boorish and the brutish of these individuals resort to mockery for lack of arguments, for they cling to a feeble, false sense of security in numbers, criticizing any deviant opinion as “biased”, though they have no shortage of opinions which they themselves have never questioned, and the number of their peers and specialized authorities is even greater in its surplus. Then there are the clever ones who *know* that what they do is dogmatism, but they are so mystified by their own cleverness that they’ll defend that dogmatism with a cavalier abandon, jovially patting skeptics on the head for being diligent… and even, at times, right!! Yet even underneath this cavalier veneer there looms fanaticism, the simplistic superstition that there is some sort of “mainstream” point of view that’s “safe” from criticism, an “official story”, an abstraction representative of objectivity, untouched by all subjective bias. Which is worse? Is it the boorish fool or the fanatic who indulges in escapism?

 

In truth, there is no mainstream. Objectivity is personal; the Crowd, as Kierkegaard wrote often, is Untruth. Each one of us must take responsibility for one’s own views, though practice forces us to act as though those views alone were valid. Yet why not? What can the dogmatists do to persuade us otherwise? They cannot threaten us with confirmation, for two reasons:  One is that it’s no grim fate to be confirmed, as it’s a symptom both of progress in approximating what is Absolute, as well integration in a genuine community of individuals who took the solitary road to knowledge. Two is that all of the negativity assigned to confirmation is the solitary province of the dogmatist. It’s not the skeptic who ignores all evidence which disconfirms his views; he simply does not take such evidence to be definitive. Conversely, it’s the constant stream of platitudes, redundancies, old memes, and propaganda on the Internet that serves as evidence against one culprit: dogma. Anyone would tire of redundancy and, purely out of boredom, come to question it; when Antony tells Rome that Brutus is an “honourable man”, repeatedly, he thus persuades his countrymen that Brutus is no more than a barbarian.

 

Most often, when we question something, it’s because we know already that it’s wrong, though know not why. This doubt arises just as much from well-informed opinions and research as it does from hunches, private interests, and groupthink. The redundancy of “human rights” is only aggravated by the brutal means by which they are pursued, yet such brutality would be accepted were it not that MacIntyre criticized the concept. The redundancy of saying “feelings are not facts” is only aggravated by a psychiatric institution which dismisses its own patients as subjective, yet its episteme would hold more credibility if not for Sartre’s proof that feelings are intrinsic qualities in things themselves. The dogma that all information must be verified by specialists is challenged by the Jungians, as Jung himself defied most laws of logic in pursuit of confirmation for his theories; he’s redeemed in his successes as a therapist, which can’t be replicated and, as such, have been dismissed through envy. Jordan Peterson praised Jung by saying that he answered questions you would never think to ask. Can anyone be blamed for seeking confirmation for such questions? What good is the mass of confirmation dogmatists receive for never asking them?

 

**[({R.G.)}]**