Sometimes, ideas with the potential to make great positive impact can be obfuscated by everything else that surrounds them: its speaker’s credentials, perceived moral competence, being vouched for by an authority figure, demonstrating a sense of practical common-sense wisdom in their discourse, etc. These are all elements that derive from what in rhetorics is called ethos.
Ethos is an idea at least two and a half millennia old, so this is nothing new. Still, it is a shame that good ideas might go unnoticed because their ethos play against them, instead of shoring them up. On the other hand, it is necessary to take shortcuts such as allowing oneself to gravitate towards arguments surrounded by a positive ethos, because nobody has the time to study all ideas circulating in their radar with careful consideration.
What a person who is aware of this blindspot in the market of ideas could begin doing is to exercise their critical thinking here and there. They could lay their focus upon ideas that sparked their curiosity by their content regardless of who says it. They would analyse them only taking into consideration how much they stand up to scrutiny and how useful they could be.
After all, what if this idea was presented within a pristine, irreproachable ethos? Credit must go where it’s due, but at the same time good ideas deserve a chance.
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