“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
— Thomas Paine
or in short,
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason, is like administering medicine to the dead.”
Sometimes, you find yourself going in circles around someone who has renounced all plausible reasons, not by their cognition, because they keep rambling, trailing the path left by the process you traversed to infuse common or – daringly – less common sense in this person.
Proximal development can only expand the fractal of a person’s comprehension level by so much. And when you notice they have reached their max, it is time to leave the debate behind and leave people where you found them.
Some people cannot be changed for the better. No matter how hard you try. And poignantly, a meritocracy upon which human evolution depends has no respect for consensus, so do not fret.
Thanks, Thomas, you were a wise man.
