The Virtue of Dickishness

As someone who is daily bombarded with saccharine requests that I stop being such a negative, pessimistic, cynical, look-out-for-that-bus-about-to-run-you-over boo-bear, I am going to print out multiple copies of this post from PZ Myers and hand it to everyone who tries to make me be nice.

He concludes:

That is the virtue of dickishness. It provides the social and psychological penalties that counter the draw of complacency. It's so easy to go with the flow, to pretend that a thousand issues, whether it's homeopathy or religion or transcendental meditation or an absence of critical thinking or a lack of concern about our health, are OK because they make people happy, and it's even easier to demonize the cranky Cassandras and make them the problem, because they make people uncomfortable.

But if bad ideas don't have immediate consequences to the placid mob, and if everyone is being Mr and Mrs Nice Folk and reassuring everyone that they're still good people no matter what foolishness they might believe in, where is the motivation to change? A skeptic who thinks their mission is to provide only positive messages and lead everyone along with affirmations and friendliness is going to be an ineffective skeptic.

Read the whole thing.

So, to everyone who thinks my calling attention to the probable adverse consequences of your Pollyanish world view is just too much of a downer, I'll just say this:

You're welcome.