Letters to a Young Contrarian Book

Have you ever conceived of a lean epistolary work on the pugnacious pursuit of truth and the importance of descaling your cherished ideals as often as possible in an effort to avoid gestating a stilted intellect that ossifies with time like sun baked avian offal? That was very prescient of you, as the late master of melee most mouthful produced one such work, and now reaches out across time to steady you by your tender morsels, and shotgun, past your trembling lips, the hot second hand vapors of wisdom tirelessly sought. Until you're shouting: "Kiss me hard on the mouth you disagreeable asshole. I wish to learn the pressure points of conventional wisdom, so that I might subdue those who advocate it using only a bottle of absinthe and my thumbs."

Have you ever thought to yourself that education's primary concern shouldn't be ladling the gruel of context divorced particulates into the squiggly cortical topologies of curiosity until it all resembles a coagulated mass of stultifying minutiae and rancid chicken stock, but instead should be committed to equipping students with the tools necessary to innervate these channels with stagnation battering, tidal currents? Producing people who are not easily affronted. People who do not avoid verbal conflict in matters that are serious to them. People who find consensus to be insufficient in matters of policy and what they should value. People who are not easily taken in by the emotional appeals of demagogues, charlatans, and wankers. Who, in short, are capable of thinking for themselves. Then let me tell you, those sentiments are well expressed in this svelte correspondence between Hitchens and the prospective gadfly which seeks his counsel.

This book examines what it means to gird your loins for intellectual battle while wielding the exotic weaponry of unpopular opinions. This book teaches, much like the chain whip and three-section staff I happened upon in kung fu class, which disincentivize their misuse by mangling your knobby bits when flailed wildly, that you should unsheathe your contrarian objections with great care, and never in the service of calling attention to your asinine shenanigans. It invites you to question authority (not at the expense of allowing your kidney stones to go unpulverized) in its many forms: Political affiliations with pre-packaged, highly processed beliefs which masquerade as perfectly coherent and self evident, but sport nutritional information that is incomprehensible when examined. Fundamentalist religious indoctrination which seeks to stigmatize the act of reasoning itself as an unforgivable act of high treason. The media which promulgate falsehoods of extraordinary omission in order to pander to their viewership, obfuscating substantive debate in favor of the comforting atavistic narratives of us versus them, tribe versus tribe, good versus evil. And finally; you. Your self assurance in matters you are deeply ignorant of. The halo of all those unchallenged presuppositions, gaslighting your drunkards walk through the dark spaces between true knowledge and puffed up pretensions to it.

I recommend this book to everyone, without reservation. So lets poor a little Johnnie Walker Black in memory of Hitch and go out with a quote which he was fond of.

As Mill said in Chapter II of On Liberty: "The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."