Standing Clearly

On Being Insufferable

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

They say I'm insufferable. Too confident in my convictions. Perched atop a “moral high horse,” looking down at the compromised world below. Friends and enemies alike have lodged this complaint—that my insistence on clarity is itself a form of arrogance, that my refusal to equivocate feels like judgment of those who do.

Perhaps they're right. Perhaps there is something unbearable about someone who means what they say in an age when meaning itself has become negotiable.

I've been thinking about this accusation lately—turning it over like a strange artifact from another time. What does it mean to be “insufferable” in a world that has made an art form of suffering the insufferable? What does it mean to be accused of moral clarity when moral murkiness has become our shared condition?

Here's what I've come to understand: people mistake moral clarity for arrogance because they've forgotten what it feels like to stand next to someone who actually means what they say.

It's disorienting to encounter conviction in an age of performance. When most public speech is crafted for effect rather than accuracy, words chosen for their emotional payload rather than their precision, the person who speaks plainly about matters of consequence becomes a kind of stranger. The person who refuses to dress their convictions in the comfortable garb of irony or equivocation becomes, well, insufferable.

But there's a difference between moral clarity and self-righteousness that my critics often miss. Self-righteousness stems from certainty about one's moral superiority. Moral clarity emerges from certainty about moral principles, regardless of how well one lives up to them personally.

I don't claim to be better than others. I simply claim that some principles are better than others, that some ideas are closer to truth, that some positions are more coherent than their alternatives. I claim that these distinctions matter not because they elevate me, but because reality itself demands recognition.

When I insist that words have meaning, that actions have consequences, that principles are not mere preferences—this isn't bombast. It's an attempt to hold the line against a flood that threatens to wash away the very possibility of meaningful discourse.

George Orwell once wrote: “The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” Perhaps what my critics find insufferable is not my moral clarity but the discomfort it produces—the cognitive dissonance that arises when someone refuses to participate in collective fictions.

I understand the appeal of moral flexibility. It makes life easier, relationships smoother, social navigation less fraught. When you treat principles as situational, when you allow meaning to flex according to convenience, you avoid a certain kind of conflict. You can move through the world with less friction.

But at what cost? When we surrender clarity for comfort, when we trade precision for peace, we don't just change our strategy—we change ourselves. We become people for whom truth is whatever works, for whom consistency is less important than conformity.

I choose a different path, not because I believe myself morally superior, but because I believe moral clarity itself is superior to its alternatives. Because I believe that meaning matters, that coherence counts, that principles aren't just poses we strike for social advantage.

If that makes me insufferable, perhaps the problem isn't with my clarity but with a world that has grown too comfortable with confusion.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And sometimes, the most compassionate thing we can do for one another is to mean what we say and say what we mean, even when doing so disrupts the comfortable fictions that surround us.

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold. Even when holding it makes us insufferable to those who prefer drift to direction, comfort to clarity, the easy path of collective pretense over the harder road of seeing things as they are.

I don't shout big words into the abyss because I think I'm interesting. I speak clearly about what matters because clarity itself has become a form of resistance in a world that profits from confusion. I stand on this supposed “high horse” not to look down on others, but to see farther—to maintain perspective when the flood waters rise.

And if that perspective makes others uncomfortable, perhaps the discomfort itself is worth examining. Perhaps what feels like judgment is simply the mirror that clarity holds up to our collective compromises. Perhaps what feels like arrogance is simply the unfamiliar experience of encountering someone who refuses to pretend that all positions are equally valid, all perspectives equally true, all principles equally sound.

So call me insufferable if you must. I can bear it. What I cannot bear is surrendering clarity for comfort, meaning for ease, truth for acceptance. Some prices are too high, even for the warmth of universal approval.