Smoke Alarms and Anarchists
You'll recall that smoke alarms tell you when they're low on battery. If the chirping begins at a time when D batteries are not at your immediate disposal, you start ripping the thing apart. Once you've tried to disable it by harvesting its organs, you press the two buttons on top in different combinations for desperate relief. I once reached my limit, wrapped it in a some cardboard, and brought it outside to the dumpster.
But I laid in bed and heard its distant chirping still, and the trash wouldn’t come to get collected for a few a days. So I had to jump in the dumpster and claw it out as to not subject the entire apartment complex to its chirping.
At last, I brought it out into the woods and started smacking it to pieces with a hammer.
Safety engineering is stubborn, and should be. Protection should be prioritized over any other design consideration. Practical risk management overrides any aesthetic choice or ease of user-experience. Nothing can impede its maximization for safety effectiveness and efficiency.
When we witness the battle of ideas, occasionally a strong enough argument will trump any complication or nuance, and the thing will be settled. "Listen, I hear you, but at the end of the day..." will signal an impasse of unnegotiability, and no transformational effect will have taken place.
A well-thought-through ultimatum is healthy, when properly arrived at, but often it will place us on either side of a clearly defined binary. Rarely do I see a militant agnosticism defended, a doubtful orientation argued, or a humble disposition firmly claimed. For once I'd like to see reductionism benefit the side of humility.
The problem is a social one. Entertainment is best packaged in absolutes, friends affirm our delusions, and expertise means having an answer for everything. And this approach sells. Political commentary, broadcasting, journalism, YouTube personalities, and authors notice the profitability of partisan oversimplification. This isn't a realm for philosophical inquiry, it's the stylists' zone for animating policy positions with base emotion.
It all starts from the limbic system and the amygdala, and all rationalizations blossom from there. This insight should remind us to run test trials for the counterintuitive, the viserally disgusting, and immediately offensive. We are the most blinded by what inspires self-righteousness, moral staunchness, and reactionary aversion. The second most corrupting element of intellect is the propensity towards false association, defensive projection, and media bias.
The Anarchists have been a nuisance lately. They treat it as a veil for mere antiestablishmentarianism, or lazy bleak nihilism, or intellectual insecurity used to disengage from mainstream discourse. If you abstain from the competition, you never have to be a loser. They've invented a new game, totally disconnected from reality, with ideals they know they will never achieve, to posture moral and intellectual superiority built on a void. Unserious people, and far stupider than the Communists.
Examples of self-deception are abundant in supply, and the bad actors give us an honest look at what ails humanity. Engaging these people is mostly fruitless. They combat you as a humiliation sport, without consideration for material stakes. Their impotence drives their intent to befuddle responsible adults, who concern themselves with imminent consequences, not the fantasy of utopia-building.
People are eager to resign to demoralized defeat. This is surprising in such a prideful species, that no self-belief in one's agency stands a chance in upending the levers of power. Even that word "power" exists as an abstraction that plays tricks on the mind. They see it as a god instead of a glove that mediocrities temporarily slip their hands into.
Even those who claim to be wolves are sheepish in how they submit themselves to a mob of cynics.