What makes mid-level villains like Ben Linus of Lost, or Shades of Luke Cage so captivating? They never resort to hyperbole. That alone makes them better role models, stylistically, than Glenn Greenwald.
Speech turns supervillain when people use hyperbole to express righteousness. An example is Greenwald describing Obama: “And now we have the spectacle of President Obama reciting paeans to the values of individual privacy and the pressing need for NSA safeguards with an impressively straight face.” Greenwald would demand that Batman take off the mask.
Peter Thiel is another fan of hyperbole. This is Thiel on higher education: “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.” But Thiel is a study in hyperbolic traps. He specializes in baiting progressives, like Greenwald, who speak with moral certitude. The traps work because, unlike Greenwald, Thiel still uses hyperbole as a form of irony.
Hyperbole attracts exaggeration and nothing is easier to shrug off than a un-ironic exaggeration. Just try matching Thiel's ridiculous tone. Accuse him of luring high school graduates to Silicon Valley and training them to confuse greed for innovation and ruthlessness for merit. Then watch while Thiel associates you with old-fashioned social panics and floats away on his airship.
Hyperbole is comic sans with impunity. It vibrates in the register of cartoon villain. It turns facts to plaque. Complexity collapses under its bloat.
Sometimes events are catastrophic. Sometimes people are corrupt. Sometimes we need extreme language because the things about which we speak are extreme. The world generates plenty of real reason for outrage. But, as any mid-level villain will tell you at just the moment you think you have exposed him, “this time, you have it wrong. This time, no one had a plan. No one meant harm. No one derived pleasure from your pain. This time, it looks like misfortune because it is misfortune. And it’s a shame that you called the police and the newspapers to this dusty warehouse thinking that “kitten box” was code for something sinister because when I said it, I meant an actual box full of kittens. Here. Hold one. I guarantee it will make you feel better.”