Prophet or Charlatan? A Human Behavioral Observation of Those Who Refuse to Communicate

There is a person who keeps issuing warnings before things happen. Some accuse him of talking nonsense, others of spreading alarmist talk.

After the event occurs, that person says, “See, it happened after all.” Some accuse him of gloating, others of digging up his entire family history.

Such a person may be regarded as a prophet by the devout, or dismissed as a showy charlatan by those devoted to a different set of values.

This person could be Jesus Christ, Columbus, Copernicus or Galileo, former Director-General of the Department of Health Yang Chih-liang, or you and me—people who found a problem but had no one to tell.

An enlightening professor I had during my student days once said: “Don’t casually give up on your flashes of inspiration. Don’t worry about whether your ideas will be accepted, and don’t be afraid of wild, fanciful thinking. Write down all your thoughts and inspirations with your own hands. Even if you can’t understand them now, or can’t even see the road ahead, once you gain more knowledge in the future, you may discover an entirely new continent among those ideas.”

What’s curious is that these golden words, which benefited me so much, seem to be met with such contempt by many people. And the progressive dialogue and communication that comes from different knowledge gained through each person’s upbringing and academic cultivation—ideas that clash, accommodate, and grow together—will not appear on this island of Taiwan either.

Worse still, these people will glare as if they had seen a mortal enemy, eager to slaughter and eliminate you as fast as possible.

To put it plainly, it’s not that the thinking or ideas have done anything wrong; it’s the resentment generated between people that makes them unwilling to see the correct direction clearly, sinking them deeper into the trap of refusing to communicate—just like those pitiful people deceived by con artists, who always claim they were drugged by a tap on the shoulder, and would rather hide it their whole lives than admit it was simply their own greed.

If these people have no voice, they act like guerrillas—sarcastic posts, fake neutrality, trolling, attacks;

Those with a voice jump out, each saying their piece, ignoring the logic of the overall discourse, all just to jointly and publicly criticize a civil expert with whom they hold absolutely no equal power—utterly lacking the cultivation that should come with high office, barely short of telling you outright to shut up.

What these two types of people have in common is that the words they speak often have nothing to do with how to actually solve the problem itself; they are simply emotional blackmail occupying the moral high ground—meaningless for solving anything.

Setting aside these false hats of “charlatan” or “prophet” with ulterior motives, if we communicate sincerely, learn to accept and embrace each other’s ideas, and abandon mutual hostility, then even three cobblers who don’t argue can outshine Zhuge Liang, right?