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One person’s messiah is another person’s quack
It is always interesting which rights and thinkers people choose to latch onto when they frame an argument, and who they choose to denigrate when they get angry. As any university lecturer will state to their first-year undergrads you all need to critically engage with your sources and not simply trust a source blindly. Plato lambasts the philosophers and poets he dislikes, teaching his students a very rote version of society based on a walled garden of knowledge, something which I strongly rail against. It is vital you read information you dislike, churn through it, digest, because if you trust someone else to digest it for you then you are at the mercy of their personal biases. One person’s trusted voice is very much another person’s snake in the grass.
I find it interesting when a particular person is cited as if they are an oracle of wisdom without any surrounding context. If you read my work, you will frequently see me citing Hannah Arendt, a woman who has a very piquant reputation for her life’s work. For me the ideas she wrote about have framed my conception of the world, especially rights, but that has not made me blind to her flaws. All good writers must account for their personal biases and those of their sources, something which they should also convey to their audience to enable their audience to make up their own mind.
