An antidote to bombast …

… Reality, One Grain at a Time | PopMatters. (Hat tip, Christopher Guerin.)

… Aldous Huxley famously observed, “Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.” 

These “secret doubts” are precisely what our mini-Menckens and assorted other polemicists ought to be confronting and exploring, rather than suppressing or insincerely rationalizing away as they too often do. “Truth,” as La Rochefoucauld pointed out in his Maxims, “does not do as much good in the world as the semblance of truth does evil.” It’s this persuasive simulacrum of truth that is the single-minded thinker’s greatest failing.