Both extremes damage our reputation. Every undertaking which differs from the reasonable approaches foolishness. The paradox is a cheat: it wins applause at first by its novelty and piquancy, but afterwards it becomes discredited when the deceit is foreseen and its emptiness becomes apparent.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
There is a temptation, especially for the intelligent, to prefer the surprising claim to the true one. The paradox arrives with immediate rewards: attention, the appearance of originality, the pleasure of a room reacting. Then time does its work, the position is tested, and what remains is not an original thinker but someone whose judgment is entertaining and unreliable. The passage is careful to condemn both extremes: the trite is a real failure too, and repeating conventional wisdom adds nothing. The exit from both is not cleverness but depth, the unfashionable position held because the evidence demands it, which occasionally looks contrarian and never is.
Practice
- Before publishing a surprising claim, ask whether you would hold it if nobody found it interesting. If not, it is a performance.
- Distinguish evidence-led unpopular positions from novelty-led ones; the first can be defended in five years, the second cannot survive one.
- When the trite is true, say it plainly and add value elsewhere: in evidence, in application, in the specific case (maxim 92 prefers the ounce).
Use this when
- Use this whenever you notice yourself hunting a take rather than a truth, particularly in public forums that reward reaction.
- Use it in advisory work, where a paradoxical recommendation costs the client and the paradox costs you the client.
Ignore this when
- Don't let it silence genuinely heterodox views; the maxim targets contrarianism as method, not disagreement as such (maxim 43 routes the real ones).
- Don't retreat into the safe and obvious either; that is the trite failure, condemned in the same breath.
A picture of it
The columnist built an audience on reliably inverted positions: the crisis was overblown, the consensus was cowardice, the boring solution was a trap. It ran beautifully for three years and then the record accumulated, and the same readers who had enjoyed the inversions began checking them against outcomes. His colleague, less quotable, held ordinary views and one unpopular one that she had documented for a decade. When that call proved right, it moved policy, because the paper trail showed judgment rather than reflex.
Hold the unpopular view when the evidence forces it. Manufacture it and your whole record becomes decoration.