"Most people when they come to you for advice, come to have their own opinions strengthened, not corrected"
About this Quote
Advice, in Josh Billings's hands, becomes less a moral service than a customer-satisfaction business. The line lands because it punctures the flattering fantasy we keep about counsel: that people seek truth when they seek guidance. Billings, a 19th-century American humorist with a sidelong, homespun bite, treats the advice-seeker not as a humble student but as a lawyer shopping for a favorable verdict. It is comedy built on recognition, the kind that makes you laugh and then check your own last text thread.
The intent is diagnostic, not comforting. Billings is warning the would-be adviser that the transaction is often rigged. The subtext: advice is frequently a social performance, a way to outsource responsibility while keeping control. If the adviser agrees, the seeker gets validation; if the adviser disagrees, the seeker gets a foil to reject, which still reinforces the original stance. Either way, the seeker leaves with the soothing sense that they "considered options."
Context matters: Billings wrote in a culture of public lecturing, moral uplift, and self-help platitudes, where "good advice" was a kind of civic currency. His joke pushes back against that earnestness by admitting how status and ego distort supposedly rational exchange. It's an early, blunt sketch of what we'd now call confirmation bias, but sharper because it indicts not just the mind's wiring, but the social choreography: we don't merely believe what we want; we recruit other people to bless it.
The intent is diagnostic, not comforting. Billings is warning the would-be adviser that the transaction is often rigged. The subtext: advice is frequently a social performance, a way to outsource responsibility while keeping control. If the adviser agrees, the seeker gets validation; if the adviser disagrees, the seeker gets a foil to reject, which still reinforces the original stance. Either way, the seeker leaves with the soothing sense that they "considered options."
Context matters: Billings wrote in a culture of public lecturing, moral uplift, and self-help platitudes, where "good advice" was a kind of civic currency. His joke pushes back against that earnestness by admitting how status and ego distort supposedly rational exchange. It's an early, blunt sketch of what we'd now call confirmation bias, but sharper because it indicts not just the mind's wiring, but the social choreography: we don't merely believe what we want; we recruit other people to bless it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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