Ideas That Cannot Be Spoken
Spotting cowards in the public discourse.
Most jobs come with a series of unappetizing demands. You must wake up early. You must endure a long commute. You must perform sweaty physical labor, or serve the thankless public, or corral a classroom of unruly kids, or waste away in a dreary cubicle. You must perform these grueling, tedious tasks, in exchange for an amount of money that is surely smaller than you deserve, in order to obtain food, clothing, and shelter, lest you and your family become destitute. This is the baseline reality of work for the average person.
Then there are the minority of jobs that are easier, more enriching, that offer fulfillment and meaning and a sense of purpose and a humane lifestyle. One place that some of these rare good jobs can be found is in the Ideas industry—among the journalists, pundits, political thinkers, activists, and self-styled Thought Leaders who collectively produce the National Discourse. In comparison to most real jobs, these are great gigs. Instead of hammering nails, you are talking to interesting people; instead of making sandwiches, you are doing research; instead of manning a cash register, you are writing some essay; and instead of being treated as a replaceable and undervalued cog in the machine of capitalism, you get to enjoy the enlivening process of people seriously engaging with your ideas. Whether you are getting rich or not, there is no question that you are blessed with a career that is infinitely more rewarding than that which is given to most of America’s 170 million working people.
Participating in the Ideas industry carries one underlying moral demand: To tell the truth. You do not have to sweat and slave and struggle and serve in the same way that most working people do, but in exchange, you owe to the world your very best effort to say things that are true, and that are righteous, and that reflect exactly what you believe to be an accurate reading off the world. Different thinkers will deliver different and competing ideas, but all of the ideas they deliver—in order to justify the presumption that they are worth your time—must come with the implicit guarantee, “Here is my best argument for something true.”
This quality is what makes The Discourse worth a damn. If everyone argues forthrightly for their own vision of truth and justice, the interplay of all of these arguments produces a national conversation that progresses in a productive, informative, enlightening way. That’s the deal. As soon as you lose track of this, you begin straying off the path of Thinker and onto the path of Propagandist. That is the path to the Bullshit industry—a separate (and more lucrative) world than the Ideas industry. That is where political communicators try to trick you with half-truths, and public relations strategists scheme to avoid difficult questions, and advertising executives concoct campaigns designed to bathe you in illusion. All of that exists, but it is a different thing. The thing that distinguishes those of us who purport to operate in the world of ideas is that we are not trying to rip you off—we are trying to persuade you with the truth.
A happy quality of this arrangement is that it treats all consumers of the ideas as equal. My job as a writer is not to go into some secret back room with The People Who Really Matter and agree on a narrative designed to dupe you and then to emerge and perform this narrative for you in a way that I think you are likely to fall for. No! My job is to squeeze my little brain as hard as possible until I feel like I have a clear picture of something that is true and important and then squeeze it some more until I have figured out the best way to say these things and then say, to everyone who cares to listen, “Here is what is true, and here is why it’s important, and here is why doing this thing will be good for humanity.” You may think I’m an idiot. You may find my knowledge base lacking, my moral framework twisted, my arguments unpersuasive. You may curse me as a vile socialist, an unsophisticated ignoramus, a repetitive bore. All of that comes standard in the course of writing for the public. (Indeed, your thoughtful attacks on what you see as the holes in my argument are the things that produce The Discourse that we are all a part of.) The one thing that you should not be able to say about my work is that I am not telling you what I really think. That is the price of entry to the worthwhile part of the Ideas industry. We may be bastards, but we are not bullshitting you.
You should therefore be very suspicious of anyone who claims to be in the Genuine Ideas business but who is afraid to fully speak their mind in public. For the past half decade at least, America has been bombarded with the grumblings of influential people griping that they are not “allowed” to say what they really think, these days. Because of wokeness, and witch hunts, and things like that. What do they mean when they argue that they are not “allowed” to say something? Do they mean that they might be snatched by government agents and deported for writing a humanitarian op-ed in a student newspaper? No. What they mean, usually, is that they hold opinions that many people would find objectionable and if they say those opinions out loud people will get mad at them. In many cases, they also hold prestigious positions at media or business or academic institutions that claim to have some anodyne progressive values, and because their objectionable ideas are objectionable in the specific sense of “being some variety of bigotry,” their colleagues at those institutions would be mad at them, making their lives unpleasant. (It is darkly funny that, in the years that all of these people have been complaining about the woke censorship they are suffering, the people who have actually suffered the most professional retaliation for voicing their beliefs have been those who spoke out for the human rights of Palestinians. That has proven to be far more dangerous to one’s livelihood than being a bigot.)
It is important to notice the fact that, in truth, all of these whining people very much are allowed to say what they think. They sure can. No one is stopping them. What they are really objecting to is not censorship, but rather the honest reactions that their honest ideas will elicit. In other words, they cannot handle The Discourse. They are not equipped to participate in the Ideas industry. They are unable to carry the burden of telling the truth as they see it. This is fine, if you’re a regular person; no one is obligated to get yelled at for their beliefs. But it is not fine if you are someone—a writer, a leader, an intellectual influencer of the public—who is supposed to be pushing ideas. Those people must either say what they believe, change what they believe, or accept the fact that they are intellectual cowards.
These are the things that I thought last night when I read Ben Smith’s Semafor story about the many exclusive group chats, full of pundits and quasi-journalists and Substack writers and Silicon Valley business titans and political activists, that have served as private petri dishes of reactionary thinking since the start of the pandemic. It is a juicy story, replete with tales of the wounded signatories of the infamous Harper’s Letter forming and reforming little Signal chat groups where they could hold masturbatory agreement sessions with Marc Andreesen and Mark Cuban and similar tech gurus who fancy themselves masters of the nation’s future. Over and over again, participants in these chats explain that they were places where they could speak more openly than they would in public. “People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media,” goes one typical comment from an entrepreneur, “and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone.” It’s not just the businessmen— “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens,” agrees one popular blog thinkfluencer, who presumably is not giving his public readers his important or interesting stuff.
I used to write for Gawker. The founding premise of Gawker can be described as, “All the stuff these group chat people said is fucking poisonous.” Nick Denton often told the legend of Gawker by saying that when he was a reporter, all the reporters would go to the bar after work and talk about the real stories, the ones that had not made it into the official stories that went in the paper. He thought the public should get the real stories too. Hence Gawker. There is a lot to criticize about Gawker, but this premise is one that the site generally tried to adhere to. It was not a high-minded publication, and we don’t need to pretend that most of its work was fancy or charitable, but I do think of that premise as a kind of high-minded ideal: We will do our best to say what we actually think.
Sometimes you say what you think, and guess what happens? People get mad. People yell at you. Yes. That goes with the territory. I will put the = hate mail and death threats and angry internet comments that I received during my Gawker years up against anyone’s. And, hey: that’s the fucking job. Whether you write for Gawker or Substack or the New York Times or Harper’s—or whether you are a CEO or tech visionary or a venture capitalist who goes to the Aspen Ideas festival and has a bazillion Twitter followers—the only requirement of the job is to speak your mind honestly. Because, because, by asking the public to listen to you, you are telling the public that they will be getting, as best as you can manage it, your truest ideas. We ask people to give us their attention, and their time, and in turn we give them our honest thoughts. When you are operating in this world and you stop giving people your honest thoughts, you begin ripping people off.
Feel free to hide your honest thoughts in private group chats if you like. Rather than speaking forthrightly, retreat into a little hole where you can stage manage and coordinate the rollout of soft versions of your unpopular ideas in friendly forums. But if you do, don’t pretend that you are a member in good standing of the (absurd, enraging, pompous, but ultimately socially valuable) Ideas industry. Say what you think, cowards! Or stop pretending that your beliefs are important enough for other people to care about in the first place.
Also
Related reading: The Coddling of the Elites; Words That Mean Nothing; Your Opinions Can Be Bad But You Still Have to Tell the Truth. I have been yelled at for many political things that I have written, but one of the most vicious outpourings of hate mail I ever received in my career came in response to my brave and provocative piece, “Why Do Assholes Love Watches?”
This week is May Day. Find a protest here, and go to it. Or make your own.
Yesterday, I wrote my annual State of How Things Work piece, because this publication is turning two years old. You can read it here. I won’t reiterate it all, except to say: Thank you for subscribing, and thank you for your support. This place wouldn’t exist without all of you, and I appreciate all of you for being here. Peace.
Well I was a child and detested unfairness and to be honest, could not help speaking out.
I am 76yrs old soon and very rarely back off. I don't have many friends!
Every person should read this. Thank you.
This has been one of the most thought provoking pieces for me that Hamilton has shared. I’ve been guilty of only expressing how I feel within friendly confines. And like he noted, these days those that speak their minds regarding the Palestinian dilemma get carted away. And yet, it is those persecuted for their beliefs that I most admire, those with the true courage of their convictions. I now feel compelled to at least aspire to that level.