The progressive complaint about ridicule is Janus-faced. It is, to be sure, duplicitous, but for dark objectives. Ridicule on that side inverts the proper purpose of ridicule. Progressives ridicule normal and sane people to project the source of ridiculous beliefs onto their enemies. The responsible use of ridicule, however, is to attack a belief where reason cannot reach the believer. Progressives subvert ridicule to thwart reason, since their beliefs are unreasonable. The reasonable mock the unreasonable to save reason from irrationalism.
Regarding ridicule and offense-taking: the primary target is the absurd belief—one so empirically baseless, logically incoherent, or morally grotesque that it warrants being laughed out of the room rather than endlessly debated in good-faith circles. Progressives do not argue in good faith. They’re sophists—often not even clever enough to deserve the label. As I’m fond of saying, stupid ideas make smart people stupid. Last night, I read one of the stupidest things I have ever encountered. The person is smart, yet has become profoundly stupid under the weight of irrational thoughts. I will not reveal his name, but his acquired stupidity inspires this post.
Ridicule functions like a social immune response: it tags something as unworthy of serious deference, lowering its status and making it harder for it to spread unchallenged. Beliefs, like culture, are not floating in the ether. Just as an immigrant bears the culture of his homeland, a believer bears the ridiculous beliefs of his tribe. When commitment to the belief is stubborn, ridicule becomes the only peaceful option. Absurdity resides in the heads of humans, corrupts their judgment, and guides their behavior. The human animal is tied to communities that shape identities; beliefs result from socialization—often indoctrination. It’s lodged in the deranged brain and needs to be knocked out.
When I throw sharp mockery at the stream of bad ideas, it almost inevitably splashes onto the persons holding them. “That’s absurd; how could anyone think X?” often becomes “How could you think X?”—at least to the hearer. The believer experiences it as a personal attack, even if the intent was idea-focused. But often it is directed at the person. The spillover is usually inevitable because people are emotionally invested in their worldviews. Such a person is characteristically tribal and thus often impervious to reason. He must be separated from the herd before he can be deprogrammed, and shame is thus instrumental. Progressives love to shame the clear-headed man. The man must shame them back—because he loves people.
Some ideas—e.g., denial of the gender binary and its entailments, such as factual birth certificates and driver’s licenses, and the necessity of exclusive female spaces—are so detached from reality that polite engagement only dignifies them. Ridicule signals: “This ridiculous notion doesn’t deserve oxygen.” It can jolt the believer into reevaluation when rational discourse is futile. By ridiculing him, we ridicule the tribe that deranged him. Hopefully, this provokes a genuine crisis, prompting him to wonder whether he has played the fool. We hope he leaves the herd, pursues an internal critique, and becomes a more fully autonomous, self-actualized person on the other side of madness. If he does, he will thank us later.
Christopher Hitchens argued that certain religious or ideological claims are inherently contemptible and that withholding scorn is a form of false civility. Hitchens’ razor—“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”—is a powerful heuristic for cutting through nonsense, especially online or in public discourse. Hitchens was not above ridiculing his interlocutors. Carl Sagan’s standard—“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”—is also worth keeping in mind. Are we going to drag Hitchens and Sagan? If you want to drag wise men, go ahead, but know that it’s a sign of desperation.
Another wise man, Richard Dawkins, in an exchange with the ridiculous man, Medi Hasan, mocked the notion that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse. Hasan habitually demonstrates the type of mind that cannot be reasoned with. In the face of having to prove such a ridiculous claim, he demanded Dawkins prove Muhammad didn’t ascend to heaven on a winged horse. Hasan shifted the onus to the skeptic rather than defending his extraordinary assertion. Confronted by a mind that doesn’t understand the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof, Dawkins could only ridicule. It is obvious to any rational brain that Hasan provided a textbook instantiation of sophistry, treating the absence of disproof as positive support for his belief. Dawkins rightly laughed at the absurdity, underscoring how faith in winged horses (or thetans, or gender fluidity untethered from biology) thrives precisely because it evades rational scrutiny. When reason fails to penetrate, ridicule remains the appropriate response—polite deference only emboldens the unreasonable.
Let’s appeal to the method of wise men. Consider the claims of gender identity doctrine: that a man can be or become a woman. If gender is objective, the claim is easily falsified. Does the person have an XX karyotype? Large gametes? If not, he is a man. If gender is subjective, the substance of the doctrine of gender identity, then the claim is unfalsifiable and can be dismissed out of hand as an article of faith. A person may believe it, of course, but no one else is obligated to take it on faith—or to take it seriously. Freedom of conscience means we do not have to accept others’ faith-beliefs. Freedom of speech means we have the right, I dare say obligation, to ridicule those beliefs—and their bearers.
Some ideas are so absurd that they deserve mockery. L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and its cosmology—the notion that each of us harbors an alien being called a “thetan” waiting to be discovered through “auditing”—is so extraordinary that no extraordinary evidence is required. Hubbard’s cosmology is structured as a faith-belief; no such evidence can be presented. Gender identity doctrine is of precisely the same quality. It should have been dismissed without consideration. It should be submitted to an audience with the hope that it will draw laughter. Unlike Hubbard’s, however, gender identity doctrine has institutional power behind it. The belief is fading, but it would have faded faster if ridiculed from the start. And if it isn’t relentlessly ridiculed from this moment forward, it might return at full strength and persist. If that happens, hundreds of thousands of bodies will be broken for ideology and profit.
I have proudly ridiculed Hubbard and Scientology for decades. It should be obvious to all that the notion that an alien being resides in each of us should be a ridiculous idea. But it isn’t for too many people. The Scientologist should feel embarrassed at believing Hubbard’s ham-handed attempt at religious-making. So should the followers of John Money and Robert Stoller—ridiculous people with degrees attached to their names. We must have no qualms about mocking them, because our ridicule stems from reason and protection. We are trying to save people from accepting the idea of a thetan or gender identity, only to find themselves conned out of money—and, in the case of gender identity, with mutilated bodies to boot. Reason won’t reach them. Ridicule becomes necessary. When South Park ridiculed Scientology, it liberated people trapped in its gravitational pull. Ridiculing trans ideology carries the same effect.
For progressives, however, ridicule serves a different purpose: it makes normal and sane ideas—and people—look backward and bigoted. Their complaint about being ridiculed is an attempt to claim victimhood, wrapped in the toxic rhetoric of “kindness.” But they are not kind. Progressives do not hesitate to ridicule the normal and sane, because this is their method of suppressing attention to facts and reliance on reason. This is why their brand of ridicule is cruel. Demonization is rooted in hate. We must therefore consider the relative purpose of ridicule: if it frees people from ridiculous ideas or prevents them from adopting them, then ridicule is a vital tool; if it aims to prevent normal and sane ideas from prevailing, then it is a weapon of darkness.
The sides are not the same. Equating them is like saying the status of National Socialism is no different from the beliefs of those who died to stop the Nazis. Anything wrong with ridiculing Nazis? You’d have to be a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer to object.
When crazy people appear reasonable, it is only because power makes them seem so. That is the core problem behind phenomena like National Socialism and gender identity doctrine. Sanity requires the ability to identify, describe, and resist such power. Ridicule is a necessary means to that end.
freedom and reason 