I am fascinated by a phenomenon that is a variant of the Freudian slip. Call it error infection. Anytime I truly get on my high horse and go on about an error someone has made – a journalist, a politician, a critic, etc. – my commentary will inevitably be undermined by an error I make in the scolding. My contempt for a mathematical mistake, a boggled reference, an illogical deduction, a false analogy, will spawn, in my own writing, a mathematical mistake, a boggled reference, and blah blah blah.
The unconscious is a little devil – a little printer’s devil. I have noticed this again and again, not just with myself but with others. Demystifiers and contrarians leave a fine track of misreadings and falsities behind them. This does not mean that takedowns are useless, of course. The takedown is the base of civilization, peeps! But it does mean that mercy is no superfluous virtue – it is literally the soul of wit.
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