The Craziest Ideas Are the Ones Most In Need of Intelligent Responses

As soon as you say, “Everyone should believe X, and if you don’t, you’re a crazy”, you make X look both less desirable, and more likely to be mistaken.

If X really is obvious, you needn’t pressure everyone to accept it. Anyone who denies the irrefutable is not going to be pressured anyway. An appeal to authority or consensus is not going to win over doubters, nor should it. If X is untrue or even a little bit off in some way, your anger at non-believers will harden your perceptions and form an intellectual arrogance that blinds you to new developments. It also makes you look like an ass who’s afraid of a world where people believe things differently than you.

Believers in far-fetched, fringe ideas rarely suffer from this kind of angry, shaming proclamation, because they’re used to their ideas being considered fringe. Those who believe generally accepted ideas, or who oppose fringe theories, are most in danger of this mindset. They may be entirely correct that the fringe ideas are silly, but the angry demand that everyone agree with generally accepted ideas is at least as anti-intellectual as the fringe ideas themselves, and revealing of a deep insecurity.