The Weight of Wit

In most social interactions, the wittiest contribution is usually assumed to be the one with the most truth and is respected the most.  This is especially true for Internet interactions.  If your viewpoint can be summed up in one clever remark, then either it's self-evident (say, civil rights or some other fundamental values that can't be debunked with a logical counterargument) or your judgment is clouded by rhetoric and groupthink.

This bothers me on many levels.

For something to be witty, it needs to be dense.  Making a terse statement is easiest when more is known about the subject.  It's also easiest when somebody already understands what the statement implies.  Basically, the less explicit the communication, the sharper it is.  This is why poetry is fantastic, but when you're talking about expository discussions of serious matters, it's hugely counterproductive to defer to the least explicit, and thereby least informative, argument.


Then there's the fact that the picketing slogans that capture people's hearts ("God Hates Fags" on one side, "We Are the 99%" on the other) are passed on so smoothly and so easily that it's frightening how little critical thinking happens between transitions of the phrase.  It's ridiculously easy to get somebody to join a chant.  It's far more difficult to convince them of what it means.  So there you have a mass of people, all with an idea of what it means that they formed gradually while chanting their slogan.  They thought about what they believed in after they believed it.  This is an unhealthy habit for society.  If we do it too much, our crystallized intelligence is utterly arbitrary.


This phenomenon has no regard for social, political, or economic views.  People try to put as much punch as they can into their social media by sharing one sentence that apparently encapsulates everything they believe.

Some people try to use substance to move forward in discussion.  But even those who are patient enough to decry public opinion as undeveloped are ultimately reduced to a thesis statement and suffer having the rest of their exposition ignored.

Too long.

Didn't read.

I'm not giving you one.