12 writers who influenced my writing

This is by no means intended as an exhaustive list of all of the writers who have inspired me and influenced my writing style over the years. I'm sure that after I hit publish I’ll think of other writers who were just as worthy of inclusion as some of those who made it to the forefront of my mind as I was compiling it. 

The list is presented in more-or-less chronological order of when I came across their writing in life, and provides a short explanation of who they are and why I consider their writing so inspirational.

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl is most famous for his children’s literature, but he also wrote adult fiction too, which is certainly worth checking out. Some people tend to scoff at children’s literature, but I don’t. It takes a special kind of writing voice to engage and inspire children. With his wonderful appreciation of the utter silliness that children adore, Roald Dahl was responsible for completely revolutionising children’s literature, making it as engaging for adults as it is for children. In my view any parent of young children who hasn't read at least a few Roald Dahl books aloud to their kids needs a bloody good talking to.

Spike Milligan

Like Roald Dahl, Spike Milligan was a veteran who witnessed the horrors of the Second World War. I first came across his work as a child (the ning nang nong, Milliganimals and loads of other silly stuff) but it was only when I re-engaged with his work as an adolescent that I came to appreciate the staggering genius of his work. His war diaries are juxtapose the sublime with the ridiculous and the horrific with the breathtakingly beautiful, but it’s in his poetry that I found the most inspiration. Spike suffered terribly with his mental health, and it was his poetry about depression, love and loss that reached out into the mind of the depressed and socially anxious teenager I was and told me that it doesn't matter how bad things get in life, you can still write something utterly amazing about it.

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was a remarkable man. He did pioneering work on the development of the radar technology that helped the UK survive the Battle of Britain, he is credited with inventing the concept of the geostationary telecommunications satellite and he was also a noteworthy underwater explorer who discovered the remains of the Koneswaram temple in eastern Sri Lanka. In later life he became one of the greatest science fiction writers of his generation with his brand of hard sci-fi, that eschewed fantasy and scientific inaccuracy for the creation of potential future realities. His science fiction work was a kind of novelisation of popular science and futurology. His book 2001 resulted in one of the greatest science fiction films of all time; Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey", a film adaptation that severely tests the common assertion that film adaptations are never as good as the book.

Douglas Adams

If you haven’t read "The Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy", why not? Surely you've been told many times how good it is. In the view of an unapologetic nerd like me, Douglas Adams is the most hilarious writer I've ever encountered. The humour in his science fiction writing contrasts with the seriousness of hard sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke, but he was no less educational and informative for it, dealing with issues like quantum indeterminacy, improbability, computing, artificial intelligence and countless others through the prism of humour. If, for whatever reason, you consider yourself the kind of person who doesn't like sci-fi, I thoroughly recommend his two hilarious novels about Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned from Douglas Adams’ work is that it is possible to be incredibly funny and informative at the same time.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn wrote compellingly about his experiences of the brutal excesses of the Soviet Union. He spent a decade in various soviet forced labour camps and political exile for the “crime” of writing a letter to his friend criticising Stalin’s conduct of the Second World War. His experiences during these years formed the basis of most of his great works. “The Gulag Archipelago” was one of the most compelling books I read as a teenager, but the much shorter book “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” is his most accessible masterpiece. As the title suggests, it chronicles the events of a single day in the life of the protagonist. What makes it such a remarkable work is the way that it builds a picture of the whole world of the Soviet labour camps by chronicling the activities of a single prisoner in a single day.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was born into an establishment family, and perhaps that’s how he gained such a remarkable understanding of the way the establishment powers use propaganda and distraction to maintain their grip on power. He is most famous for his science fiction novel “Brave New World”, but his non-fiction work “Brave New World Revisited” is equally worth a read. George Orwell was another writer who strongly influenced my writing, but as the years progress I’m ever more convinced that we’re moving toward Huxley’s dystopian vision of the future rather than Orwell’s. In 1984 Orwell imagined an all-powerful state that controlled the population through brute force, while Huxley imagined a state that kept people servile by bombarding them with propaganda and distraction. Both Huxley and Orwell taught me that it is possible to conduct insightful and engaging political analysis through the medium of fiction.

Hunter S. Thompson

It is impossible to understate the influence that Hunter S. Thompson’s writing has had on me. He invented the genre of Gonzo journalism, and when he was at his productive peak he was capable of producing unsurpassable analysis of politics and American culture through the prism of his own lived experience. His most famous work was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the film adaptation of which was directed by the legendary Monty Python turned film director Terry Gilliam, but his some of his other work was equally influential. Hells Angels, The Rum Diaries and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail are all exceptional works. I’ve written quite a lot in the gonzo style, the vast majority of it as yet unpublished, and I fully intend to write some more and publish it at some point.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell is perhaps my favourite philosopher. Many of the things he wrote in the early to mid 20th Century stand truer today than when he actually wrote them. It really doesn’t matter whether you consider yourself a left-wing person or not, reading some Bertrand Russell and thinking about it will make you more intelligent. If you want to read some, a good place to start might be his essays on Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism entitled “ProposedRoads to Freedom” from 1918.

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein has written three phenomenal books. “No Logo” is a brilliant critique of consumerist culture. “The Shock Doctrine” exposes the crackpot right-wing economic agenda that was forged in the furnaces of brutal South American dictatorships, and has gradually become the economic orthodoxy of our age. Her most recent book is “This Changes Everything” which deals with the devastating environmental impact of modern capitalism. One of the big influences Naomi Klein had on me as a writer was the way she is so meticulous in backing up her assertions with facts and references.

I think it’s definitely worth noting that Naomi Klein is the only female writer in my list and considering the reasons why. Part of the reason is selection bias. There are just more male writers in my favoured genres of science fiction, politics and economics, but this imbalance is gradually changing and improving as the years progress. Another reason is that most of my favourite writers come from the mid-20th Century period, where there were so many more barriers to female success in place, meaning fewer women could break through and establish themselves as influential writers. I wish there were more women on my list, and hope that should I compile a similar list in the future (perhaps of influential 21st Century writers) that it contains more female voices.

Noam Chomsky

The world is so complex these days that it’s rare indeed for anyone to be able to claim to be a world leading authority figure in two distinct fields. Noam Chomsky undeniably is. Not only is he a world renowned linguist (perhaps his most famous contribution is his grammatically correct but completely nonsensical phrase “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”) he’s also one of the great political thinkers of our age. If you haven’t read any Chomsky you really should. If you lean to the left, then you’ll find his writing compelling, and if you lean to the right you should get a teriffic mental workout from trying to find fault in his analyses.

Ha-Joon Chang

In my view Ha-Joon Chang is one of the greatest economics writers of our age. He has found a manner of explaining seemingly complex economic ideas in everyday language, so that ordinary people can engage with what is often perceived to be an elitist and inaccessible subject. I was already writing about economics in everyday language when I came across Ha Joon Chang’s book “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism” and I read it with amazement as I realised that there was somebody else out there doing what I was trying to do, and doing such a fantastically good job of it. If you want to know more about the subject of economics, but find it intimidating, then I absolutely recommend that you read some Ha-Joon Chang.

Steve Keen

Steve Keen is an Australian economist who was one of the tiny minority who managed to accurately predict the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis. I’m not saying he was unique in saying that there was a bust coming, even I was saying that and back then I knew a tiny fraction of what I do know about economics. What made Steve Keen different is that he explained how the crash would come about, and he put his head above the parapet and said so. At the time Keen was lambasted as a fearmongerer for having dared to stand up and criticise the orthodox economic system, but the global financial sector meltdown proved him right. If you manage to read some Ha-Joon Chang and take something from it, the next step could be to move on to Steve Keen’s “Debunking Economics”, which although much harder work, is crammed full of critiques of the right-wing crony capitalist neoclassical orthodoxy that caused the global financial sector meltdown, and has somehow built itself such a powerful position that it seems almost impervious to criticism and immune from reform.

Endnote

If you are an aspiring writer, I imagine that it would be a useful exercise for you to compile a similar list of writers who have influenced you, and analyse what it is about their writing that made it so engaging.

I think the factor that makes these writers stand out from the hundreds of others I've read is more than the fact that they wrote about subjects I found engaging, it's that they found a voice. A style of writing that was uniquely theirs.

If you think that I’ve missed off any terribly important writers please feel free to add your own suggestions and descriptions in the comments section.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Recommended reading - Economics

Several people have written to me asking if I could suggest some books for them to read in order to broaden their understanding of economics. Instead of answering personally each time I've decided to combine the time I've been spending on writing short individualised responses into writing this more comprehensive article.

Hopefully it will be of some use to you, whether you specifically asked me for some recommendations or not.

Who this guide is for         
         
This guide is intended to be useful whether you are an aspiring economics student, a current student disillusioned with the way in which your economics department uncritically pushes the failed neoclassical economic orthodoxy, an economics graduate who is keen to continue broadening their horizons, or someone with no background in economics at all who would simply like to learn more about the subject.

Many of the people to have asked me for reading advice are already economics students, economics graduates or people intending to study economics at university. It is a very positive sign that these guys have realised that there is a lot more to economics than the narrow mainstream neoclassical orthodoxy that has infected and overrun the majority of economics departments, and that they're looking for answers elsewhere.

Several of the other people to have asked me for economics reading tips have admitted that they have very little understanding of economics, which is hardly surprising given that economics courses aren't taught in the majority of UK state schools, meaning that the vast majority of the 93% of state educated kids end up leaving school as functional economic illiterates.

This public lack of basic economic literacy is extremely beneficial to the ruling establishment because it allows them to use all kinds of absolutely ludicrous economic fairy stories to justify their harmful economic policies.

I feel proud that people from many different walks of life have seen me as a reliable person to turn to for advice, and it makes me glad that there are still people out there who want to understand economic issues from different perspectives to the ones prescribed by the neoclassical orthodoxy.

Ha Joon Chang

A very good starting point for economics novices is the book "23 things they don't tell you about capitalism" by Ha Joon Chang. This is a brilliantly written book that rigorously deconstructs some of the many myths and outright fallacies that underpin conventional economics. In my opinion the best thing about the book is the way that Ha Joon Chang uses every day language to explain often quite complex economic ideas. Even if you feel that you're well aware of the flaws in orthodox neoclassical economics already, 23 Things is still worth a read because in my view it's a masterclass in discussing economic ideas in accessible language, which is an incredibly important skill.

I am looking forward to obtaining a copy of his latest book

Inside Job

Another good starting point is the 2011 film "Inside Job" directed by Charles Ferguson which provides an explanation of how the 2007/08 global financial sector insolvency crisis actually came about (spoiler alert - the UK Labour party was not entirely to blame for the global banking crisis as the Tory press would have you believe).

The truth is that the global financial sector insolvency crisis was caused by a toxic blend of greed, corruption, conflicts of interest, poor regulation, moral hazard, ideologically driven deregulations and an alphabet soup complex financial products.

The film gives a great overview of the economic meltdown that would have completely wiped out Wall Street and the City of London without the biggest state subsidies in history to bail out the insolvent financial sector institutions. The book of the same name provides a wealth of more detailed analysis.

Steve Keen

"Debunking Economics" by the Australian economist Steve Keen is an exceptionally good critique of the absolute nonsense that underpins the neoclassical economic orthodoxy. It's harder going than the work of Ha Joon Chang or Charles Ferguson, but it's really worth the effort. A must read for anyone who is intent on looking at economics from outside the narrow spectrum of the neoclassical orthodoxy.

Heterodox economics

Steve Keen talks a lot about heterodox economics in Debunking Economics. If you're intent on learning more about economics it's very important indeed to understand that there is no single unified subject called "economics". There is mainstream economics which is based on the flawed and assumption riddled neoclassical orthodoxy (more like a religious faith system than a social science), and then there are countless other fields of economics which are often classed together under the umbrella "heterodox economics".

There is actually very little in common between the various fields that are lumped together as "heterodox" other than that they have been pushed to the margins by the now completely invalidated, but still widely accepted, neoclassical orthodoxy.

This PDF provides a good overview of the myriad fields that make up "heterodox economics".

Behavoural Economics

Of the many promising heterodox economic fields, I'm particularly interested in behavioural economics, which stands in opposition to the neoclassical position that accurate economic models can be built upon the assumption that human beings act in their own rational self-interest. There is a huge amount of evidence to prove that in reality human beings actually make most of our decisions on an intuitive, non-rational level. Behavioural economics is about trying to work actual human behaviour, and human cognitive processes into our economic models.

If mainstream economics is ever going to make the progression from a pseudo-scientific quasi-religious ideology riddled with ludicrous assumptions and unquestionable core beliefs to become a legitimate social science, I'm certain that developments in behavioural economics are going to play an important part.

Economic inequality

Inequality has always been a theme in economics, but with the rise of the neoclassical orthodoxy it fell out of favour. In recent years inequality has made quite a comeback, so much so that two of the bestselling economics books in recent years directly addressed the theme. "The Spirit Level" by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson popularised the theory that too much inequality is extremely bad for the economy, and the French economist Thomas Piketty further developed the theme that growing inequality is a major threat to economic stability in his book "Capital in the 21st Century".

The 2013 documentary "Inequality for All" featuring Robert Reich is certainly worth some 90 minutes of your time too.

You've got to learn some Marx

Even if you are strongly inclined to disagree with Marxist and socialist ideas, you've got to accept that Marx was a genius of his age and at least look at some of his work.  Many of Marx's criticisms of capitalism hold as true today as they did when he wrote them in the 19th Century.

Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto are both freely available on the Internet, so you've got no excuse for not at least taking a look. My personal view is that Marx's critiques of capitalism were immeasurably superior to his predictions about how capitalism might be overthrown. However I urge you to look for yourself and make up your own mind about Marx's ideas rather than blithely accepting other people's parsed, paraphrased, misrepresented or just completely made up interpretations of his work.

If you're interested in finding out a bit more about who Karl Marx actually was, Francis Wheen wrote a decent biography.

But, you should probably read some Rand too

In order to gain a more complete understanding of an issue, it is often necessary to read things with which we strongly disagree. Thus you should probably read some of Ayn Rand's demented frothing. Rand had a powerful influence over the reactionary right-wing in the US, in fact her book "Atlas Shrugged" is still regularly appears on bestseller lists in the US.

One of Rand's inner circle of sycophantic acolytes Alan Greenspan went on to become Chairman of the US Federal Reserve between 1987 and 2005, where he unleashed wave after wave of ideologically motivated deregulations that culminated in the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis. Reading some of Rand's raving pseudo-philosophy helps us understand the ideological roots of the cult of the individual, greed-is-a-virtue, privatise everything, neoclassical mentality that has now infested the majority of economics departments, central banks, multinational organisations and political parties on the planet.

Orthodox economics

As a sceptic of the mainstream economic orthodoxy and free market dogma I'd caution people to use their critical judgement when reading the work of economists like Freidrich Hayek, Ludvig von Mises or Milton Friedman, but then you should strive to keep your critical judgement in play whatever you read, whether you're inclined to agree with it or not.

I'd also suggest reading some Adam Smith (perhaps Wealth of Nations) and considering how different many of his economic ideas are to those of the modern economic right who have so often championed him.

John Maynard Keynes

It's bit difficult to know what to suggest with Keynes, he was an incredibly influential economist, but his writing style can be somewhat impenetrable. There have been so many interpretations of his work that several distinct schools of Keynesian economics have developed (Neo-Keynesians, Post-Keynesians and New Keynesians).

If you are formally studying economics, make sure you have established some knowledge of Keynes for yourself before you learn someone else's interpretation of his work. Here's a link to Keynes' General Theory of Economics, and here's a fairly comprehensive list of books that have been written about him.
  
The capitalist "doves"

There are many economics commentators who seem to accept most of the core unquestionable faith positions that underpin conventional economics, but who don't fully subscribe to the extreme end of the capitalist spectrum (deregulate and privatise everything, massive tax cuts for corporations and harsh austerity for the masses). These guys are by and large supporters of the neoclassical capitalist orthodoxy, but they want to tinker with some of the ancillary beliefs to make capitalism a bit fairer and a bit less ruthless.

There are two positions to take on these guys. One is summed up with the Chomsky quote "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." One might say that economists like Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs and Nouriel Roubini are just providing the lively debate within the limited spectrum that is bounded by "capitalism rules OK". 

My personal view is that it is often worth reading what they have to say, despite the fact a lot of their core assumptions are extremely dubious.

Nouriel Roubini was one of the tiny minority of economists to accurately predict the 2007-08 financial sector insolvency crisis, so his book "Crisis Economics" is worth a read if you want to check out what one of these "capitalist doves" have to say.

Lesser known economists
                     
In my view some of the most interesting economists are people who have been largely forgotten, and rarely ever make appearances in standard economics courses.

Some of most interesting economists I've come across include Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (French socialist and founder of mutualism)  Henry George (American left-libertarian, advocate of Land Value Tax and Basic Income),  Antonio Gramsci (Italian Marxist, defined the term "hegemony") Silvio Gesell (German anarchist and egalitarian, founder of Freiwirtschaft) Kenneth Boulding (Anglo-American economist, philosopher and Quaker, pioneer in systems theory and evolutionary economics) and Hyman Minsky (American Post-Keynesian, developer of the financial instability hypothesis).

I obviously don't agree with everything these guys came up with, but as is often the case, many of the most interesting and challenging voices have ended up being pushed to the sidelines in favour of those who know how to tell the rich and powerful exactly what they want to hear. In the case of economics it's clear that the ruling establishment love to hear that greed, selfishness, lack of empathy, hunger for power and pure self-interest are not vices, but virtues.

Economics doesn't exist in a vacuum

Economics overlaps with countless other fields of human endeavour. In fact many of the great economists throughout the ages have been recognised as profound thinkers in other important subjects aside from economics. These leading economic thinkers were more than just professional "money men", they were renowned philosophers, scientists, inventors, statesmen, political theorists, activists, mathematicians, social commentators and businessmen as well.

In my view it is of fundamental importance to try to synthesise what we learn about economics with what we already know of the world. In my case I've devoted much of my time to the study of philosophy and politics, which is convenient because these subjects are two of the most natural bedfellows of economics (in fact the three are often formally combined in PPE university courses).
   
A better understanding of philosophy can provide the cognitive abilities to identify and criticise structurally incoherent economic ideas. A better understanding of political history and familiarity with common political structures and processes helps to clarify how abstract economic theories have been applied in the real world of politics.

The advice to read up on philosophy and politics is a bit vague, so I'll provide details of a few (hopefully) interesting things that broadened my perspective on how economic theories can interact with the subjects of philosophy and politics. Perhaps they may be of some use to you.

• Bertrand Russell - "Proposed roads to Freedom": If you want to make yourself smarter, read some Bertrand Russell. This is as good a place to start as any.

• Naomi Klein - "The Shock Doctrine": This book is a meticulously written history and critique of neoliberal politics and economics.

• Noam Chomsky - Understanding Power: Chomsky is one of the great living intellectuals. It doesn't matter at all whether one agrees with Chomsky's politics, only a fool would claim that the man isn't a genius.

These suggestions are possibly of little use to people of markedly different experiences and mindsets to my own, so if you're more inclined to take a scientific, literary or perhaps business oriented perspective in life, try to consider the crossovers between particular economic ideas and aspects of your other fields of expertise.

Economics needs more thinkers with diverse "real life" experience and new perspectives to offer. What it certainly doesn't need is any more of the kind who have devoted the majority of their study hours to the uncritical rote learning of neoclassical economic dogma and little else.
             
The Keiser Report
                           
Max Keiser is a controversial figure, but in my view he's probably done more to popularise economics reporting than any man since the dawn of the television age. Max and his now wife Stacey Herbert present the first half of the thrice weekly Keiser Report show, and in the second half of the show Max interviews a guest, often someone with economics expertise, but occasionally others too. Some of his more offbeat guests have included Frankie Boyle, George Galloway, Kerry-Ann Mendoza (AKA Scriptonite Daily), Russell Brand and Mark McGowan (AKA The Artist Taxi Driver).

I don't see eye to eye with Max Keiser on everything, he's too much of a "gold bug", he is too keen on the Austrian school of economics and he doesn't interview nearly enough left-libertarians for my liking. But one thing is for sure, The Keiser Report is guaranteed to give you food for thought, especially if the guest is an interesting one.

If you watch nothing else of the Keiser Report, at least try a couple of episodes featuring the aforementioned economist Steve Keen (episode 4, episode 77, episode 226, episode 418, episode 500).
                  
Tax-Dodging and Capital flight

Tax-dodging and capital flight are two important subjects in contemporary economics. I've written short introductory articles on both of these interrelated subjects. If you would like to learn more about the alarming scale of tax-dodging, and why it is such a major economic problem you could read "Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world" by Nicolas Shaxon, or you could take a look at Richard Murphy's Tax Research UK blog or the Tax Justice Network website.  
                   
Rethinking economics
             
Rethinking Economics is a global movement to promote pluralism and critical thinking in economics courses. The movement arose out of a protest by Manchester University students against the uncritical teaching of the neoclassical economic orthodoxy in their economics department, despite the fact that huge swathes of neoclassical economic theory have clearly been completely refuted by the global financial sector insolvency crisis and the massive state bailouts. 
The Manchester students are called The Post Crash Economics Society, and in 2014 they won  university society of the year at the 2014 NUS Awards.

Positive Money

Positive Money is a movement which attempts to educate the public about the nature of money, how most of it is created out of nothing by private banks and rented out to the public as interest bearing loans, why this is a problem (inflationary bubbles and ever increasing levels of debt), and what they propose to do about it (giving monopoly power to create money to a kind of central bank-politburo).

My view on Positive Money is surprisingly similar to my view on Karl Marx. They have correctly identified flaws in the economic system and have attempted to inform the public of the problems - which is highly commendable, but their proposed solutions leave quite a lot to be desired.

Whatever your views on the nature of currency, Positive Money are definitely worth keeping an eye on.
     
My own work
 
I have written several articles on economic subjects, I suppose this is one of the main reasons that people have asked me for advice on economic matters. So my economics articles are probably the main reason that this article even exists.

I have written about many subjects ranging from the absolute basics (the difference between a debt and a deficit) through economic ideas that lots of people tend to grasp intuitively without realising there are specific economic explanations (Marginal Propensity to Consume, Hidden Inflation, Fiscal Multiplication) to much more complicated things (Information Asymmetry, Credit Default Swaps, Quantitative Easing).

I have also written a number of articles on Universal Basic Income and I intend to write a lot more about alternative currencies at some point in the future ...

Social media

I have set up a Twitter list of interesting economics related accounts. Feel free to do a spot of cherry picking of interesting accounts to follow, or to suggest other accounts you believe should be added to the list.
              
Finally

I hope this short guide to learning more about economics has been of use to you. 

If you would like to offer more economics recommendations in the comments section, please go ahead. 

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, 

it would be massively appreciated.

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The "I don't understand you - so you're stupid fallacy

The "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy is one of my absolute favourite bits of faulty reasoning. To be perfectly honest it is not technically a right-wing fallacy because it could conceivably be used by very stupid people of any political persuasion - however in my experience, I've only ever seen it used by those poor people suffering under the delusion that their haphazard collection of simplistic right-wing tabloidisms represent some kind of profound understanding of politics and the economy.

The user

The kind of person that uses the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy is the type of person that thinks that just because they are in possession of a collection of simplistic idioms, slogans and assumptions to explain away any given political phenomenon, this makes them an expert authority figure when it comes to political debate.

There are many problems with this mindset, not least the fact that anyone that has ever pursued genuine knowledge is familiar with: the more you learn, the more you realise you don't know. This problem was brilliantly summed up by Bertrand Russell who said "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

Fools and fanatics allow themselves to believe that they are experts because they have a collection of very simple answers to support their worldview, whilst thinking people realise that the elevation of particular views to the status of "absolutely beyond doubt" is an impediment to the pursuit of genuine understanding.

A major problem for the tabloid thinker is that many of the idioms, assumptions and slogans they use to create their comfortable illusion of political expertise are mutually contradictory. 

For thinking people, the acceptance of two mutually contradictory views results in irritating bouts of cognitive dissonance until we can resolve the situation by rejecting or redefining one of them. The tabloid thinker is often almost completely immune to cognitive dissonance because they don't have a holistic worldview. 

One minute they can berate the unemployed as "idle scroungers", then the next spout some spurious justification narrative to defend the idle lifestyles of hereditary wealth. They can do this because they are unwilling to consider the idea that it is somewhat contradictory to generalise about the poor and castigate them for being idle, yet defend the rentier class despite the overwhelming evidence that their wealth allows them the freedom to be as idle as they like. 

The tabloid thinker is comfortable holding mutually exclusive explanations because they just don't do "joined up thinking"

Being a pub bore
The first time I remember noting the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy was in a pub a few years ago. Now I admit that I was being a bit of a pub bore by talking about politics (one of the three forbidden pub subjects - politics, business and religion) but in mitigation this was a quite special pub, where the barman would play me at chess for free drinks* and intellectual conversation was not strictly forbidden.

Anyhow - I got talking to a bloke about the unrepresentative nature of politics. The thing I was trying to explain was that the average politician doesn't actually work for us, they work for their donors. The politician knows that they get their parliamentary pay whether they bother to represent their constituents or not - therefore it serves their self-interest to use their political power and their political connections to serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy minority in order to further enrich themselves with kickbacks, rather than devoting their time to serving the interests of their constituents (as they are supposed to). Thus politicians have a strong financial incentive to forget about the best interests of their constituents, and instead serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy in return for political donations, corporate junkets, ludicrously overpaid advisory positions, corporate directorships, speaking fees and countless other forms of kickback.

The guy I was talking to was absolutely insistent that I was wrong. He maintained that we pay their wages so they must work for us. I tried explaining my point in several different ways, using numerous examples, however there was no convincing him. He soon became agitated and angrily declared that he couldn't understand what on earth I was going on about, therefore I must be stupid. Normally I would have argued the point, but the guy was as burly as he was drunk, so I decided to drop the "conversation" and challenge the barman to another game of chess instead.

Arguing with trolls
The encounter in the pub happened a while before I'd established Another Angry Voice, so for quite a while I remembered it as an probably the stupidest bit of "reasoning" I'd ever encountered. However, as the AAV Facebook page began growing in popularity and my exposure to cognitively illiterate right-wing ranters increased exponentially, I began to see ever more pitiful attempts at right-wing "logic" including numerous invocations of the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy.

One particularly impressive example occurred after I rebuked someone for a truly feeble attempt to claim that New Labour was a left-wing project. He said that the privatisation of the HMRC property portfolio into the hands of a company based in Bermuda for the purposes of avoiding tax was a left-wing policy, because it had happened under a Labour government.

My response was to question his assumption that everything that a Labour government does is by definition left-wing, even the extraordinarily right-wing policy of privatising the HMRC property portfolio. I mean what warped definition of "socialism" must an individual be using if it includes privatisation of public property into the hands of tax-dodgers?**

As part of this response I stated that New Labour had abandoned socialism in order to embrace the "right-wing psuedo-economic ideology of neoliberalism". The comeback to this was that it was nothing more than "a load of meaningless buzzwords" and that I was stupid.

The problem of course is that all of those words do have meanings. Even if you don't know the meanings of any particular word, it isn't difficult to go and look it up. Apologies to those that are arleady familiar with all of these words, but I'm going to briefly define each of them to demonstrate that they are not "meaningless buzzwords".

Right-wing : An outlook or specific position that accepts or supports social hierarchy or social inequality as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable.

Pseudo-economic ideology : The prefix pseudo- is used to mark something as false, fraudulent, or pretending to be something it is not. Thus something that is described as a pseudo-economic ideology is something that purports to be an economic discipline, but is in fact an ideological agenda.

Neoliberalism : A word that is used to describe the economic orthodoxy of the late 20th / early 21st Century, which is built upon a foundation of neoclassical economics and pushes right-wing economic objectives (privatisation, tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, attacks on labour rights and the right to protest, financial sector deregulations, abandonment of capital controls, centralisation of executive power, abandonment of monetary autonomy ...). Here's my article on the meaning of neoliberalism.

The moral to this story is this: If you don't understand all of the words, the person that uttered them is probably not the stupid one in the conversation.

Tips
I imagine that anyone that has managed to read this far without abandoning the article as "stupid" because it is full of "meaningless buzzwords" such as "cognitive dissonance", "mutually exclusive", "holism" and "neoliberalism" isn't actually in need of any tips for avoiding the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy, but I'll provide some just in case.

If you find yourself reading something that you don't fully understand, there are two possibilities. Either you're not getting it because you're missing some information or vocabulary or it is actually incomprehensible gibberish.
 
It is fairly easy to identify incomprehensible gibberish, because it is usually presented in appalling grammar. However, Noam Chomsky demonstrated that it is possible to construct grammatically correct sentences with no actual meaning. The famous example he provided was "colourless green ideas sleep furiously". It is fairly easy to spot that this kind of construct is meaningless because of the glaring incompatibility of the words ("colourless" and "green" are mutually exclusive, it's not a great strategy to personify abstract concepts and "furiously" is hardly an appropriate adverb to describe sleep).

If the thing you are struggling to understand is written in acceptable grammar and is not filled with glaringly incompatible words, then it is likely that you need to look up some of the constituent words in a dictionary. Looking up the meaning of a new word is hardly an admission of ignorance, given that there are well over a million words in the English language and the test your vocab data suggests that the average native English speaker knows some thing like 20,000 - 35,000 of them (between 2% and 3.5% of the total).

Whatever the case, it is probably better to avoid going around calling people "stupid" whether you understood what they said or not. If you have looked up any unfamiliar words and had a good think about what it means and you still don't understand, the best course of action is probably to ask politely for a rephrased explanation, not to resort to insults.

Conclusion
The "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy is one of my absolute favourites for two main reasons. Firstly because it takes such an astonishing lack of self-awareness for the user to conclude that because they can't understand the argument, the utterer of the argument must be the stupid one; and secondly because it is such a remarkably daft stance that it actually quite rare (as compared to other much more common fallacies such as the inefficient state fallacy, the "Hitler was a socialist" fallacy*** or the "Waah you're censoring me" fallacy) so it is quite a privilege if you ever have it wielded at you.

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* Being quite good at chess I became somewhat of a regular there!

** Anyone who is even vaguely politically literate knows that one of the core socialist principles is the commitment to social ownership, which is completely incompatible with selling off public property to a Bermuda based tax-dodging operation.

*** The ludicrous "Hitler was a leftie" fallacy is one of the next articles to write in my political myth busting series.

 Click here to read more articles in the Political Myth Busting series 

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