"Letters to a Young Contrarian" by Christopher Hitchens

• I attack and criticize people myself; I have no right to expect lenience in return.
• The noble title of “dissident” must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement, and it has been consecrated by many exemplary and courageous men and women.
• Nonetheless, there are in all periods people who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge the debt or not. (Don’t expect to be thanked by the way. The life of an oppositionist is supposed to be difficult.)
• The essence of the independent mind lies not in what is thinks, but in how it thinks.
• In every epoch, there have been those to argue that “greater” goods, such as tribal solidarity or social cohesion, take precedence over the demands of justice. It is supposed to be an axiom of “Western” civilization that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as “order.” But in point of fact, such immolations have been very common.
• It’s always as well to remember, when considering “miscarriages” of justice, as the authorities so neutrally and quaintly like to call them, that the framing of the innocent axiomatically involves the exculpation of the guilty. This is abortion, not miscarriage.
• Another observation from antiquity has it that, while courage is not in itself one of the primary virtues, it is the quality that makes the exercise of the virtues possible.
• One of the hardest things for anyone to face is the conclusion that his or her “own” side is in the wrong when engaged in a war.
• The pressure to keep silent and be a “team player” is reinforceable by the accusations of cowardice or treachery that will swiftly be made against dissenters.
• Quite often, the “baptism” of a future dissenter occurs in something unplanned, such as a spontaneous resistance to an episode of bullying or bigotry, or a challenge to some piece of pedagogical stupidity.
• To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.
• You must feel not that you want to but that you have to.
• The Greek oracle proclaimed “Nothing Too Much” as the supreme wisdom; the lazy modern translation is “Moderation in All Things,” which is not quite the same.
• It’s often been observed that the major religions can give no convincing account of Paradise.
• And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.
• Allegiance is a powerful force in human affairs; it will not do to treat someone as a mental serf if he is convinced that his thralldom is honorable and voluntary.
• It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or “converting” the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end up holding exactly the same position as that with which he began.
• Oriental religions, with their emphasis on Nirvana and fatalism, are repackaged for Westerners as therapy, and platitudes or tautologies masquerade as wisdom.
• If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows that he is right.
• For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.
• Whenever A and B are in opposition to one another, anyone who attacks or criticizes A is accused of aiding and abetting B. And it is often true, objectively and on a short-term analysis, that he is making things easier for B. Therefore, say the supporters of A, shut up and don’t criticize: or at least criticize “constructively,” which in practice always means favourably. And from this it is only a short step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is the highest duty of a journalist.
• The Principle of the Wedge is that you should not act justly now for fear of raising expectations that you may act still more justly in the future--expectation that you are afraid you will not have the courage to satisfy.
• The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do any admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case, which, ex hypothesis, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the present one.
• Every public action that is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.
• The Principle of Unripe Time is that people should not do at the present moment what they think right at that moment, because the moment at which they think it right has not yet arrived.
• The job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it’s more complicated than that. At least, that’s part of the job. However, you must have noticed now often certain “complexities” are introduced as a means of obfuscation. Here it becomes necessary to ply with glee the celebrated razor of old Occam, dispose of unnecessary assumptions, and proclaim that, actually, things are less complicated than they appear.
• Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim de omnius dubitandum.
• Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville’s unforgettable line, “Created sick--Commanded to be well.” And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.
• There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is the moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativist and “non judgmental” that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultravindicitivness and ultra-compassion.
• No one can be entirely sure that any solution he proposes will not contain its own woes and pains by way of unintended consequences.
• I repeat: what really matters about any individual is not what he thinks, but how he thinks.
• Religions is, and always has been, a means of control.
• “Science,” as we call it, or objective and disinterested inquiry as it should be called, has helped contain and domesticate religion and vulgar Creationism but will never succeed in dethroning it.
• An old definition of a gentleman: someone who is never rude except on purpose.
• Books that were once banned or ridiculed or both, from the time of the condemned Socrates to the time of the forbidden Ulysses, have had to be saved not by the crowd, but from the crowd.
• Many are the works of genius now in public libraries that would have been incinerated if a roll of opinion had been called.
• The first thing to notice, surely, is that these voyages into the ocean of the public mind [opinion polls] are chartered and commissioned by wealthy and powerful organizations, who do not waste their money satisfying mere curiosity. The tactics are the same as those of market research; the point is not to interpret the world but to change it.
• You may have noticed that popular opinion is not always and invariably cited by the elites. Nor is it consistently tested: I don’t remember reading the findings of any poll about the tight money policy of the Federal Reserve. Who would pay (a properly sampled poll is quite an expensive business) for such a thing? No, “public opinion” is not usually recycled until it has been treated. Only then are people informed whether or not their own opinion enjoys the certification of being the majority or approved one.
• People in the mass or the aggregate often have a lower intelligence than their constituent parts.
• Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience, that has decided it knows what is wants and is entitled to get it.
• One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others.
• Remember that saying nothing is also a decision, and that the relativists and the “nonjudgmental” have made up their minds just as much, if not as firmly.
• All human achievement must also be accomplished by mammals and this realization (interestingly negated by sexless plaster saints and representations of angles) puts us on a useful spot. It strongly suggests that anyone could do what the heroes have done. Our current culture, with its stupid emphasis on the “role model,” offers as examples the lives of superstars and princesses and other pseudo-ethereal beings whose lives--fortunately, I think--cannot by definition be emulated.
• Of course if the oddballs and doubters were in a majority they wouldn’t be oddballs and doubters.
• Those who need or want to think for themselves will always be a minority; the human race may be inherently individualistic and even narcissistic but in the mass it is quite easy to control.
• People have a need for reassurance and belonging.
• There is an important paradox at work here: of those who are drawn into oppositional activity or mentality it can often be observed that they are rebellious or independent types. Yet the best of them are actuated by concern for others, and for causes and movements larger than themselves.
• Don’t allow your thinking to be done for you by any party or faction, however high-minded.
• Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we,” or speaks in the name of “us.” Distract yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style.
• There is an obligation, if your “own” government is engaged in an unjust and deceitful war, to oppose it and to obstruct it and to take the side of the victims.
• Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term “we” or “us” without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that “we” are all agreed on “our” interests and identity.
• Always ask who this “we” is; as often as not it’s an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.
• I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.
• In one way, travelling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight.
• The sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.
• The two worst things, as one can work out without leaving home, are racism and religion.
• Distinctions that seem trivial to the visitor are the obsessive concern of the local and the provincial minds.
• We still inhabit the prehistory of our race, and have not caught up with the immense discoveries about our own nature and about the nature of the universe.
• It especially annoys me when racists are accused of “discrimination.” The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members of one “race” to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.
• Just as you discover that stupidity and cruelty are the same everywhere, you find that the essential elements of humanism are the same everywhere, too.
• Most important of all, the instinct for justice and for liberty is just as much “innate” in us as are the promptings of tribalism and sexual xenophobia and superstition.
• People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains; every time a Bastille falls one is always pleasantly surprised by how many sane and decent people were there all along.
• The crucial organ is the mind, not the gut. People assert themselves out of an unquenchable sense of dignity.
• Beware of identity politics.
• There is a relationship between intelligence and humor and it’s very unwise to try and describe it.
• An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence.
• Very often, crowds or audiences will laugh complicity or slavishly, just to show they “see” the joke and are all together.
• The sophisticated element in humor is exactly its capacity to shock, or to surprise, or to occur unintentionally.
• The literal mind is baffled by the iron one, demanding explanations that only intensify the joke.
• Humor is easily enough definable as a weapon of criticism and subversion, but it is very often a mere comfort or survival technique.
• The great caricaturists of the past were prepared to shock people beyond reason in showing the simple fact that our masters are made from the same damp clay as we are: that’s why they (the caricaturists, that is, like Daumier) often went to jail.
• A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.
• Tedium is its own reward.
• It’s important to be able to recognize and seize crux moments when they do appear, but much of the time one is faced with quotidian tasks and routines.
• The great reward, if that’s the right word, lies in the people you will meet when engaged in the same work, the lessons you will learn, and the confidence you will acquire from having some experiences and convictions of your own--to set against the received or third hand opinions of so many others.
• New forms of the artistic register are on of the infallible signs of an authentic moment.
• Do not worry too much about who your friends are, or what company you may be keeping. Any cause worth fighting for will attract a plethora of people.
• Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves; in any case they are, as I was once taught to say, tackling the man and not the ball.
• Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the “transcendent” and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.