"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here's my small gift to anyone who reads me: a clear view into why I disagree so often, and how I try to do it without becoming a cartoon. I'm not selling rebellion, and I'm not auditioning for the role of contrarian online. I'm just noticing that the older I get, the more my private reasoning diverges from the crowd's public performance. I want that gap to be legible.
Recently, I watched dozens of people destroy someone online. A hobbyist photographer posted a color-graded photo of a public landmark and shared the exact editing settings. Within hours, influential accounts declared it fake and dishonest. Whoa. That's a strong claim, a really big deal.
The pile-on was swift, totalizing. What struck me wasn't the initial accusation but the responses when they defended themselves: "If they had just stayed down and apologized." As if compliance was virtue. As if the very act of resistance proved guilt; you know the script. It's the choreography of a struggle session performed by people who believe they're resisting it.
I checked my reasoning three times. Intent: teaching a technique and sharing settings. Context: common practice in that community. Impact: who specifically was harmed, and how? The more I examined it, the clearer the gap became between color grading and fabricating a scene, between a transparent tutorial and manipulation. But saying this would cost me communities, relationships, the comfortable anonymity of agreement. I'm saying it anyway.
What I value first is clarity. Not cleverness, not victory, clarity. Before I post, I try to name what the disagreement is actually about. Sometimes it's taste. Sometimes it's a different model of cause and effect. Sometimes mere jealousy. Sometimes it's two moral priorities bumping shoulders, each valid inside a different frame. When I can name the thing, the volume drops, the heat dissipates. That's when the work begins.
The Machine We Are Inside
Most public disagreement now runs through systems that literally pay 
for speed, certainty and spectacle. Slowness, doubt and revision earn almost nothing. The result is a market where attention flows to outrage, and where the price of nuance is invisibility. People learn to keep heterodox views in private. They learn to signal safety rather than speak plainly. The visible consensus gets louder, and less representative.
I keep seeing entire communities adopt wholesale the opinions of whoever speaks loudest, who's got the most followers, then point to each other as proof they're right. The circularity would be funny, if it weren't so effective. "There are resources about why this is problematic," they say, pointing to content created by people who already agree with them. The snake eats its tail then calls it "consensus".
Language gets strange in this environment. Offense becomes harm. Harm becomes a suitcase word that holds anything we fear, dislike or remember painfully. A Halloween costume sits on the same shelf as systemic violence (though it definitely can happen ). A disagreement about terminology carries the same weight as actual discrimination. These are politically agnostic tools: anyone can pick them up while believing they're the good guys. The flattening serves no one, least of all the people these language games claim to protect.
Look, I use a simple triangle to stay sane: intent, context, impact. Any two corners without the third usually describe the mess. Strong intent and strong context with no credible harm needs measurement. Strong impact with absent context or contemptuous intent deserves serious response and change. What I refuse is the collapse that says every misalignment deserves the same fury.
Not "is this true?" but "can I afford to say this is true?" The mental tax compounds. Hours get spent constructing arguments that get dismissed with slogans. Sources go unchecked by those who cite them most confidently. Counterarguments remain unexamined while positions get adopted wholesale from whoever sounds most certain that morning... such an exhausting asymmetry.
What cuts deeper is watching people I respected fail their own tests. They know better. They have the tools. But when the crowd moves, they move with it, choosing safety over accuracy. Not evil, just weak. Unwilling to risk even five minutes of discomfort for precision. Each time it happens, my circle of trust shrinks a little more. And yeah, it hurts.
What this is not
I need to be explicit: this is not a First Amendment brief and it is not a wink to people who want to say cruel things without consequences. The government isn't in the room here; this is about norms, accuracy and proportion inside communities and platforms.
The standard I use applies in every direction. The same lazy thinking I critique on the left shows up on the right: people who cry censorship at any pushback, who confuse criticism with silencing, who demand infinite tolerance for genuinely harmful speech while offering none in return, who wield "debate" and "rationality" as cudgels instead of tools: not my team.
I'm not defending slurs, targeted harassment or dehumanization. Some speech is beyond the pale. The difference is I can say why: intent, context, impact line up to show contempt and credible harm, so strong consequences make sense.
Examining proportion doesn't mean equal platforms or moral equivalence. It means naming harm precisely and matching the remedy: correction, counterspeech, labels, limits, removal, and bans, scaled to evidence.
How I carry dissent in public
I promised an operating manual, so here's the discipline I try to practice.
First, I ask what powers my stance. If it's a principle I can name, like fairness, precision, dignity, then I keep going. If it's bruised pride, control or boredom, I cool off and try again later. The world doesn't need more flinches dressed up as values.
Second, I look for likely effects. Not extrapolated catastrophes, but near, testable ones. Who's helped, who's harmed, what evidence would show up if I'm wrong. When people claimed the post was 'actively harming the community,' I asked for the pathway from a settings walkthrough to harm. If the allegation is deception, point to the specific false claim and the measurable consequence. If the allegation is confusion, show evidence of people being misled and how the guidance caused it. In this case, the practice was standard and disclosed. The connection skipped several steps that seemed to go over everyone's heads. Precision matters. The vaguer the claim, the harder it is to address genuinely.
Third, I run the universality test in plain language. If everyone behaved the way I'm advocating, would public life get clearer or more chaotic? Would vulnerable people be safer or more exposed? If everyone accepted "stay down and apologize" as legitimate discourse, we'd have something resembling soft totalitarianism.
Fourth, I look for resonance. Not cheerleaders, but serious minds across time who've stood near my position. When I see activists from the civil rights era focusing on material conditions while today's discourse fixates on symbolic gestures, I pay attention. When I notice that the loudest voices often belong to people with no skin in the game they claim to defend, I take note.
Fifth, I check my posture. Am I still curious, or am I prosecuting? Can I name the best argument against me as cleanly as the one I favor? Can I say what would persuade me to move? Sometimes the answer humbles me. Sometimes it confirms I'm on solid ground.
Sixth, I watch for bad-faith tells and keep proportion. Do they conflate criticism with censorship? Are the goalposts moving? Is "debate" being used to exhaust rather than to clarify? Are they asking for tolerance for cruelty while offering none? When I see this, I narrow the scope or disengage. And I match remedies to evidence: correction when it's confusion, limits when it's risk, removal and consequences when it's targeted harm.
Only then do I choose my level of engagement. Sometimes I keep it private, testing ideas with people who can push back without performing. Sometimes I write a calm public note that steelmans the common view, draws my boundary, lists what could change my mind. Sometimes, when norms or policies are at stake, I go fully public with receipts, measured tone, and a clear exit.
I also keep a repair kit. If I cross a line, I say so plainly, specify what I missed, and change behavior going forward. No hedging, no performative weasel words. The sentence "I was wrong" costs less than any elaborate justification.
The exhaustion and the alternative
The cost accumulates. Not just lost relationships or closed doors, but the grinding daily work of thinking when others aren't.
The constant translation between what I observe and what's safe to say.
The disappointment of watching another acquaintance choose the lazy route.
People thinking they're immune to mainstream forms of propaganda while parroting the exact slogans that appeared on their feed that morning.
But here's what should terrify them: the same mental muscles they're letting atrophy, the ones that should distinguish between an offensive joke and actual bigotry, between disagreement and violence, between hurt feelings and actual harm -- those are the exact muscles needed to recognize real evil when it arrives. You flat-out will not be able to suddenly develop discernment when it matters after years of outsourcing your judgment to whoever sounds most confident. The people who accepted "stay down and apologize" as normal discourse are already primed for whatever comes next. They've trained themselves to comply first, think never.
If you feel alone with a careful thought, you may not be. You may just be early, or unwilling to perform safety for the gallery. The private messages I receive suggest many people are doing this same calculation, reaching similar conclusions, but keeping silent.
The consensus you see is not the consensus that exists.
I keep going because the alternative is simply worse. To surrender my judgment to the crowd, to stop checking sources, to accept that ignorance or disagreement equals malice because someone with followers said so. That's a kind of death, the quiet suffocation of everything that makes thinking worthwhile. Horror.
A promise and an invitation
If you read me, this is what you can expect. I'll try to disagree with care. I'll question my own certainty before questioning yours. I'll make distinctions others ignore. When someone claims "harm," I'll ask how. I'll also listen when someone points out real contempt, because everyone deserves dignity.
What I ask in return is small. Meet me with the same posture. Tell me what I've missed. Show me a cost I didn't see. Name the strongest case for the thing you believe before you demand mine. Don't dogpile, don't perform safety for the gallery, don't confuse silence with guilt. If you think I'm wrong, convince me. If you think I'm dangerous, prove it with consequences instead of adjectives and argumentum ad hominem.
The work is exhausting. Every position requires documentation. Every disagreement requires a full framework. Every careful thought must be armored against misinterpretation. But the alternative is accepting that truth is whatever the loudest person says it is today. That's a world I refuse to help build.
Disagreement keeps the joints of a free society from seizing. I'll keep doing my part, noisily some days, quietly on others. Even when it means standing alone. Even when it means watching others take the easier path. Even when it costs more than I want to pay.
Valuable friction. That's the job.
Notes and Reading
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies
Jonathan Haidt, Moral Foundations Theory