Towers

If you decide to become a soldier in the war of ideals that has raged for all time, it is unfortunantly true that you will meet on the vast and varied landscape known as the human mind many people who are brilliant, but have erected towers of ignorance, powerful, imposing, and impervious to facts. In my own limited and short journeys have met several such towers, and no matter how much I hurled facts, figures, and witty quotations at them, they have continued to stand, tall and power, immune to all my arguments.

In a recent confrontation of this nature, I found myself wondering at thickness of the walls and the height of the tower that two gentlemen had erected, from which they poured abuse on an organization they next to nothing about and its failure to have any resemblance to a second organization which they knew nothing about either. Such towers are immensely infuriating to those they withstand, and I found myself devoting far too much time to constructing refutations of their utterances of nonsense. The problem with nonsensical utterances is that there are so many ways to refute them that you can often spend a great deal of time preparing attacks from every possible angle, when you will at most use one.

However, two separate thoughts came to me as I thought how best to bring down a tower impervious to anything I could do. First, assaulting such towers is often a waste of time. Granted, there are times when nonsense is broadcast so far and so loud that it must be contradicted, but it is often better to save our energy and time to discuss truth with those who are genuinely interested in discovering it. Second, and perhaps more importantly, as we survey such towers, we should take a moment to see if our vantage point is a result of our standing on a mountain of fact and reasoning, or if we are able to see so far because we have erected our own citadel of folly.