When we interact with others, we often like to be perceived as lively and witty. Accordingly, we may aspire to come up with clever comments and comebacks during conversations. This aspiration can be healthy if it prompts us to become more attentive to people’s words and moods so that we can better respond to them. But it can be unhealthy if it propels us to stand out in a crowd by speaking sarcastically, and by seeking to excel in such sarcastic speech. 

We may even congratulate ourselves for our cleverness whenever we are able to come up with a snarky comment. And it does require intellectual and verbal dexterity to craft biting remarks on the spur of the moment. Such sarcasm can be constructive in those specific contexts where someone is putting on a lot of airs and we put them in their place. However, when our sarcasm evokes laughs and claps, we may get hooked to that applause — and we may start trying to be sarcastic constantly, including at times when it is uncalled for or is even inappropriate or downright offensive. 

Sarcastic remarks not only deflate people’s egos but also deflate their spirits. If they are timid, they may become discouraged and depressed. If they are rough, they may hit back at us through words or even actions, thereby creating and escalating unnecessary conflicts. Therefore, if we believe that our sarcasm is a sign of our cleverness, we are being self-destructively short-sighted. We need to expand our understanding of what will make us good communicators: not just cleverness, but also wisdom. In this context, wisdom refers to the foresight to see how our words will affect others and to forgo the pleasure of short-lived applause for the purpose of a long-term good relationship. Essentially, wisdom means coming up with the will to refrain from speaking sarcastic words even when we are smart enough to come up with them in no time. Put another way, our will for verbal restraint needs to rise up as fast, if not faster than, our words of sarcasm. Pertinently, the Bhagavad-gita (17.15) guides us toward such wisdom when it recommends that we refrain from speaking words that are agitating and instead seek to speak words that are pleasing. 

Summary:

Cleverness is coming up with the words to say something sarcastic; wisdom is coming up with the will to not say those words.

Think it over: 

  • When can the aspiration to be witty conversationalists be healthy and when unhealthy?
  • When is sarcasm constructive? How does it tend to be destructive?
  • How can we expand our understanding of what makes us good communicators? 

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17.15: Austerity of speech consists in speaking words that are truthful, pleasing, beneficial, and not agitating to others, and also in regularly reciting Vedic literature.

Audio explanation of the article is here: https://gitadaily.substack.com/p/the-difference-between-cleverness

To know more about this verse, please click on the image