How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

“True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.”

(It’s curious that the examples that come to my mind of this kind of informal membership, sustained by affection and an easy acceptance of idiosyncrasy, tend to be from children’s books—perhaps most adults no longer dare to hope for connections like these.)

“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”*13

You have to suspect that if you took this “tired hack” to a pub and bought him a pint and tried to get him to defend his position, he would have nothing to fall back on except “the familiar phrases.”

This kind of writing is dangerous because it goes beyond (mere) argumentation; it becomes immersion, method acting, dual-booting. To make your argument strong, you have to make your opponent’s argument stronger. You need sharp thinking and compelling language, but you also need close attention and deep empathy. I don’t mean to be too woo-woo about it, but truly, you need love. The overall sensibility is closer to caregiving than to punditry.

This is about the debating technique whereby you first restate your opponent's argument to their satisfaction, before making your own.

“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”

say that if you cannot imagine circumstances that would cause you to change your mind about something, then you may well be the victim of the power of sunk costs.

but perhaps what really matters is the damage this inability to code-switch does to the social fabric. It rends it.

You simply can’t thrive in a state of constant daily evaluation of the truth-conduciveness of your social world,