Please, please, argue with me

I’m literally begging you

Socrates was the most annoying person who ever lived.

While many consider Socrates the wisest person who ever lived, we forget that he was also incredibly infuriating to everyone around him. How annoying was he? Well the city of Athens held a vote about him, and they decided… to execute him…

So, yeah, he was pretty insufferable. The man himself even acknowledged that his goal in life was to bother the Athenians. He often called himself a "horsefly" whose whole purpose was to irk the citizens, stirring them to into activity, goading them to consider more closely their habitual ways of thinking and doing.

So how is it possible that the wisest man was also the most annoying? And it's a bit of a chicken-or-egg dilemma—was he wise because he was annoying? Or was he annoying because he was wise? Or is there some correlation v. causation turbulence going on here that obscures some third variable causing both of them?

To understand this dilemma, all you have to do is talk to a pre-schooler. Although they are generally very cute and they say silly things and they are fun-loving and playful and vivacious, et cetera— they are also incredibly irritating, because they are always asking "Why?"

Above: lil squirts

It starts out innocently enough, with some general question that you can answer pretty easily. But then they just keep asking you "Why?" It never ends. Once you’ve answered the first “Why,” they quickly follow up with another “Why.” And as you go down the rabbit hole of complexity, you quickly find yourself conducting a sort of root-cause analysis. And you then you get vexed, partly because you don't really know the answer to their latest question, and partly because you are ashamed that you never thought to doubt and/or examine the issue for yourself.

Here's a perfect illustration:

(note: there's a lot of profanity in the clip)

Socrates was basically the manchild equivalent of this prototypical annoying little punk kid, and to make matters worse, he was also apparently very ugly. And he was poor and disheveled because he never worked, nor did he charge for his "lessons." And he spent all his time in the agora where he would just pester people (particularly the young men) and engage them in endless dialogues about obtuse topics like "What is Justice?" and "What is Piety?" and "What is the ideal form of government?" And of course, he was never satisfied with any of the answers he was given.

We have a form of teaching these days called the "Socratic method," wherein the teacher basically continually asks questions to his pupil(s) and gradually leads them to the correct answer, which was predetermined from the very beginning. It's a bit of a pageant, but it's supposed to get the pupil(s) thinking for themselves, rather than the alternative of just lecturing them and giving away all the facts one-by-one, bullet point style, which is incredibly boring to listen to day-after-day.

And on a surface-level analysis, it may seem that this is what Socrates was doing in all his dialogues, because he always had a ready response to every answer, which would lead the discussion down a different path. In his dialogues, there were never any dead ends, unless of course his counterparty got fussy and exasperated with him, (which as mentioned above, we all are prone to do once the string of "whys" gets unreasonably long), and they lashed out or just plain walked away (sometimes the smartest thing to do).

But in truth, Socrates never really had the answers. He never actually guided the discussion towards a definitive solution. This is partly what makes philosophy so frustrating (and why I hated my Philosophy 101 class as an 18 year-old—there are no cut-and-dry, hard and fast, final answers, like you might find in the sciences, or mathematics.

Here's the point: Socrates was genuinely interested in the discussion. He wasn't being annoying on purpose, merely using rhetorical tactics to aggravate his opponents, or leading them slyly to some predetermined answer. He was childlike in the truest sense-- endlessly curious, hoping to expand his view of the world. He was enthusiastic about hearing someone else's perspective on a topic.

Perhaps in the end, this is what made Socrates the wisest— the only thing he knew was that he didn't know. When the oracle at Delphi told him that he was the wisest of men, he was perplexed. He knew that he wasn't the wisest, so in order to resolve his confusion regarding the oracle's statement, he went around Athens asking all the other "wise" men what this meant. And what he realized is that. time after time, each of them had an opinion which they held to be a fact. They were so confident in their wisdom that they were unwilling (or unable) to consider their ignorance. Yet Socrates, for all his acuity, knew himself well enough to know that he did not have the answers.

And so he lived for argument and debate and discussion. He was endlessly curious. Perhaps this is the third variable that underlies both wisdom and annoyability (?).

Socrates would wake up every day, effused with the fervent giddiness of a kid on Christmas, literally running to the agora (in his shoddy sandals and toga) so he could begin talking with his friends (and his enemies) about anything, anything at all, to ask and provoke and consider the topic, to see it from new angles, to approach it obliquely, with the aid of his fellows.

In my imagination he would run from person to person, saying, "Please, please, argue with me!"

And that's what I say to you now. I'm 100% serious— Please argue with me.

This publication is growing strongly, and I'm really excited about it. I have published every Wednesday now for eight weeks! I'm honestly impressed (and surprised) by my consistency, and I'll be writing about just that topic (=consistency) next week. There are now over 30 subscribers to The Apocalypse, including, of course, YOU! Does every one of those subscribers read each essay every week? No, but that's not the point.

The most exciting thing about this growth is that people are starting to argue with me! Last week I had four people give me feedback about the essay, and that's a new record. You see, when I first started publishing (and truthfully, when any writer starts), the only audience is crickets. It's like that for a while.

In some senses, it's kinda nice, because you can literally publish anything you want, and it doesn't matter if it's complete shite. That's how the Apocalypse was in the beginning (not the shite part, I hope). But somehow I began to accumulate readers. I guess because I was using the same Substack account to follow other writers, they started following me back. And they started reading. And that was exciting. And also stressful.

“In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write… the whole endeavor’s about fun. You don’t expect anybody else to read it. You’re writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don’t like. And it works—and it’s terrific fun. Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually get to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the AM subway by a pretty girl you don’t even know, it seems to make it even more fun. For a while. Then things start to get complicated and confusing, not to mention scary.”

—David Foster Wallace, The Nature of the Fun

But even then, though I could see that people were reading, they weren't responding yet. It's hard to tell from the stats whether someone just opens the essay and then immediately exits (“Nope”), or whether they read a part of it and got distracted and eventually dropped off, or whether they read the whole thing. You can’t tell whether they liked it, or hated it, or couldn’t comprehend it, or just simply forgot about it.

But when people start confronting you about the essay, disagreeing with you, providing alternative viewpoints— then you know that you've written something meaningful. Or at least provocative. You know that people care. That you are engaging them. It may seem really horrifying to have people get mad at you because you've bothered them, but it's honestly a way better alternative than getting no response at all because you've bored them.

“If you really don't care, you aren't going to know it's wrong. The thought'll never occur to you. The act of pronouncing it wrong's a form of caring.”

—Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Of course, it's ideal if your readers agree with you, and that feels validating, but it doesn't really expand your worldview at all, or increase your knowledge or wisdom. But the dialectical process of arguing and chasing the truth, painful as it is, does provide that succulent and oh-so-sweet expansion and edification and enlightenment. Da good stuff.

Perhaps the best analogy I can think of is the parable of the blind men and the elephants. By myself, I am only one of those men. With the aid of other authors and writers that I’ve read, I get a few more perspectives. But when YOU add to the dialogue, bringing to the table all your experiences, and all the authors and writers you know, then we finally begin to see the issue from many different viewpoints, finally seeing it in three dimensions.

I don't expect you to read every essay every week. But what I would love, and what would bring me immense satisfaction, is if you would disagree with me whenever you read something here that provokes a response. Good or bad. You just let me know, either here in the comments, or in person.

In fact, my ultimate goal for my writing, the purpose of this publication and all the effort that goes into it (and the reason for enduring the accompanying stress and self-doubt and fear)— the point of it all is not that I can become famous and make a living doing it (though that would certainly be very nice), but rather that I would be able to have interesting and enlightening discussions with other people. That those discussions would foster our understanding of humanity, invigorate us with the freshness of new (or renewed) ideas, and inspire us to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

As I wrote in my first post here on The Apocalypse, my life was changed by reading, and I want to continue the process:

I had found a greater store of wealth than I could have ever hoped to find through the career/financial ladder. Golden words.

I wanted to write words like that. Words that would strike deep into the heart of my readers, and make them feel that I was speaking directly to them, though we might be separated by thousands of miles, or hundreds of years.

I wanted to utter the unutterable things.

But those words— these words— go only so far as they are read.

And those go only so far as they provoke.

And those go only so far as they are responded to.

So please, please, argue with me.