“If you’re easy to fool, you’re a mammal with empty luggage in the overhead storage compartment.”
Mark Twain is reputed to have said that, and, if he did, it pays to remember that he was in the book-selling business. That’s why you used to see that quote so often in bookstores.
We repeat it like a dietary admonition: Good advice we have no intention of following. But I can go you one better, because I live it: To fail to write is to fail at being human.
Most of the credit we give to the thinking brain actually belongs to the mammal brain; in my spare time, I am demonstrating this with a French Bulldog named Cleopatra Chioux. What the thinking brain actually does, discernibly from the mammal brain and the snake brain, is make abstract connections – precisely what your dumbass dog can never do.
Qua telos, thinking rationally – in proportion to the facts – is our job – and for the most part we suck at it. Reason requires rigor, and rigor is meaningless if unmeasured. I am apt to say that discursive prose is thinking, but that’s not literally true. What is true is that if you expect me to believe that you have engaged in thought, you’re going to have to show me some proof. This – writing – is how that’s done.
Yes, you were cheated in school, and no, you’re not doing well at hiding that fact. But ignorance is everyone’s curse – we’re born that way – and it has never been more-easily exorcised.
The internet is very much your friend in this regard: It puts all the world’s facts at your fingertips, but it also drops you into little text boxes where you can make your ideas real by putting them into words.
There is nothing bad in this. Even belligerent assholes become better writers and thinkers, over time, by writing every day. And if you apply yourself honestly – never making persuasively-invalid claims, never indulging your biases, never attacking people when your ideas fall short – you will become amazingly better at thinking things through in no time.
Even when they’re not Marxists, teachers are lazy, so they deliberately robbed you of your right to write. You can take it back today – but take it every day: To write is to think, and thinking is how humans, uniquely among organisms, become unconquerable.
In other news:
Redstate.com: The Bill Comes Due After the DOJ Capitalizes on Brett Kavanaugh’s Cowardice.
David Harsanyi: Biden’s Unprecedented Attack on the Constitution.
Jack Dunphy: In Progressive Washington State, Criminal Justice Reform Only a Criminal Could Love.
Dr. Robert Malone and Peter Navarro: Biden team’s misguided and deadly COVID-19 vaccine strategy. Three big heroes in 2021: Christopher Rufo, James Lindsay and Peter Navarro. Had Trump followed Navarro’s advice, the “pandemic” would have come to nothing. Trump got played, and the world got played with him.
Townhall.com: Why Johnny Can’t Think.
James Lindsay: No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why.
