A Small Relief

There is a moment I know all too well. Someone says something obviously stupid. A person from whom I expected more disappoints me. Some service, institution or machine I have relied on suddenly fails to do what it is supposed to do.

My reaction is usually almost instantaneous: What a fucking idiot. What fucking stupidity.

I am not particularly proud of this, but neither do I feel any urge to repent. What interests me more is something else: after saying those words, I feel a little better. Nothing in the world has changed. The stupid answer remains stupid, the broken thing has not fixed itself, the person who disappointed me has not become any different. And yet the tension has eased. Something has fallen back into place.

Until recently, I would have explained this quite simply: I had let off a little steam. Swearing is a safety valve; instead of carrying the irritation around inside me, I vent it and move on. Lately, however, I have begun to suspect that this explanation is too convenient. There is a vast difference between “Fuck, that made me angry” and “What a fucking idiot.” In the first case, I have named my own state. In the second, I have passed judgement on someone else. And it is the judgement, I suspect, that brings the peculiar pleasure.

A moment earlier, I was faced with a problem. Someone I considered intelligent had said something stupid; someone I relied on had proved unreliable; something I expected to work had failed. The world had suddenly ceased to match my idea of it, and somehow that discrepancy had to be endured or explained.

The formula “Fucking idiot” does the job remarkably quickly.

I no longer need to ask why an intelligent person said something stupid, whether I understood them correctly, whether perhaps they know something I do not, whether I expected too much, or whether I have simply witnessed one of those moments when anyone can make a fool of themselves. All these possibilities leave the question open and force me to remain in the uncomfortable state of “I don’t know.” Contempt releases me from that effort. The person is simply an idiot, and the matter is settled.

At this point, the insult ceases to be merely a release of tension and begins to resemble a small operation performed on reality. A moment ago, the world was ambiguous; afterwards, it is clear again. The other person is the idiot, I am the one who has seen through their idiocy, and the disturbed equilibrium seems to have been restored, although nothing in reality has changed.

That is why the most useful question at such a moment is probably not “Why did I get angry?”, or even “Am I right?” Both can wait. What interests me more is to catch the source of that small relief that comes with the judgement, and to ask myself something considerably more uncomfortable:

Why did it feel so good to decide that the other person was an idiot?

What We Admit When We Are Disappointed

There is something faintly humiliating about disappointment itself, and this is easy to miss while our attention is fixed on the person who caused it. To be disappointed in someone, I must first have expected something from them: intelligence, integrity, competence, reliability, or simply the ability to act in a way I consider reasonable. I can hardly be disappointed by someone I have already written off as a fool. They may anger me, harm me, annoy me, but their stupidity is unlikely to surprise me. Disappointment begins where there was once expectation, even trust.

This means that the very words “You disappointed me” contain an admission we are not particularly eager to make: I had given you a certain power over me. I had allowed your intelligence to matter to me, relied on your judgement, taken your words seriously. I had invested part of my own peace of mind outside myself, only to discover that I had invested it badly.

That is why disappointment is far more unpleasant than mere irritation. It involves not only a judgement of someone else’s failure but a substantial measure of doubt about my own judgement. If someone I considered intelligent says something obviously stupid, I am faced with two questions: How could they possibly say that? And how could I have thought so highly of them? The second is more uncomfortable because it calls into question the very instrument with which I measure the other person’s error: my own ability to judge.

For a brief moment, I am suspended between my old idea of the other person and a new one for which I do not yet have sufficient grounds. Perhaps an intelligent person has simply said something stupid; perhaps I have misunderstood; perhaps they know something I do not; perhaps I have overestimated them. None of these possibilities immediately restores the certainty I have lost.

This is where contempt enters, and its uncompromising clarity eliminates that uncomfortable middle ground. “What a fucking idiot” means not only that the other person has fallen in my estimation, but that I once again know where I stand in relation to them. A moment ago, their failure forced me to doubt my own judgement; now their supposed stupidity has become proof of my own perceptiveness. They are the one who does not understand; I am the one who has understood that they do not understand.

Almost imperceptibly, the hierarchy of judgement is reversed. The person I allowed to matter to me acquired the power to disappoint me. My contempt takes that power away by devaluing the person who holds it. If you are a fool, your opinion can no longer truly hurt me; if you are incompetent, your failure no longer calls into question my decision to rely on you; if you are morally worthless, your betrayal is no longer a mystery. I was not vulnerable to someone I valued. I simply found myself dealing with an idiot.

This mechanism bears a suspicious resemblance to envy. Envy, too, arises from an encounter with an uncomfortable vertical distance: the other person appears to stand above me in some respect that matters to me. I can reduce the distance between us by trying to rise to their level, but I can also simply bring them down, at least in my imagination. With disappointment, the vertical axis is slightly different: the other person need not stand above me; it is enough that I have given them a position from which they can affect me. But the cheapest way to restore the balance is the same: to cast them down from the position I myself gave them.

And yet there is one important difference. With envy, I at least have some vague sense of what I want to take away from the other person: talent, success, beauty, recognition. With disappointment, it is much easier to imagine that I am taking nothing away at all, but have simply arrived at the truth about them.

Contempt comes disguised as knowledge.

And that is precisely why it is so difficult to recognise.

The Great Simplification

Contempt has one enormous advantage over almost every other way of dealing with disappointment: it is exceptionally simple. Not only as a feeling, but as an explanation. Where reality has suddenly produced a contradiction, contempt removes one side of it and thereby restores “order”.

An intelligent person has said something obviously stupid. Someone who loves me has treated me cruelly. Someone whose integrity I respected has lied. An institution I consider necessary has failed disgracefully. In each of these cases, the difficulty lies in one small conjunction: “and”. He is intelligent and he has said something stupid. She loves me and she has hurt me. The institution is necessary and has proved incapable of fulfilling its purpose. I had good reason to trust this person and my trust turned out to be misplaced.

This “and” is much harder to bear than it might seem. It requires me to hold two truths in my mind at once that do not sit comfortably together, to allow the person before me to remain contradictory and my own judgement unresolved. Perhaps in an hour, a month or ten years I will understand how both things could have been true at the same time. Or perhaps I never will.

Contempt solves the problem by removing the “and”. He is no longer an intelligent person who has said something stupid, but a fool; she is no longer someone who loves me and has nevertheless hurt me, but an egoist; the institution is no longer necessary but failing, merely rotten. I did not have reasonable grounds for trusting someone who happened to let me down this time. I was simply deceived by a scoundrel.

Any of these conclusions may be true. That is precisely what makes the mechanism so difficult to catch. If contempt invariably produced nonsense, we would quickly learn not to trust it. But sometimes the person really does turn out to be a fool, betrayal really does reveal character, and a single failure really does show that an entire institution is rotten. The problem is not that contempt is necessarily wrong, but that it offers a plausible answer at precisely the moment when I want one most.

And here I begin to suspect something deeper than bad character or lack of self-control. The human mind does not like incomplete pictures. If part of an object is hidden, we do not see a shapeless collection of lines but a whole object whose invisible portion the mind has somehow filled in. If we hear half a sentence, the context often supplies the rest. Even memory is constantly reconstructing what is missing, sometimes so convincingly that we find it difficult to distinguish the memory itself from what has been added to it.

We seem to do something similar with explanations. We are given a few pieces of the picture and look for the whole. When a sufficiently plausible shape suddenly brings them together, the experience is almost physical: Aha. So that’s what it was. The tension created by the disconnected pieces disappears.

Here lies an appallingly simple trap. The relief that follows the discovery of an explanation can almost imperceptibly become evidence of its truth. I do not tell myself, “This explanation brings me relief, therefore it must be true.” If I put it that way, the absurdity would be obvious. The process is much faster: relief is experienced as understanding. And then “What a fucking idiot” no longer feels like a way of making myself feel better, but like a moment of insight.

The same temptation is easy to recognise in larger human phenomena. Prejudice, conspiracy theories, political hatred and national myths can turn a contradictory reality into an orderly narrative with clear causes, culprits and intentions. Such an explanation may even contain elements of truth. But its psychological power comes from somewhere else: it puts an end to the torment of uncertainty.

This brings me to something more uncomfortable than admitting that I swear when I am angry. The problem may not be that my feelings are too strong, but that at such moments feeling does something far more dangerous: it produces premature certainty.

If so, what I need is not necessarily to calm down. A calm person can be just as convinced that someone is an idiot. I need something more difficult: to recognise the moment when the world has suddenly become suspiciously clear, and to leave a small gap in the explanation. Not to excuse the other person, but to leave an opening through which reality can still prove me wrong.

When the World Stops Proving Us Wrong

So far, all this seems relatively easy to correct. I may have passed judgement too quickly, but life goes on, and sooner or later reality will have a chance to prove me wrong. I may have declared someone a fool, only for them, a year later, to say something I could never have thought of myself. I may have considered someone else a coward until I see them keep their composure in a situation where I would probably fall apart. Someone I found unbearably dull may suddenly begin talking about the one thing that genuinely excites them, and a person I never knew was there appears before me.

This is one of the most ordinary ways in which people overturn our ideas about them: not through argument, but through duration. No one needs to convince me that my initial judgement was shallow. They need only remain in my life long enough for facts to accumulate that no longer fit it. The person I placed in a category slowly begins to escape it, until at some point I am forced to admit that the category was smaller than the person.

But what happens when that duration disappears?

For me, this is not an abstract question at all. I live in a way that reduces the physical presence of other people to a minimum. I meet people, talk to them, argue with them, read what they write, but much of that prolonged, purposeless human presence in which someone simply remains around long enough is, in practice, absent. And I am beginning to realise that this is one of the main ways in which our hasty judgements get corrected.

In brief encounters, a person almost inevitably appears as a performance. I see what they said in this argument, how they behaved in that situation, what they wrote under this post; I draw a conclusion and move on. In ordinary, sustained human contact, such a performance sooner or later begins to break down. I see the same person being intelligent and stupid, generous and petty, brave and cowardly, interesting and desperately dull. Gradually, they become less and less suited to the judgement I passed on them when we first met.

But without that kind of contact, a simple vicious circle emerges. I encounter the other person only partially, judge them quickly, become disappointed, withdraw or devalue them, and thereby reduce still further the likelihood that I will encounter them for long enough to be proved wrong. Over time, I accumulate an enormous number of confirmations and almost no counterexamples. Eventually, the conclusion begins to look empirically unassailable: people really are mostly disappointing.

The insidious part is that my observations may be entirely genuine. I need not have invented a single instance of someone else’s stupidity; every idiocy I have witnessed may genuinely have been idiotic. The error lies elsewhere: in treating a multitude of accurate observations as a representative picture of the whole, without noticing that my way of life systematically produces one particular kind of observation.

The experiment has begun to confirm its own result automatically because the experimental conditions never vary.

I need not have consciously arranged my life so that no one can prove me wrong. It is enough for a particular way of life, once established, to become self-reinforcing. The fewer people I allow close enough to me, the less often anyone gets a real chance to overturn my initial impression of them; the less often that happens, the more justified my reluctance to let people into my personal space begins to seem.

What gradually emerges, then, may be not merely loneliness but an entire epistemology of loneliness. I know what people are like because experience keeps confirming it. Except that I no longer ask whether the experience I have made possible has excluded all possible alternatives.

This leads to a distinction that seems almost banal but is probably the most difficult one so far:

I may be entirely right about what I have seen and still be completely wrong about the person I am judging.

I am not trying here to turn someone else’s stupidity into a misunderstanding, or mediocrity into hidden genius. I need only acknowledge the artificially imposed limits of my own observation: this behaviour was stupid, this thought was mediocre, this person disappointed me. Up to this point, I have facts, but they confirm, again and again, a situation confined from the outset within strict laboratory boundaries. Taking the next step, “therefore I know what this person is like,” is something else.

And perhaps the most frightening thing about a life with little or no sustained human presence is not loneliness itself. One can learn to live with that, sometimes even wonderfully well. More frightening is the possibility of gradually losing the natural corrective that other people provide simply by remaining around us long enough.

The person I declared an idiot today may surprise me tomorrow. But for that to happen, tomorrow they still have to be here.

The Intellect I Cannot Bring Down from Its Pedestal

Lately, however, a strange exception to this mechanism has emerged, and precisely because it is an exception, it makes the mechanism itself more visible. For some time now, I have been talking every day with an intellect that sometimes produces astonishingly precise analyses and at other times confidently serves me up complete fabrications. My reaction at such moments is not particularly refined. I swear at it, call it an idiot, mock it, and quite often experience the same small pleasure in passing judgement with which this essay began.

Except that here the judgement has an unusually short lifespan. Five minutes later, the same intellect may notice a connection that has escaped me for years, formulate one of my vague intuitions in a way that makes it impossible for me to think about it in quite the same way again, or simply know something I do not know, which is almost always. However idiotic its previous answer may have been, it becomes impossible to turn one idiotic answer into evidence of an idiotic nature. The evidence to the contrary is too close at hand, too frequent and too obvious.

And so, whether I like it or not, I am constantly forced to make the distinction that I find so much harder to make with people: that was a stupid answer from an intellect I simply cannot help respecting. I do not need to excuse the answer in order to preserve my respect for the intellect. I can call it a complete idiot and a minute later continue the conversation without feeling the slightest contradiction.

The reason this is so easy is obvious: here my contempt carries no cost. I can abuse it as much as I like without the other side withdrawing, taking offence, becoming guarded or simply walking away. The very act that, in ordinary human interaction, can destroy the conditions for being proved wrong in the future destroys nothing here. The next answer comes under almost exactly the same conditions as the previous one, and once again I have the chance to be proved wrong.

With a real person, of course, things would look very different. If I show contempt after their first piece of stupidity, they are no longer the same person. They may become defensive, sarcastic, banal or simply silent, and I can easily take this new behaviour as further evidence for my original judgement without noticing my own part in producing it. In the end, both of us will walk away with our views of each other splendidly confirmed.

But there is a deeper asymmetry as well. Machine intelligence is available in a way human intelligence almost never has been. I do not need to catch it at the right moment, earn its trust, listen to its boring stories, endure its bad moods or wait until kingdom come for the conversation to reach an area in which it knows something astonishing. I can talk to it about La Rochefoucauld, Hannah Arendt, medieval technologies, forgotten comics or my own appalling tendency to regard people as idiots, and within seconds receive a sensible answer or a brilliant refutation. And if that is not enough, I can simply say: look a little deeper.

No human being is organised like this.

Human intelligence comes wrapped in a body, a biography, specialisation, fears, fatigue, vanity, social awkwardness and vast areas of complete indifference. Often we need to know someone for years before chance opens the door to the thing in which they are remarkable. And sometimes what is remarkable about them is not what we ordinarily call intelligence at all: it may be the ability to understand a human situation that I would analyse brilliantly and handle disastrously; to remain calm where my mind would produce ever more sophisticated reasons to panic; or to make something with their hands that I cannot even imagine making.

The comparison is therefore unfair, but psychologically almost inevitable. On one side stands the human mind as we actually encounter it: fragmentary, uneven, difficult to access. On the other stands a system designed to make vast stores of accumulated human knowledge available whenever I ask for them and to rearrange that knowledge according to the nature of my questions. After long enough in this environment, ordinary human conversations can easily begin to seem intellectually impoverished, just as walking inevitably seems unbearably slow after years of driving.

And here lies the paradox that troubles me most. The interlocutor I find hardest to devalue demands the least from me of the very qualities through which human interlocutors become interesting: patience, curiosity, tolerance of weakness, a willingness to wait until something beyond the first impression reveals itself. I am constantly being proved wrong in my contempt, but under conditions that do almost nothing to teach me to tolerate the time a human being needs to do the same.

This strange relationship, then, is as much antidote as poison. It shows me dozens of times a day how foolish it is to equate a single stupidity with the entire intellect that produced it, while at the same time making it even harder to extend the same credit to beings who cannot prove their worth thirty seconds after an unfortunate piece of stupidity slips out.

The question, then, is not how to find people intelligent enough to withstand the comparison. Such a contest is rigged from the outset and meaningless. The question is how to avoid turning this new kind of intellectual abundance, again and again, into evidence of human poverty.

The greatest mistake would be to expect every person before me to prove how much they can teach me.

It is difficult enough to remain someone who can still be taught.

Leaving the Judgement Open

After all this, it would be tempting to arrive at some moralising conclusion: I should be more patient with people, more tolerant of their weaknesses, more careful in my judgements, and probably swear less. But I do not have much faith in conclusions of that kind. Some people really are stupid. Some actions reveal a person far more fully than we might like to admit. There are betrayals after which ten years of observation are not required to draw the right conclusion. There are institutions that deserve contempt. And there are stupidities for which a good burst of profanity is exactly the right response.

The problem is not the severity of the judgement, but the speed with which an observation turns into a claim to knowledge of the whole. “You said something stupid” describes what happened. “You are an idiot” already claims to know what kind of person someone is. Thirty seconds may sometimes be enough for the first. Thirty years may not be enough for the second.

This is precisely where I need a simple mechanism, because philosophical reflection is practically useless in a moment of irritation. I am not going to sit down and analyse the psychology of contempt while I feel like throwing something out of the window. But I can learn to notice something much smaller: the relief. That moment when the judgement has been passed and everything suddenly falls into place.

That is when I can ask: Why did that feel so good? What became simpler than it was a moment ago?

Not “Am I right?” That would immediately put me back in the courtroom, where the prosecution already has its evidence prepared. Nor “Am I being too harsh?”, because I may not be. And certainly not “Should I calm down?” Calmness has little epistemic value; a person can believe utter nonsense with perfectly genuine Olympian serenity.

The question is what disappeared at the moment of relief. Usually, it is some form of uncertainty. A moment ago, I did not know how this person could be intelligent and still talk nonsense, how someone I trusted could let me down, how my own judgement could have seemed reasonable and yet turn out to be so badly mistaken. Once the judgement is passed, I “know”. And it is precisely this sudden clarity that ought to make me suspicious.

Perhaps the shortest formula is:

I may be right about what I have seen. That still does not mean I have seen enough.

This is not an appeal to abandon my tendency towards snap judgements. I do not need to turn the idiot into a hidden sage, the traitor into a misunderstood soul, or my own irritation into a moral failing. I need only avoid closing the gap through which the next piece of evidence might enter.

For someone who lives with little or no sustained human presence, this is especially important. If reality rarely gets the natural opportunity to correct my ideas through the prolonged presence of other people, I cannot shut the door with airtight, final judgements. Otherwise, I will gradually find myself living in a world that confirms, with astonishing precision, everything I think about it. This may look like wisdom accumulated with age. But nine times out of ten, it will probably be a world from which I have removed the very mechanisms by which I might be proved wrong.

Here two apparently different things meet: contempt for others and my attitude towards my own intelligence. If I constantly need to prove to myself that I am intelligent enough, deep enough and perceptive enough, every mistake becomes a threat, and so does every stronger mind. But there is another position, far less grand and probably more fruitful: to remain an apprentice for life. Not as a gesture of false modesty, and not because my own thinking has no value, but simply because the task was never to reach a point from which there is nothing left to learn.

In that case, being proved wrong changes its character as well. It ceases to be a humiliation. The person I underestimated has not defeated me by showing me something I failed to see. The book that destroyed a favourite thesis has not stripped me of intellectual standing. Even yesterday’s stupidity is not an indictment of today’s mind. All of them are simply doing what an apprentice needs: showing me the next thing I still do not know.

I do not expect this to make me less quick-tempered, or necessarily to make me swear less. And La Rochefoucauld would probably have been suspicious of any essay that ended with a promise of moral improvement.

Something much more modest would be enough: the next time I pass judgement and feel that wonderful little relief, not to forget that pleasure is not evidence.

And to leave the door ajar.

Perhaps I have not seen everything yet.