No, we’ve lowered ourselves. He has a radical, yet predictable imbalance between inductive and deductive reasoning, hinged on aggression and protectiveness in the fight or flight response.
It’s a common trait in many thinkers… we all possess this thought pattern actually, much of the discussion on this site sits on one extreme or another…the preference is deeply hard wired. In our dialogue, we have to be aware he in inherently hostile to source ideas and personifications that lead to pain and alertness on his end. He is much better than most here on this site at linking concepts together from schematic presentations.
When you talk to him, try using syllogisms that transfer verbal thought in a linear pattern, into visual aspects (description of parts).
He will read this and become self conscious, but will also grasp the truth of this. It will take time for him to learn to balance deductive and inductive thoughts into synergistic patterns he can accept. One glance at half the agnostic and atheistic rebuttals on this site against strawmen suggest too many infact carry an unhealthy imbalance themselves…
We just gotta learn to get out of our shells. Imagine if you were a lawyer, and you had to deal with a hostile witness. Hostile why? You have a job to do… people are watching. You have to analyse the person then and there, and approach them responsibly, with a understanding of what makes them tick to get the data you need out of them.
In Philosophy, especially in debate, we have to deal with a wide range of hostile contenders, who don’t always play by our rules. They might not care for your presentation, or see what is wrong with your assertion they are operating off a logical fallacy. You gotta play by their rules… if your going to get the idea across. It takes rhetorical finesse and dialectic honesty to approach.
A good philosopher can do this. Approach many kinds of thinkers, tackle the underlining issues they have against our point of view.
We no longer PRODUCE good philosophers. Reason why… for starters, we turn off, and turn away from thinkers such as Idiot. Let’s look at similar thinkers, who took the style of thinking to the ultimate extreme… Timothy McVeigh, The Unibomber, bin Laden… our society just writes them off… no fucking clue or even an attempt to grasp them, communicate with them, figure them out. They all present predictable traits. They all have a remarkable specialization in thought. They all are rebelling against painful threats, and are protecting something.
Because we fail like idiots to actively engage such people in philosophy, they continue, unchecked… till some amazing masterplan is hatched… then everyone is fucked. Our civilization is stuck in this silly cycle.
Quite frankly, I would prefer a few more guys like Idiot and Ben on this forum, and strap those eyelid openers from “A Clockwork Orange” to the people who maliciously and fanatically assault such thinkers… in the abhorrent name of recoiling from emotions and just about any extreme, demarking etiquette and equanimity as the valued virtues, banishing such bad people like Idiot away. Its a sickening demand that everyone else much arbitrarily support one thinking style by ostrichizing the other. Fuck that Dan… how about we raise this sites standards by booting your ass out?
In philosophy, when you present ideas, be prepared to receive from all kinds of cognitive styles. Learn to deal with it… we all have an intellectual Achilles Heel, a point from which we act and express our thoughts increasingly irrationally.
Idiot sits on a stable, and yes, SANE personality type. You ban him, you basically wrote off half of Seattle, South Korea, and some of our best politicians and programmers. You lose most school teachers, our best abstract theorists, and finest theologians.
I’m not interested in arguments to banish anyone. You wanna learn to do philosophy, learn how to deal with different kinds of thinkers. We are showing a unhealthy cultural deficit on this site to back one kind of thinker over another, and our society has shown this to be a weakness too… we fail to communicate and competently respond… countless acts of violence and terror results.
Idiot has already begun grappling this himself, he is self conscious of his weaknesses. How many of you are aware of your own flaws of ignorance? A good philosopher raises the bar, without excuses. A good philosopher takes philosophy seriously, and doesn’t try to weed out every different kind of thinker, so we can have a pathetic club of similar minded thinkers. Get in the mix.