Intro
— The Day I Forgot What I Know
But every now and then, I forget.
Case in point: I was on Reddit,
mistake number one, when I stumbled across a post where the Original Poster was
foaming at the mouth about a private publishing house that dared to use an
AI-generated book cover instead of hiring a graphic designer.
Against my better judgment, I
dropped a simple comment:
“A private publishing house’s
primary purpose is to make money, not to give jobs.”
This, I thought, was basic reality.
Economics 101. It’s not even an opinion, it’s just how the system works.
Surely, this one sentence would snap people out of their righteous outrage and
close the case.
Oh, the sweet naivety.
The downvotes rolled in like
medieval villagers with torches. The OP hit me with whataboutisms, emotional
appeals, and unrelated moral crusades. The crowd applauded. The truth had been
spoken — and then buried under the village square, face down, with a stake
through its heart.
And here’s the thing: I don’t care
about the downvotes. They’re meaningless. What mattered was the reminder of a
lesson I already knew: people hate ugly truths because they bruise their egos,
puncture their illusions, and interrupt their warm bath of shared indignation.
So, let’s carve this corpse open and
have a good look inside.
1.
Truth vs. Comfort — The Addiction to Being Right
We all swear we “want the truth,”
but what we actually want is truth that agrees with us. A truth that makes us
feel smart, righteous, and morally clean. Something we can nod at, not
something that makes us flinch.
Drop an ugly truth into the
conversation, like the one I did, and you’ve just slammed a brick into
someone’s fragile glass ego. And here’s the funny part: if the brick breaks the
bottle, it’s the brick’s fault. Not the fact that maybe, just maybe, they’ve
been sipping the wrong drink all along.
Most people don’t “search for the
truth,” they go shopping for confirmation. They want content that affirms their
worldview, not challenges it. If it contradicts them, it’s “biased.” If it
agrees with them, it’s “objective.”
When I told the Reddit mob that the
publishing house existed to make money, not to uphold their sense of artistic
morality, I wasn’t disagreeing with their taste, I was tearing down the stage
where they were performing as noble defenders of Art. And you don’t just boo
someone for that. You throw rotten vegetables.
2.
Validation Over Solutions — The Sacred Complaint Circle
Here’s the part that most “fixers”
don’t get: complaints are rarely requests for help. They’re invitations to a
ritual.
The ritual goes like this:
- I complain.
- You nod, agree, and maybe share your own complaint.
- We bond over the shared misery.
This is sacred. This is holy. And
you, with your neat, factual, two-sentence solution, you’ve just desecrated the
temple.
When someone complains about a
company, they don’t want to hear that the company is simply acting in its own
interest within the rules of capitalism. They want to hear how greedy, evil,
and disgusting the company is — in poetic, emotionally satisfying detail.
You’re supposed to join the circle, light a candle, and sing the hymn of
Righteous Outrage.
Offer a real-world explanation, and
you’ve just ended the ceremony mid-verse. And people don’t like that because if
the problem can be explained in practical terms, that means it can be solved,
and if it can be solved, that means they have to stop complaining. And the
complaint itself was the whole point.
3.
Punishment of Unpleasant Reality — Shooting the Messenger
When reality is unpleasant, the
first instinct isn’t to adapt to it. It’s to kill whoever brought it up.
You’d think that calmly stating a
fact would make people less defensive, that it would show you’re not there to
provoke. Wrong. Calm delivery makes it worse because now they can’t dismiss you
as an extremist or a troll. You’ve left them with no way to discredit the
message except by attacking you.
And that’s the real reason ugly
truths get buried under downvotes, insults, and collective outrage. Not because
they’re wrong, but because they force people to face a world that doesn’t align
with their preferences. That’s painful. That’s inconvenient. And in today’s
culture, “painful” and “inconvenient” are synonymous with “offensive.”
So the mob doesn’t try to dismantle
your argument. They dismantle you.
Outro
— Why This Matters (and Why It Won’t Change)
This isn’t just about Reddit. It’s
not even just about online culture. It’s about human wiring. The truth will
always be the underdog because the brain is a comfort-first, accuracy-second
machine.
People don’t actually want the truth,
they want a truth-shaped pillow they can hug at night. They want to hear their
own beliefs echoed back at them in someone else’s voice, so they can pretend
they’re part of a great chorus of wisdom.
And when you, idiot that you are,
take away the pillow and hand them the actual truth, don’t be surprised when
they try to smother you with it.
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