If It Makes You Angry, It Isn't Yours
The ground is the evidence. You cannot see it from up there.
If It Makes You Angry, It Isn't Yours
Think of the last time someone challenged a belief you hold strongly and you felt a flash of anger before you had time to think. Hold that feeling in mind. That is the subject of this essay.
Anthony de Mello, who spent a lot of his life watching how people defend their beliefs, had a short way of putting it. You know someone has been brainwashed, he said, because they get angry when you question their positions. Not irritated, which is normal. Angry. As if you had stepped on something.
The anger is the tell, and it is the tell because of what it is defending. It is not defending the belief. It is defending the belonging.
I wrote a companion piece to this one a few days ago called Contact Is the Test. That essay was about losing contact with other people through the same technology that makes us feel constantly connected. This one is about losing contact with the ground under your own beliefs, and why you cannot feel the ground is gone.
Here is what has changed in the last decade, and why de Mello's observation matters more now than when he made it.
It used to take effort to acquire a confident political or moral position. You had to read something, argue with someone, sit with your own uncertainty for long enough to work out what you actually thought. The process was slow and it left marks. You remembered why you ended up where you ended up, because the path was the thing.
Now you can absorb an entire worldview through a feed in a month, without consciously choosing any of it. The algorithm shows you the positions your tribe holds, the tone they hold them in, and the contempt they feel for the other tribe. You catch the lot. You never went through the work of getting there, so you don't know the reasons, only the conclusions. And when challenged, you reach for the conclusions with force, because they are all you have.
AI makes this worse. You can now have a very confident argument written for you, on demand, defending any position you want defended. You feel articulate. You feel informed. You are not. You have outsourced the reasoning and kept the certainty.
So here is the diagnostic, and it is not one question but three, because one alone is too easy to fail cheaply.
One. Can you name the strongest argument against your position, stated as its best defenders would state it, without caricature? Not the weakest version. Not the version that makes your side obviously right. The version that would make a thoughtful opponent nod and say, yes, that is what I think.
Two. Can you hold your own position calmly while that counter-argument is in the room?
Three. When someone in front of you states the counter-argument and means it, what do you feel? Curiosity is the right answer. Contempt, irritation, or the urge to correct the person before they finish their sentence are the wrong ones.
Pass all three and you hold a belief. Fail any of them, particularly the third, and you are probably holding a badge of tribe membership that happens to look like a belief from the inside.
People who have thought a thing through for decades can be very passionate about it. Passion is not the tell. Passion plus inability to state the counter-argument plus anger at the challenge is the tell. All three together. One or two of them on their own mean nothing. Three of them mean you have not examined what you believe; you have been fitted for it.
Before you close this tab, pick a position you have stated strongly in the last month. Try the three questions on yourself, honestly.
If you noticed a small flare of resistance while reading the last paragraph, that is the data, not the noise. Sit with it. That is the test. Everything else is weather.
Jamie Watters writes about solopreneurship, AI, and the practice of becoming unhideable without becoming fake. Find more at jamiewatters.work.