How do I dismiss thee?
Let me count the ways!
- I will be too busy with things more important than you. Therefore, I will not be responsible for dismissing you.
- I will smile at you and pretend to agree, while I tell myself what an idiot you are.
- I will take you as “angry”, and dismiss your every word as nothing more than anger.
- I will decide to see “arrogance” in you, and then tell myself I need never consider anything you ever say.
- I will see you as “vain”—as one who “just has to be right”, or who “just likes to argue”—and will dismiss everything you say as empty.
- I will label you as a member of this camp, or of that one—even if you are not—because I’m already very good at dismissing members of such camps.
- I will declare you a “heretic”, and even a “son of Satan” if I must, so that it becomes my religious duty to ignore you.
- I will declare that your demonstrations of fact are really just your “opinions”, and from there, I will opine that we all have a right to our opinions, and to dismiss the opinions of others.
- I will twist your words into something you didn’t mean—such that they become something I can now make a show of debunking.
- I will posit that your concerns, while perhaps being mildly important, are simply not the most important thing to be considered right now, and that I, being wiser than you, know better than to get bogged down in your concerns.
- I will simply put you off until a “later” that will never happen.
- I will declare you “biased”, after which I will take the mental shortcut of assuming that everything you say is biased. After all, who would want to consider the words of a biased person?
For more observations on quite a similar theme, see my 2012 article, How To Be Criticism-Proof.
