If you have been following me you haven’t seen me address any current affairs. Believe me, it is not that I’m not exposed to them or that I don’t find them morbidly interesting. But what has led me, instead, to spend hours, weeks and months focusing on seemingly unrelated or outdated works of fiction and philosophy like Crime and Punishment, Beyond Good and Evil or The Road to Wigan Pier (coming soon), is my belief that there are better and worse ways to act in the war of ideas.

You have an opinion. Or, at the very least, you have biases that lead you to sympathize with a certain position. Any day you log on to the Internet you are guaranteed to encounter a number of people saying or acting out things to put that opinion into question. These encounters will fall on a kind of spectrum:

It’s so plainly malevolent it’s enraging. It’s so idiotic it’s funny.

The logical mistake is obvious and can be pointed out in a paragraph.

The logical mistake isn’t that obvious, a benevolent, smart person could end up having that position. It would take me some time to formulate the arguments against this one. Maybe even some back and forth.

It is nuanced and complex, I would have to read up on things and think a lot to be able to criticize it. Maybe it’s even beyond my ability to comprehend.

Note that this spectrum can exist among the utterances of a single person, even among the statements within a single blog post. The question is: what are you going to focus on? It’s way easier to engage with the idiotic and enraging stuff, while the things on the other end of the spectrum give us a vague, unpleasant feeling and the desire to avoid and forget them. But what this behavior achieves, is to lead our collective attention away from the conversation worth having (i.e. most likely to help us getting closer to the truth), towards the polarization we are currently seeing, and ultimately, to violence.