I’m not conflating them; I never said anything about telling someone they’re wrong. Maybe rephrasing would make what I wrote clearer: “…people think admitting one is wrong is also an admission that one is inferior.” That is, admitting that one’s own opinion is wrong. But since you brought it up, why should criticizing an opinion be taken as “literally trying to criticize [a person’s] existence”? It’s a cultural perception that an opinion = existential identity.
Sorry if I was being too U.S.-centric; I thought this forum was American, but I’ve since learned that it might be more British/Canadian. What I was talking about is a pretty strong feature in U.S. culture. This is not to say that the U.S. has no academia or intellectualism, or that no one ever works together to solve problems, but we have major issues that stem from people never wanting to admit weakness. Politicians can never express doubt and they have to constantly attack their opponents, even by telling obvious lies, or they don’t get reelected; crimes are committed because people in groups don’t want to be called weak; even our courts operate in an adversarial justice system, which has its pluses but also leads to a lot of unfairness. I think some of this is true in other Western cultures; maybe you have an opinion on that. Brian Cox mentions in the video clip that “you can never get any sense” in a program that’s “adversarial,” so apparently American talk radio and cable news are not the only places where convoluted arguments, attacks, and confusion reign.
