Survival in the Age of Personal Attack
Or how to stop caring about who’s saying the argument
By MARTIN REZNY
How stupid are you? No, seriously, if you were to measure your stupidity objectively, how stupid would you say you are, on a scale from a human turnip (Baldrick from Blackadder) to the future’s mightiest supergenius (a tie between Reed Richards and Victor von Doom)? Also, would you say you’re ugly? Unqualified? Did you even get my pop culture references?
Whatever your answers were on any of these counts, you’d be glad to hear that they don’t matter. You can has a good thought. You can speak good. Who one is doesn’t make them automatically wrong about anything. Anyone telling you otherwise — that your origin, appearance, identity, attitude, education, experience, or status disqualifies whatever you’re saying — is probably personally attacking you. Which would be a fallacy.
Flip it around, by saying that someone’s personal qualities automatically make them right, and it’s still a fallacy. The former is called ad hominem, the latter is called appeal to authority fallacy. These two are literally the simplest, most basic logical fallacies. Now, why is it, how is it, that everyone is using them today, constantly, all over all forms of popular media? In case I wasn’t being clear, I do mean everyone (figuratively).
Starting with basic kindergarten-level insults, you get your high-ranking politicians in world’s superpowers, and all of their critics. Think of Trump saying anything about anyone, or of all the brilliant intellectuals who ever mentioned how tiny Trump’s hands are, or mocked his hair, or did an impression of him. Those are your basic appearance attacks. But hey, this is politics, right? Mudslinging is part of it. Well, we’re just getting started.
Still within politics, but with a significant overlap into activism and academia, you get your identity politics and political correctness culture. The whole point of which is criticism-proofing or disqualifying people on the basis of their identity, experience, or attitude. Apparently, every ethnic or gender-based group is always correct when arguing about all issues pertaining to them, and has nothing to say worth listening to about any other groups. Well, apart from heterosexual white men, who are wrong even about themselves, somehow. Especially if they’re comedians.
Deep within academia, you then have the Only True Authoritarians, who cannot possibly commit the appeal to authority fallacy or be the target of it, because their authority is the only one that is correct (non-dubious). See, they’re experts, and experts cannot be effectively criticized by non-experts. It’s so improbable that an expert would be wrong and a non-expert would be right, that one shouldn’t even waste time entertaining the baseless ramblings of just some dudes, or respecting their basic human dignity.
In case you think I might be exaggerating about this particular type of personal attackers, I have recently had a bit of a tussle with an academician on YouTube who literally started the title of his response video with “Dudes Think They Can”. After a lengthy discussion, he categorically rejected the notion that he has ever (yes, ever) made a single ad hominem in any of his videos. Mind you, in this one video alone, he also used “fringe”, “pseudo-”, “hippie”, and “woo”. Which are all terms seen as fine by most skeptics.
After education, there are also common status-related fallacies. While there are many people, sadly, who do think that being poor makes one’s arguments invalid, the bigger issue is a much larger number of people who assume that all arguments of the rich, powerful, or successful automatically have merit. How else would they have succeeded, if they aren’t right about everything, right? People tend to be selective about this, but there’s no difference between Musk, Soros, Oprah, or Putin here.
Outside of all of these areas that matter in real life, all of the ultimately pointless cultural squabbles are also infested with personal attacks. Fandoms of popular franchises tend to mock each other, but also partake in ceaseless infighting. For evidence, just visit any forums discussing the comparative merits of the MCU versus the DCEU, or Star Wars versus Star Trek, or the original LOTR trilogy versus the Rings of Power, or Harry Potter versus… You know what, better to avoid Harry Potter altogether. And anything to do with gaming. Basically, everyone’s just as bad as Hitler.
I’m kidding of course, nobody has been Hitler since Hitler put an end to being a Hitler. So, why is this now a thing, when previously it was not (so much)? To be clear, I don’t think there was a perfect golden age of nobody attacking anyone ever before the present day, but I guess the media weren’t as much in the face of everyone all the time, and the news cycle was slower, and people liked more to pretend to be nicer than they are, and most people didn’t have access to public platforms on a personal basis. This age is more honest, probably, just in a kind of bullshit “telling it like it is” way.
I don’t think the solution is to try to return to any kind of past, at least not unless the past to return to is very selectively targeted to only the best stuff that the smartest of the ancient Athenean citizens were doing. Because there is a solution. Let me tell you a trade secret that all debate adjudicators know — you never need to, or should, care about who the speaker is, when deciding whether what they’re saying makes any kind of sense. In today’s world, being able to do that is basically a real, legitimate superpower.
Let’s breeze through a couple of quick exercises. Do they have a lot of money? Irrelevant. Do they spend a lot of time at the gym? Irrelevant. Are they funny? Irrelevant. Are they of color? Irrelevant. Are they a furry? Irrelevant. Are they Russian? Irrelevant. Are they a Muslim? Irrelevant. Do they have a bunch of degrees? Irrelevant. Even when they’re talking about stuff that they have degrees in? Yes, still irrelevant, to whether any particular point they’re making objectively makes sense or not.
Sometimes, ad hominem arguments, or the personal qualities of the speaker, feel quite relevant. Maybe the speaker has an obvious bias, or lacks any education or experience in the field that they’re commenting on, or maybe they have a conflict of interest (something to lose), or a history of lying. In the absence of one’s ability to judge the objective merit of the speaker’s argument, it does make sense to hedge one’s bets, or use a razor, and decide to reject the argument outright if the speaker feels iffy. Or to accept the argument of an authoritative expert without questioning it.
However, possessing the ability to judge the objective merit of arguments is kinda important. An argument can still happen to be right even when the person who says it arrived at it in the wrong way or only says it because of some ulterior motive. The argument will still be right or wrong because of objective, non-personal reasons, if it’s an argument that’s in any way about objective reality or human universals. Even statistically, if you’re always going to trust all experts and never anyone who isn’t one, you’re just guaranteeing you’re going to be wrong about some important things in life.
You shouldn’t leave the thinking to others, but you still have to actually do it yourself. Just like an expert isn’t automatically right because they’re an expert, you’re not automatically right criticizing them because you’re you. I’m not arguing for switching one fallacy for another. I’m arguing for not using any fallacies. I’m only focusing on the personal attack fallacy because while all fallacies make you wrong, or at least not right, personal attacks exclude people and make everyone feel disrespected, pissed off, or hurt.
If, for example, you don’t like Trump, then if you’re using personal attacks against him, you’re being just like him. So, don’t be? If he’s wrong about anything, it’s not because of his tiny hands, or his fake hair, or his limited vocabulary, or his lack of being educated about anything, or his compulsive tendency to lie and exaggerate, or his massive conflicts of interest. If his ideas are bad, then they’re still going to be bad when an honest poor educated woman of color politely and eloquently repeats them.
Or consider a standard debate competition scenario. Imagine you’re a debater and I’m the adjudicator. You say your arguments and wait for my feedback, in which I tell you that I decided to outright reject them all because you were making some points about gay marriage, but you’re a heterosexual. That would be insane, right? You’d feel like I’m being insane, and you’d be kinda insulted and offended, wouldn’t you? I bet that wouldn’t make you want to participate in any more debates in the future.
Put simply, we need to stop taking everything everyone says so personally. Your argument isn’t your identity, and your identity isn’t an argument. Changing your mind isn’t the end of you. As the Doctor said, thinking is just a fancy word for changing your mind, and if you refuse to do that, you will die stupid. At the same time, if you’re smart, your scientific authority isn’t an argument either, or a license to be a dick. If you want it to be worth a damn, you should welcome being challenged and keep defending it.
And if the people challenging your authority aren’t on your level? Well, then defending your arguments should be easy, shouldn’t it. What’s there to be offended or mean about? The possibility to help some people in error learn something and grow as people? Or to find out that you have been wrong about something after all, and thus learn something yourself while helping science be its awesome self-correcting self? Just be a scientist.
As Korean-Australian two-time world debate champion Bo Seo recommends, stop watching any debates where people you don’t know personally attack each other, and instead have some debates in private with people you know personally beyond just the issue that you disagree on. While debating without an audience to perform for, and without an unchecked ego, you may find out what debating is actually for — learning. Not winning, or dunking, or flexing, or styling, or hating, or shunning.
