Selective Calls For Originality

I have seen numerous people criticize someone with a contrary ideology on grounds that they were not being "original," when the person being criticized may very well have come to their conclusion, true or false, on their own by looking to logic instead of appeals to authority.  Perhaps they arrived at their conclusion wholly on their own, or perhaps they encountered it through someone else and then personally reflected on the matter by focusing merely on what logic reveals instead of what other people have or have not said.  In either case, as long as they have not simply parroted others or embraced an idea because of social influence, they have exercised intellectual autonomy--or originality.

Their thoughts are still theirs, and they have still held up the concept to the light of reason without concern for who has endorsed it.  There are different ways to express philosophical originality!  Not all of them pertain to reasoning out strictly logical truths that are either new or familiar to others completely on one's own.  Nevertheless, whether their beliefs are true and verifiable is the first thing to consider.  Autonomous reflection and reasoning are absolute necessities for sound epistemology, but without truth to underpin it, originality is pointless.  Originality in all its forms is at best trivial when it is divorced from truth and rationality.

Moreover, the kind of person who attacks someone for making a statement the former opposes because it is familiar to a broader part of the culture instead of for stating something that is objectively false or unprovable usually supports other people who articulate their own positions, no matter how common those positions and the associated arguments actually are.  Not only do these people misunderstand the nature and different manifestations of originality, but they also are inconsistent in how they treat others.  They are hypocrites who selectively use accusations that might be irrelevant to silence those who represent other worldviews.

In other words, it is not unusual to see various ideological adherents charge each other with unoriginality--even though autonomous, rational reflection is still originality even if many others have already arrived at the same truths--and turn around to applaud their own philosophical allies, no matter how unoriginal they are in the sense of either lacking novelty (which is sometimes inescapable) or failing to believe truths because of personal reflection and strict alignment with reason.  Intellectual intolerance is not the issue, and, indeed, the inflexibility of reason itself is the basis for philosophical imtolerance.  The problem at hand is the sheer hypocrisy displayed by people who both do not understand the nature of originality and are inconsistent in living out their own asinine beliefs about the issue.