You can disagree with me. You should actually. I’m the easiest person for me to fool and so I’m going to be wrong. A lot. You should tell me when it happens.
I know why you might not want to disagree with me though. It can be hard.
You saw something I wrote in public. Maybe it was a tweet where it’s really hard to get all the context in. Or I replied to someone in a group chat. Words are lossy approximations after all. You’re wondering, “Maybe I’m just misunderstanding what he’s trying to say, there weren’t enough words. Should I ask him more questions or ask his friends what he means? Sounds like a lot of work.” I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t bother either.
Maybe you know exactly what I was trying to say, and exactly how I’m wrong. Now you need to put that in the right words. Ughh, more work. You need to do this carefully, because I’m going to need to understand you now. And I already have a vested interest in an opposing viewpoint. You have to do it tenderly, otherwise I’m going to hallucinate about your actual intention. My ego and identity might be wrapped up in all of this. Sigh, this is going to take longer than you thought.
Say you get this far. You know the perfect thing to say. The perfect analogy that’s going to resonate with me and unlock a beautiful new perspective. Hold on, you’re going to need to do this publicly in front of my gajillion fans. And they all love me and subscribe to my worldview, why else would they be following me? So now you have to convince them as well, otherwise the mob will turn against you. Or maybe you’re going to have to get me to move the conversation to a more private place. Somewhere with a slower tempo and more space to give me all the nuance I’ve been blind to.
All this is a huge burden to place on your shoulders. If you squint, maybe I’m actually right after all. Agreeing with me would be sooo much easier. I would like you more, my fans would cheer you on.
But still I’m asking you, I’m begging you, please disagree with me. I’m afraid of what will happen if you don’t.
If you are silent, your voice won’t be in the chorus I hear. I won’t be able to see the world for what it actually is. Others won’t see the real world either. I’ll get even more fans since, “Hey if he was wrong, surely someone would have said something by now.” Others like you, who come after you, will be even less likely to speak up. More missing voices from the chorus, pushing me to a dark path dependance. I’ll get sucked into the gravity of my own truthy delusion and it’ll be impossible to escape.
Ultimately though reality will hit me, hard. And I’ll be forced to reckon with what you were trying to say all along.
So please, for my sake, you can disagree with me.
“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” ― George Orwell