In talking about how he has had to deal with online hatred and attacks, Greg Lukianoff passes on the advice he got from some wise man:
You can have friends whose opinions you don’t take seriously, and you can have opponents whose point of view you very much do. So, pick your ten. Figure out who the small number of people are whose judgment you genuinely trust, the people who know you well enough and love you enough to tell you the truth when you’re wrong, when you’re being unfair, when you’re getting carried away, or when — to use the technical term — you are full of shit. Then, when the crowd is screaming, when the internet is losing its mind, when strangers are confidently informing you who you are and why you did what you did, bring it back to those ten. Ask yourself what they would think. Ask yourself whether they would be disappointed in you. Ask yourself whether they would tell you that you had acted unfairly, or out of vanity, tribalism, or cowardice. Or even better, go and ask them yourself.
In my case, I don’t have ten people to call upon, because quite frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck what strangers think of me, and never have. I do care what certain people think of me, but that number is really small — far fewer than ten — and which people depends on which topic is under discussion anyway. I am friendly with people who are more liberally-minded than I am, or who are deeply religious, for example, so occasionally I might pause before opening my big yap to expound on what has raised my irritation level, but I have to say, I don’t pause for very long.
People who know me also know about my opinions, and by and large they accept them, or not, as the case may be. I don’t change my opinions very often anyway, because in most cases they have come after long and detailed contemplation, so (in the absence of further information) there’s little reason to change them — and “because this might offend Person X” is not a reason for change.
That said, if I am occasionally guilty of being full of shit, I will accept the excoriation from these few people and either change my position or else at least acknowledge my stupidity. Most of the time, it’s because they know more about the topic than I do, and I bow to their expertise without a second thought.
But for the rest? I don’t care a fig, and never have.
