#wrong-again-batman

Using precise language is not an affectation merely because you personally require a running start to clear three syllables.

Words possess specific meanings. Those meanings allow us to communicate complex ideas without reducing every conversation to grunts, threats, and vague hand gestures. Humanity developed an entire lexicon, and I see no compelling reason to abandon it simply because some of you regard opening a dictionary as an act of intellectual surrender.

“You only use big words to sound smart.” No. I use the correct words because I am smart. You interpret that as performance because your own intelligence apparently requires one.

Furthermore, brevity is not inherently indicative of depth. Sometimes a concise statement is elegant. Sometimes it is merely the complete extent of what its speaker was capable of producing. Silence may be mysterious. It may also be empty. The distinction becomes obvious the moment the person begins talking.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not a riddle. Not a question. Not an accusation. Not even one of those profoundly irritating little anonymous declarations people insist upon depositing in my general vicinity as though I am some sort of public receptacle for their unprocessed thoughts. Nothing. An immaculate, pristine, utterly barren expanse of digital silence.

Do you understand how statistically improbable that is?

There are, conservatively speaking, millions upon millions of questions that could conceivably be asked at any given moment. Humanity has spent several thousand years asking them. What is the meaning of life? Are we alone in the universe? Is consciousness emergent or fundamental? Can morality exist independent of consequence? Why does Gotham continue electing officials who possess roughly the same collective problem-solving capacity as a concussed pigeon trapped inside a vending machine?

And yet somehow, miraculously, every single one of you has simultaneously exhausted your capacity for curiosity. Fascinating. Truly.

I didn’t realize intellectual bankruptcy could be synchronized. One might assume that placing an individual of demonstrably superior intellect within conversational reach would inspire some degree of inquiry. One might reasonably predict that at least one person would look upon the extraordinary opportunity before them and think, “Perhaps I should ask Edward Nygma something.”

Anything. Anything at all. You could ask me about mathematics. Cryptography, Linguistics, Engineering. Game theory. Probability. Deductive reasoning. The inherent philosophical inadequacy of Batman’s entire methodology. Why crossword puzzles have been steadily declining in quality. Why half the people who claim to enjoy “logic puzzles” actually enjoy pattern recognition exercises designed for twelve-year-olds. Why the phrase “common sense” is almost exclusively invoked by people immediately before saying something catastrophically stupid.

I have opinions. I have extensive opinions.

I possess enough accumulated knowledge, analysis, criticism, unsolicited commentary, and exquisitely articulated contempt to sustain this inbox indefinitely, and what have you done with this extraordinary resource?

Nothing. You have left it empty. Do you leave libraries empty? Museums? Universities? No. You go inside. You look around. You ask questions. You attempt, however clumsily, to expand the tragically limited boundaries of your understanding.

But here? Silence.

Am I intimidating you? Is that it? Because, honestly, I would understand. Imagine standing before a mind such as mine and attempting to formulate a question that does not immediately expose some catastrophic deficiency in your education. Terrifying. Absolutely paralyzing. One misplaced premise and suddenly you’ve revealed that you haven’t understood basic conditional logic since high school.

Still. Courage is the capacity to act despite fear. Be brave. Embarrass yourselves. I promise I have seen worse. Probably.

Actually, no, that’s irresponsible of me to promise. Gotham continually produces new and innovative forms of stupidity at a rate that defies conventional predictive modeling.

But the point remains. Ask. Me. Something.

Do you have a mystery? Give it to me. A hypothetical. Present it. A riddle? You had better make it a good one, but by all means, attempt to impress me. A deeply personal question that you have no business asking Wonderful. At least then I’ll have something to dramatically refuse to answer. An accusation? Excellent. Cite your evidence. An insult? Please make it original. I cannot endure another green-themed joke composed by someone whose greatest intellectual achievement was successfully resetting their Wi-Fi router.

You could even send me complete nonsense. At this juncture, I would accept nonsense. Do you understand what it takes for me to say that? I am lowering the threshold. The bar is now on the floor. Technically, it may have passed through the floor. It is somewhere beneath the building. Geologists have been contacted. And still-

Nothing. Not one miserable little notification. I refreshed the page. Nothing. I checked again. Nothing. I briefly entertained the possibility of a technical malfunction, because surely the alternative- that every person with access to this page independently decided they had nothing worth saying to me- was too absurd to seriously contemplate.

Unfortunately, the system appears to be functioning perfectly. Which means the malfunction is apparently you. Do you know how insulting it is to have an empty inbox when one’s entire personal brand is predicated upon QUESTIONS?

There is a QUESTION MARK on my CLOTHING. It is arguably the single most recognizable piece of punctuation associated with any costumed individual in Gotham. Batman has a bat. I HAVE AN INTERROGATIVE SYMBOL. The invitation could not conceivably be more explicit unless I stood on a street corner holding a fluorescent sign reading:

PLEASE PRESENT INQUIRIES TO THE ENIGMATICALLY DRESSED MAN.

And yet here I am. Questionless. Inquiry-deficient. Interrogatively malnourished. Suffering from an acute shortage of epistemological stimulation. This is humiliating. Not for me. For you. Obviously.

I am perfectly capable of entertaining myself. I could solve equations. Construct puzzles. Design an escape room so psychologically devastating that grown adults would reconsider every academic compliment they have received since kindergarten. I do not need your questions.

Let’s establish that immediately. I am not sitting here staring at the empty inbox. I have not checked it repeatedly. I certainly did not close it, reopen it, refresh it, check my connection, refresh it again, and then briefly wonder whether anonymous submissions had somehow been disabled. That would be ridiculous. I checked. They are enabled so, there goes that theory.

Anyway, this is not desperation. This is quality control. I am concerned about you. Collectively.

A society that ceases asking questions is a society in decline. Inquiry is the foundation of intellectual advancement. Every discovery begins with uncertainty. Every theorem begins with a problem. Every investigation begins because someone looked at the available evidence and had enough cognitive function to ask:

“Why?”

And apparently none of you can manage even that. Do you know who else doesn’t ask questions? People who already know everything. And corpses. Given the observable evidence, I feel reasonably confident we can eliminate the first possibility. So unless my entire audience has suffered some sudden mass casualty event- and I feel Batman would probably have mentioned that- I am forced to conclude that you are all simply sitting there.

Silently looking at this page. Perhaps scrolling, thinking, “Someone else will send something.”

Ah. The diffusion of responsibility. Classic. Do you suppose riddles solve themselves because everyone assumes another person will do it? No. Someone eventually has to engage the frontal lobe.

Today, tragically, that person may have to be you. Yes, you. The one reading this and thinking this rant must surely be directed at somebody else. It isn’t. You have fingers. You have an internet connection. You presumably possess at least rudimentary language capability, given that you’ve successfully navigated this far through the paragraph.

Formulate an interrogative sentence. I believe in you. Well- no. That’s excessive. I believe the probability of your success is greater than zero. There, that’s better. And before anyone gets clever and submits merely:

“?”

I will find you. Not in a threatening way, in a I will locate you conceptually and explain, at considerable length, why punctuation without semantic content does not constitute meaningful inquiry.

Although- actually- at this point? Fine. Send the question mark or seven of them. Send me a photograph of a strangely shaped vegetable and ask what I think it resembles. Ask whether cereal is soup. Whether a straw has one hole or two. Ask which Gotham rogue would perform worst on Jeopardy!. Ask me why Batman insists upon dressing like a flying mammal and then behaves surprised whenever children cry upon seeing him emerge from an alley at three in the morning. Ask me whether I could beat him at chess- the answer is yes, obviously. Next question.

See? Look how easy this is. We are generating content already. I have successfully simulated the participation you have all failed to provide. How astounding. Perhaps I should simply begin submitting questions to myself. Would that satisfy you?

Would you enjoy witnessing the inevitable culmination of your collective inactivity: Edward Nygma conducting an entire interview with Edward Nygma because apparently Edward Nygma is the only conversationalist available with sufficient initiative?

“Edward, what is it like being the smartest man in Gotham?” Excellent question, Edward. “Edward, how do you maintain such remarkable patience when surrounded by mediocrity?” Another excellent question. “Edward, is it emotionally exhausting being correct this often?” You know, Edward, I’m glad you asked. See how rapidly the quality improves when I control both sides of the conversation? This could be us. But apparently you lack ambition.

I created an inbox. It has a purpose. For things to go inside it. It's not advanced topology.

EMPTY BOX: BAD.

FULL BOX: GOOD.

There. I’ve reduced the concept to terms simple enough that even one of Harvey’s henchmen could theoretically grasp it. And before somebody inevitably says, “Well, Eddie, maybe people just don’t know what to ask- ” Oh, wonderful. Now I have to do everything. Must I provide prompts as well?

This is not complicated. I should not have needed approximately fifteen paragraphs to explain it. And yet here we are, so congratulations. You have successfully transformed the absence of messages into an event. You made emptiness irritating. Do you realize how philosophically impressive that is? Nothingness itself has become annoying. Sartre would be fascinated.

@sword-for-hire

Slade, the fact that you experience coherent speech as “incessant jabbering” says considerably more about the intellectual conditions inside that helmet than it does about me.

Some of us communicate through complete sentences rather than tactical grunting, gunfire, and prolonged displays of masculine disapproval.

But since you prefer brevity:

You have been granted access to arguably the most formidable intellect currently available to the general public, and within twenty-six seconds, you’ve elected to outsource existentialism to me.

“Meaning” presupposes intention.

A hammer has meaning because someone designed it to strike a nail. A sentence has meaning because someone arranged its words to communicate an idea. So, before I can answer what the meaning of life is, you’ll first have to prove life was created with one.

You’ve skipped a premise.

Sloppy.

…

Oh, please.

You ceased being a “mystery” somewhere between the third uninterrupted string of laughter and ridiculous nickname. Anonymity requires more than clicking a button, you know. It requires restraint. Consistency. The ability to disguise one’s linguistic patterns, preferred forms of provocation, punctuation habits, and desperate, almost pathological need to ensure that every room—or inbox—you enter immediately becomes about you.

You possess none of those qualities. You might as well have signed each message in purple ink and attached a novelty flower spraying corrosive acid.

And let us correct another misconception while we are here: You are not my favorite mystery. Mysteries contain concealed information. They reward investigation. They become more intricate the deeper one looks.

You, by contrast, are extraordinarily simple. You make noise until someone pays attention. If they refuse, you make more noise. If that fails, you escalate into pet names and declare yourself fascinating in the hope that repetition will accomplish what substance could not.

It is not enigmatic. It is the behavioral equivalent of repeatedly striking a malfunctioning vending machine because you believe volume constitutes technical expertise.

pls set up an escape room <3

I would be forever grateful because my girlfriend doesn’t believe that you’ll do it and I (for once) need to win an argument.

@thezesti-hummingbird

…

Fine.

But let us establish something immediately: I will not be “setting up an escape room.” Escape rooms are commercially sanitized approximations of intellectual adversity, designed so that suburban couples can fumble with combination locks for forty-five minutes before an underpaid employee offers them a hint over an intercom.

What I will construct is an immersive, sequential test of deductive reasoning, lateral cognition, pattern recognition, cryptanalysis, and psychological resilience.

Should you complete every stage, you will receive incontrovertible proof that you were correct and she was wrong- professionally typeset, embossed, and signed by Gotham’s foremost authority on being correct.

Should you fail, however, I will provide her with an equally formal certificate confirming that you invoked Edward Nygma’s name during a domestic disagreement and still managed to lose.

I consider these terms exceptionally fair.

Oh. You were listening.. Excellent!

The answer, unfortunately, is considerably less entertaining than the pigeon.

Gotham has spent decades perfecting a political ecosystem in which competence is not necessarily advantageous to survival. Competence disrupts arrangements. Competence asks inconvenient questions. Competence notices where the money went, why the same contracts keep finding their way into the same hands, and how an individual with seventeen documented conflicts of interest somehow continues being described as an “experienced public servant.”

So what does the system select for instead?

Familiarity, money, connections, fear, name recognition. The reassuring ability to stand behind a podium and confidently repeat six sentences written by somebody significantly smarter.

And Gothamites- having been conditioned by generations of corruption, scandal, institutional collapse, organized crime, super-crime, occasional chemical terrorism, and whatever catastrophic civic embarrassment occurred this week- develop extraordinarily low expectations.

Eventually, “probably not actively working for the mob” begins to resemble a qualification.

Then election season arrives, everyone solemnly promises to clean up Gotham, approximately twelve people believe them, the rest vote for whichever candidate appears least likely to be indicted before inauguration, and six months later somebody discovers that the deputy mayor has been laundering money through a charity for orphaned puppies.

Again. It is not, strictly speaking, that Gotham continually elects stupid people. That would actually be easier to solve.

It continually produces systems in which intelligent people are incentivized to become corrupt, honest people are incentivized to leave, and mediocre people with excellent networking skills float effortlessly to the surface like particularly persistent sewage.

The pigeon, meanwhile, remains trapped inside the vending machine.