Beware the Personality-Trap!

It might be the biggest trap out there.

Noam Chomsky is the leading progressive commentator in the world, and countless people (myself included) got acquainted with and interested in progressive criticisms of society through Noam Chomsky’s commentaries.

I follow Chomsky’s commentaries closely, and use his commentaries as a major window on the world. I subject what he says to fierce challenge/critique, since you can’t find out if something is true unless you harshly challenge and harshly critique it.

It’s crucial to distinguish between cult-like worship of a commentator’s commentary and great interest in that commentary. The distinction should be obvious, since the latter involves harsh challenge/critique of everything that the person says, whereas the former consists of swallowing whole everything that they say and of not criticizing anything and of not thinking for yourself.

Chomsky shines the spotlight on things. I think of Chomsky as a progressive news-channel that acquaints its viewers with all sorts of scholarship/journalism that they might have never found out about if they didn’t “tune in”. Let me give two examples. My favorite economist is Dean Baker, and I found out about Baker’s work through Chomsky’s mention of Baker’s work in a 2004 talk (see this timestamp). And my favorite institutional critic is David Ellerman, whose work I also found out about through a mention by Chomsky.

There’s an interesting quote that appears online: Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

The biggest trap out there might well be the personality-trap. If you ever find yourself getting trapped into a discussion of someone’s personality, try to extricate yourself from the trap as quickly as possible. All that matters is the realm of evidence and logic and argument and facts. Nobody should waste a second on the distracting realm of “Is Noam Chomsky mean? Is Noam Chomsky rude? Is Noam Chomsky arrogant?”

Norman Finkelstein nicely articulated how dumb/distracting the whole personality-trap is:

Q: After your book The Holocaust Industry came out in 2000, you were accused of being a quote “self-hating Jew”. What’s your response to that quite common—yet very serious—accusation?

NF: My response is a completely rational one. Let’s say it’s true—for argument’s sake—that I’m a self-hating Jew. What does that have to do with the facts? If Einstein was a self-hating Jew—for argument’s sake—would that mean e does not equal mc-squared? What do the facts have to do with what I am or what I’m not? If I were a self-loving Jew, would that mean everything I say is true?

It’s a great point. You can immediately see how perfectly irrelevant the whole universe of personality is if you consider the reverse scenario. Imagine that Chomsky was regarded by every single human on Earth as the nicest/coolest/best human ever to have lived. Would that matter one iota to the question of whether Chomsky’s arguments are accurate, logical, reasonable? It’s irrelevant.

I don’t mean to suggest that every single time someone tries to drag you down into the realm of personality/gossip/slander that they’re doing it as a deliberate tactic. We live in a society where people like to gossip about celebrities—just turn on the TV and you can see that this is a big feature of our culture that people spend ample time on. It’s natural to gossip. People have been gossiping for all of human history, I’m sure.

But it can be a deliberate tactic of distraction. Every lawyer knows that when you have a bad case, it’s extremely important to distract the jury somehow. Chomsky explained it well:

Norman Finkelstein wrote a book, which is in fact the best compendium that now exists of human rights violations in Israel and the blocking of diplomacy by Israel and the United States, which I mentioned—very careful scholarly book, as all of his work is, impeccable—also about the uses of anti-Semitism to try to silence a critical discussion.

And the framework of his book was a critique of a book of apologetics for atrocities and violence by Alan Dershowitz. That was the framework. So he went through Dershowitz’s claims, showed in great detail that they are completely false and outrageous, that he’s lying about the facts, that he’s an apologist for violence, that he’s a passionate opponent of civil liberties—which he is—and he documented it in detail.

Dershowitz is intelligent enough to know that he can’t respond, so he does what any 10th-rate lawyer does when you have a rotten case: You try to change the subject, maybe by vilifying opposing counsel. That changes the subject. Now we talk about whether, you know, opposing counsel did or did not commit this iniquity. And the tactic is a very good one, because you win, even if you lose. Suppose your charges against are all refuted. You’ve still won. You’ve changed the subject. The subject is no longer the real topic: the crucial facts about Israel, Dershowitz’s vulgar apologetics for them, which sort of are reminiscent of the worst days of Stalinism. We’ve forgotten all of that. We’re now talking about whether Finkelstein did this, that and the other thing. And even if the charges are false, the topic’s been changed. That’s the basis of it.

It’s a good tactic:

And the tactic is a very good one, because you win, even if you lose. Suppose your charges against are all refuted. You’ve still won. You’ve changed the subject.

To be clear, the person who throws the mud wins even if the charges are all refuted. The best response, it seems clear to me, is to not engage. Don’t let them distract. Don’t let them change the subject.

The personality-trap might be the single most powerful trap out there, because it’s a situation where the second you even take the bait and start refuting the charges, you’ve already completely lost. It’s over. You’re now engaged in an irrelevant mud-fight.

Until recently, I never understood why Chomsky didn’t refute Dershowitz’s attacks on him during the debate that they had at Harvard in 2005. Why not expose the attacks as false? And expose the moderator as dishonest? Wouldn’t it be a huge win (for Chomsky) to expose Dershowitz and to expose the moderator?

But now I understand. It was a trap. Chomsky was smart. Chomsky didn’t take the bait. All that Chomsky said about it was the following, and then Chomsky moved right into the topic:

Mr. Mandell will confirm, there was an explicit condition for this debate. That is, that neither participant try to evade the issue by deceitful allegations about the other. So, I, therefore, congratulate Mr. Dershowitz on having made a true statement. I was a counselor at Massad. About the rest, there happens to be an ample record in print, or if you like, you can ask a question, but I’ll keep to the topic and the rules.

Chomsky didn’t even call out Mandell for going back on the condition of the debate. I would never have had that much restraint. I would’ve totally lost my cool, and probably walked out of there.

You set one condition for the debate: no personal attacks. Dershowitz begins with a bunch of personal attacks. The moderator (Mandell) does nothing to enforce the one rule that was the condition for the debate. I would’ve lost it.

But Chomsky had the right approach. Don’t refute Dershowitz’s charges. Don’t call out Mandell for going back on the one rule that was set. Be a laser-beam. Keep to the topic no matter what. Don’t take the bait.

Here’s a paraphrase of a comment that Chomsky made:

Vilification is a wonderful technique; you always lose. The person who throws the mud always wins because there’s no way to respond to such charges.

Let them throw mud at you, or at Chomsky, or at whoever. But don’t respond. It’s a trap. You lose even if you refute it all.

A couple quick notes.

• The personality-trap is highly effective because it arouses huge emotions. If someone makes outrageous personal attacks on someone, it’s very hard to keep your cool. It can be extremely frustrating. You know that the person isn’t around to defend themselves, so it’s very tempting to want to stick up for them and say: “You’re engaging in gossip! You’re engaging in slander! You don’t know this person well at all, and you’ve maybe never even met them in your entire life!” This makes the trap effective, because it triggers people. In fact, I’m amazed that Chomsky was able to keep his cool during the 2005 Harvard-debate.

• I’m not sure whether it’s harder to bite your tongue when they attack you as opposed to when they attack someone else who isn’t present.

• The fact is that refuting slanderous accusations often doesn’t even make a splash anyway. Consider Howard Zinn. Few scholars have gotten more mud slung at them than Howard Zinn. Someone undertook a massive scholarly effort to go through all of the accusations (against Zinn) and show how false they were. Did anyone hear about—or pay attention to—the book? It had zero effect. The vilification-machine will continue exactly as before. I’m not saying that there’s zero scholarly value in going through slanders and exposing them, but it’s quite demoralizing to think that such efforts have no effect on slowing down the tsunami of vilification in any way/shape/form.

• Pretty much the only time in human life when a mud-slinger gets justice served to them is if they say something extremely damaging about someone—or about some company—and then they end up having to try to support in a courtroom the mud that they’ve slung. This almost never happens. Outside the courtroom, there’s no justice when it comes to mud-slinging, so it’s best to avoid the trap.

• In a world of constant lies, it’s deeply satisfying to see a truth-challenged person get sued for everything they own in a court of law. But defamation law isn’t necessarily a good thing. I don’t have any strong view on defamation law, but I value free speech extremely highly and I’m not sure whether defamation law constitutes an unjustified infringement on free speech.