Never Argue with a Drunk, a Fool… or a Gatekeeping Narcissist
There’s an old proverb that says: “Never argue with a drunk or a fool.”
I’m compelled today to add the gatekeeping narcissist; that strange hybrid creature who knows everything, refuses to learn anything, and sees every exchange as an opportunity to earn some kind of pseudo-edgy ego points.
We are living in an age where the performance of argument - maybe especially online but in no way limited to that space - is steadily replacing the practice of dialogue.
The internet has become thick with trolls, self-appointed experts, and people who wield a lazy sarcasm like a blunt weapon. Their goal is escalation.
But philosophy, at its best, calls us somewhere deeper: toward a conversational virtue that cannot coexist with egotistical combat.
The Ancient Art of Talking Like a Human Being
I’ve often wondered how Socrates (poor man!) would be handled on a platform like twitter/x. His insistence on methodical, slow, probing questions would be read as being pedantic or overthinking; his refusal to deliver hot takes would be “dodging the question.” He would also ask people to consider whether they actually knew what they thought they knew.
This would not be tolerated in the algorithmic age… then again, it wasn’t tolerated at his trial either!
The Socratic tradition gives us a profound approach to talking and learning together: Conversation is not a weapon, it’s a discipline that requires humility, curiosity, patience, and the willingness to change our minds.
Philosophy has long distinguished between eristic argument (fighting to win) and dialectic conversation (working together to arrive at truth). Eristic is what the fools, drunk, and gatekeeping narcissists eat. Dialectic, however, is what real humans should desperately strive for.
Eristic argument can be done by anyone with a pulse, a Wi-Fi connection, and a can of Monster. The second is an art we must learn and a skill we must practice.
The Online Drift Into Toxicity
Digital culture rewards quickness over depth, certainty over nuance, spectacle over sincerity. For years now we’ve spoken about online “trolls”. They live in comment sections, group chats, and trending replies and are proaticely trying to disrupt the conversation with escalation. They’re not just rude; they’re performative. They argue the way professional wrestlers fight: loudly, theatrically, and with an audience in mind.
We have treated trolls as a fringe online species. Something like chaotic neutrals of the internet who got their kicks from disruption and provocation. But something subtler, and stranger, is now happening: Trolling has leaked. It has quietly seeped into ordinary digital dialogue, even among people who would never dream of calling themselves trolls. The tone, tactics, reflexive snark and suspicion have become ambient, almost unconscious.
And as often happens with our online habits, what starts behind a screen migrates into the room. Conversations in face-to-face life are beginning to carry the same defensive edge, point-scoring reflex, and unnecessary hair-trigger hostility. We’re learning to talk like trolls without realising that’s what we’ve been practising.
Psychologists call this ego threat. This is the sense that disagreement is an attack not on an idea but on one’s very self. Narcissistic personalities, in particular, cannot tolerate the possibility of being wrong. So instead of exchanging perspectives, they hoard status. They gatekeep expertise and community rules. They belittle, mock, and undermine to maintain the illusion of intellectual or social supremacy.
Here’s the problem. The moment the goal of a conversation shifts from understanding to self-defence, dialogue has already collapsed.
You cannot reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
You cannot shame someone into humility.
You cannot enlighten someone who believes that being corrected is a violence.
And you absolutely cannot persuade someone who views every disagreement as a threat to their carefully curated identity.
Walking away is not weakness, it’s wisdom. It’s the refusal to waste your finite emotional energy on infinite black holes of ego.
Conversation as craft
If troll culture teaches us anything, it’s that good conversation doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be cultivated in pieces:
Curiosity: a willingness to ask before assuming.
Humility: the courage to say “I don’t know” without shame.
Patience: the ability to sit with complexity and nuance instead of reacting at speed.
Charity: interpreting others in the best light, not the worst.
Self-awareness: recognising when your ego is driving the exchange.
Aristotle treated ethics as a matter of training: you become good by doing good repeatedly and conversation works the same way. The more we practice open, ego-free dialogue, the more it becomes an internal posture rather than a reflexive fight.
We don’t need to win arguments; we need to cultivate phronesis (that is ‘practical wisdom’) in how we speak, listen, and then respond.
Going back to Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, courage is not the absence of fear but the resilience to face what is true.
In online discourse, courage might look like refusing to be baited, thinking before responding, and rejecting the economy of performative rage. Maybe it’s just trying to preserve dignity when others are determined to lose theirs.
It is the courage to disengage from the drunk, the fool, and the gatekeeping narcissist—not out of superiority, but out of clarity, understanding that they are just not playing the same game. In this case silence is not surrender but self-preservation, and sometimes the most eloquent form of speech.
The future of public conversation won’t be saved by snark. It needs humble, disciplined work of people who refuse to treat every exchange as a gladiatorial contest.
So argue with thinkers, debate with learners, and dialogue with the curious.
Never argue with a drunk, a fool… or a gatekeeping narcissist. You have better things to do.
Photo by Resume Genius on Unsplash