The Hitman

In any discussion which resembles a debate the biggest obstacle to that discussion today usually involves the ad hominem.

Why has this become such an especially pronounced issue in the 21st Century?

We could consider the impact of social media, consumerism, declining intellectual standards and attention spans, etc...

All very discouraging indeed.

However thankfully, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it is very easy to do away with such a total disregard for logic once it presents itself.

The mechanism of the ad hominem argument is no less simple than its absence of reason would suggest it is.

One example, albeit a very common one, should suffice.

Your father tells you to stop smoking because it is bad for your health. You respond by telling your father that he smokes too.

It may be true that your father smokes. However this fact alone is of course irrelevant to your father’s submission that smoking is bad for your health. The fact that your father smokes does not in itself serve to counter that proposition.

Imagine that someone presents you with a perspective which reflects badly upon you at a personal level. In the ensuing debate emotions begin to run high because you feel that you are having to defend your reputation, as well as your point of view. The person who makes the assertion in question gives you his reasons for saying that your behaviour is questionable or worthy of criticism.

Yet you feel that he is not qualified to make that criticism – perhaps because he is guilty of the same behaviour.

Finally, exhausted by his onslaught, you think “Enough is enough. I am going to tell him “Look who is talking?””

At this juncture you need to call The Hitman. Imagine that you had the ability to hire a hitman who could assassinate the little hypocrite. You would never have to listen to his criticism again.

However even with him out of the way – and that discussion over – his viewpoint lives on, capable of being taken up by anyone else. You can now take some time to reflect, in relative sanctuary, over the merits of his criticism. Were those criticisms justified, and if not, why?

The Hitman can be employed to get rid of someone you feel is not entitled to make such an argument (one would hope only figuratively speaking) and in so doing enable you to engage with that argument on its merits.

The Hitman is a ludicrous concept with far reaching consequences – his instruction the whim of an ego of tyrannical proportions. After all, only an idiot would sooner think of shutting someone up with force, than shutting them down with reason first and then magnanimous silence second, if and when reason has fallen on deaf airs.

Yet as modern history is beginning to indicate, a generational reflection of our time is the inexorable inevitability with which the intellectually inept and educationally disenfranchised seek to force shut the mouths of those who offer opinions which have been well reasoned and well justified as soon as the implication of those opinions is felt as disempowering and offending one’s sense of self-esteem – however general that opinion may be in its application.

One of the reasons why we have collectively become hypersensitive to the ideas of intellectuals is because our capacity to counter their ideas meaningfully has been undernourished and neglected. As a consequence we sense that the battle is an unfair one – which makes us feel vulnerable in the first instance and perhaps even envious in the second.

We feel envious of those who increasingly rare specimens of the Homo Sapiens species who seem to possess the powers of concentration and clarity of mind to dissect an argument and propose an alternative one – because some strange long suppressed evolutionary instinct reminds us that such a gift may in fact be vital to our survival.

Modern society has cajoled us and duped us into believing that there is necessarily weakness in intransigence. That diversity should mean automatic acceptance of our views – and instant recognition.

It is therefore then felt as painful when we come across people in life who refused to follow the same well trodden path because they remind us of an intellectual ability which we were also not single minded enough to develop at all costs.

We have often instead chosen to invest in the pact of instant mutual recognition. The price we paid was that of self-censorship.

“I promise not to dissect your views, if you also promise in turn not to dissect my own.”

This strange entente cordiale is not always enforceable but it is almost always, to a very real degree, a suicide pact of sorts – self-censorship becomes self-negation which becomes self-murder.

This is why when we do meet people who possess these skills and apply them to us in any context, it arises such strange and profound feelings of self-doubt and insecurity within us.

We are reminded that in at least this one narrow but vitally important sense we are not truly alive.

Of course the reality is that these skills are not at all easily acquired. Not least because of the fact that they are often today sadly actively discouraged within the confines of the classroom, the only real way to develop such a skillset is with years and years of relevant reading and years and years of relevant practice.

It is equally true but usually difficult to remember in the vital moment that the hallmark of a true intellectual is that it is always possible to change his mind with reason and logic.

You are unlikely to enjoy much success in this respect by waging a “dirty war”. Cheap appeals for public support using populist causes or a deliberate game of shifting sands is likely to weaken your position in the eyes of the intellectual and diminish whatever benefit of the doubt he had given to you before you employed such tricks.

It is therefore essential not to veer too far off course.

The final comment I would make for present purposes relates again, regrettably, to the limitations of the modern man. The point is a Freudian one as much as anything else.

A little appreciated fact of millennial life – and one which in my experience tends to meet with much disbelief – is quite how “modern” an invention the teenager is. What is teenhood? How much flexibility do we accord to those adolescent years in between childhood and adulthood when we are met with immaturity?

Until relatively recently there was no “in between”. You were simply a child – and then you became an adult.

The modern concept of adolescence is arguably as much a function of modern day decadence as it is one of biology.

There was once a stage at which conceiving of ourselves and the way we progressed through life in this manner – with the inclusion of an in between and transitional step – appeared to have some sort of social utility.

The difficulty manifesting itself now however is that this in-between step seems to be becoming elongated.

When the US sitcom and TV phenomenon Friends was first aired over 20 years ago, it seemed clear that adolescence had been stretched (at least) into the late 20s (and perhaps even as far as the early 30s).

Nowadays the impact of mass global immigration, social media, a rights based conception of engagement in public life and the pact of mutual automatic recognition means that increasingly this bridge is never properly crossed.

You tell a Polish migrant in the UK why you disagree with her selling her body by working as a prostitute, and she responds by giving you the middle finger.

You ask a white British man why he opposes Muslim immigration and he responds that “It is not fair that we can not celebrate Christmas in our own country.”

We have experienced a very real intellectual regression of a seemingly permanent quality in the West – whereby often we have children later and later (if at all), often much of the burden of raising our own families has shifted onto the State which often takes over the role of parent and often we talk a great deal of our rights but neglect to think of our responsibilities – and the effect is that our Western world is now one which is strangely devoid of any true “adults” – apart of course from the elderly.

We awake to a picture of J-Lo flashing her bottom on the pages of our newspapers and we do not even stop to think “This woman is now almost 50 years old. After almost half a century on this planet, does she have no other message for us?”

We read the sob story of an African former footballer who lost a multi-million pound fortune and responds to questions about what happened by stating that “he does not know” where all of his money went, and we do not even stop to think “What does that even mean? Does he actually mean that he was the victim of fraud? Or does he really mean that he just made poor financial decisions.”

We live in an age of chronic immaturity which has proven to be very toxic to our capacity to formulate a coherent point of view.

The Hitman is not the most sophisticated solution to our problems but it is the most fitting for these intellectually and morally barren times.

In the end if someone says something to you which means you want to launch a personal attack, rather than a reasoned defence, perhaps the easiest way for you to get to that second base is, quite simply, to imagine him dead.