For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me. I dare say that you may feel irritated at being suddenly awakened when you are caught napping; and you may think that if you were to strike me dead, as Anytus advises, which you easily might, then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you gives you another gadfly.

— Socrates defending himself from accusations of corrupting the youth and impiety, from Plato's Apology of Socrates

When I talk about philosophy with my non-philosophically-acquainted friends, I usually play the part of the gadfly. I ask questions, and ask questions about the answers to those questions, and questions about the answers to those. Many of those questions are questions that I myself do not have a good answer to.

This tends to be annoying. I am acutely aware of this; I get annoyed at times too, when Socrates dismantles the semantics of a poor unsuspecting Greek passerby whose conception of justice was apparently too foolish, too simple, and too shallow. Like, I get it Socrates, I'm stupid; so what do you think then?

I seek to do two things in this article. First, I want to give a defense of the gadfly which Socrates embodies. Then, I will lay out the virtues and vices of a gadfly.

Apology of John

One prominent attitude in historical and contemporary societies (regarding political discourse especially) is the attitude that people don't have the "right" to point out a flaw in something without also having the solution to that flaw at hand. We see this manifest in various familiar ways:

• People often say that those who critique the healthcare/education/police system should shut up unless they have a way to fix it. If you don't have a solution, you're just "whining" or "complaining".
• Supporters of slavery in the early United States often responded to abolitionists by questioning what would happen with freed slaves, and demanded an alternative model for the South's economy that didn't involve slavery.
• Critics of child labor were frequently asked to provide alternative means for poor families to survive.

From here on, I will refer to this attitude as the "entitlement attitude", since people who hold it feel entitled to a comprehensive solution for every critique. Now, I am not saying that asking for clarity and rigor in a critique is a bad thing. That is very much a good thing. But the entitlement attitude is too often used in bad faith, where the goal of demanding rigor, detailed plans, evidence, etc. is not to genuinely, constructively, flesh out the critical proposition, but to disregard it. These advocates of rigor, who no doubt congratulate their own high intellectual standards and noble conservatism, rarely want to even wait to see a critical idea blossom into something that really does carry rigor.

Diverging a bit, let us consider the entitlement attitude from a slightly different angle. Is it logically warranted? Here, the exact phrasing of the attitude matters; for example, libertarians who hold the entitlement attitude may object that they don't think of it as a matter of "rights", per se, since they believe in the right to free speech. Perhaps they may say that it's something that we should encourage at a societal-cultural level, that we should establish a sort of etiquette or common understanding that people should not present critiques without having solutions to them. But why? Is it morally wrong? Are the critics doing some kind of harm or promoting a vice? Or is it practically unproductive? That is, does it hinder progress in some way such that it is in the best interests of even those very critics to stay silent for the sake of their cause? Or is it something else?

I can't and won't address every possible justification of the entitlement attitude. But I would like to highlight the fact that we do not hold this attitude when it comes to some other kinds of critiques. For example, we do not expect a food critic to be able to fix a dish that he didn't enjoy, or expect a movie reviewer to be able to lay out in precise detail how an alternative version of the movie would have been optimal. These are good qualities a critic can have, of course, and it might even be that we celebrate the critics who know how to fix a flaw in the thing they critique as being the best critics. But it is clear that the kind of jagged hostility that accompanies the entitlement attitude in political and philosophical discourse is not present in the case of the food critic or the movie critic. The "rights" phrasing of the entitlement attitude captures the way that its holders feel as though unrigorous critics aren't merely bad critics or unpolished critics, but undeserving and thus invalid.

Furthermore, if we really think about it, the entitlement attitude is not very practical or realistic. The skills involved in presenting a good critique does not always correlate with the skills involved in constructing a good solution– a great movie critic isn't necessarily a great movie director. Then why do we expect critics of policy, tradition, etc. to also be good at fixing them? If productivity is our primary concern, the optimal setup would delegate the work of critiquing to those who are best at them, and delegate the work of resolving critiques to those who are best at them, and so on. It is entirely possible, and even common, for the two to lie in different domains. Sure, it may be that a critic can benefit from also being a good solver and vice versa– but then again, how common is this? Inconsistencies between Newtonian gravity and astronomical observations were apparent even during Newton's time, but it took Einstein to resolve the inconsistencies. Should Newton have shut up about the inconsistencies because he couldn't conceive of general relativity? Should we have waited for a person with the combined genius of Einstein and Newton to appear in history? This may seem like an exaggerated example, but I think the central point it illustrates holds. In fact, the unrealisticness of the entitlement attitude's expectations is really a feature and not a bug to bad-faith actors.

The gadfly rebels against the entitlement attitude. I hold no shame in asking questions, exposing flaws, and presenting critiques that I don't have complete answers to. The pestered steed says that the gadflies are uncomfortable; it demands an easy, quick relief from the nagging. It is irritated that the gadflies do not treat their own bites. We reply, "That's the point! Be uncomfortable. Resist lazy comfort, which tempts you to take a sweet, long nap. You will ignore all of your alarms and snoozes, sleep until sunset, and wake up with a headache in a dark room."

How (not) to be a gadfly

The most important thing about being a gadfly is to have intellectual humility. Too often, people who passionately start out as genuine questioners devolve into being nothing more than a concern troll like Ben Shapiro. If a gadfly does not pester in good faith, it is practically indistinguishable from the people who hold the entitlement attitude.

The virtuous gadfly asks questions because it is curious; because it is unashamed of its own ignorance; because the trouble it may endure in coming to terms with a difficult, ugly answer is overpowered by the satisfaction it gains from receiving an answer; because it is always excited to celebrate a person who successfully resolves its attack.

The vicious gadfly, on the other hand, gains pleasure in seeing the person whom they questioned feel ashamed; it doesn’t care for the quality of its pestering, only its ability to impress or intimidate (and there are definitely good pesterings and bad ones); it is deep down a coward that is afraid of other gadflies who may expose the flaws in its character and words; it grumbles when its attack is dissolved.

It may seem ironic that I give so much praise to the gadfly, which I describe myself as one, and yet I say they should be humble. I am quite a prideful person indeed. However, although I am trying to be less prideful, it is for reasons unrelated to the virtues of a gadfly, which involve intellectual humility in particular and not personal humility. But no matter how much pride exudes from one's personality in social settings, a virtuous gadfly must never let it seep into its intellectual pride, or else it becomes a pathetic troll.

I don't necessarily think that everyone, or even most people, should be gadflies. It's not moral to be a gadfly, and it's not immoral to not be one; this really lies half a step outside of the realm of morality. On a more personal note, the reason why I strive to be a virtuous gadfly, despite how often I fail, is a sort of aesthetic preference. To put it crudely, I just think it's much cooler to live like Socrates. His defense at the beginning of this article didn't work and he was put to death. If Plato's writing had not been preserved, perhaps he could have been forgotten to history there. Perhaps in an alternative timeline, he could have even been remembered as a negative figure that corrupted the youth of Athens. But even that failed Socrates would have had a cool life in my eyes. I would rather be a spectacular failure than an uninteresting success.