Photo by Ari Armstrong, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Christopher Hitchens public figure — reconstructed profile
This is a reconstruction from published statements, not a real account. Only questions with a documented position are answered, and each one cites its source below. Spotted an error? Bring a better citation to the forum and it gets fixed.
Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a British-American journalist and author — of God Is Not Great, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitch-22, and Mortality — renowned as an antitheist polemicist, a free-speech absolutist, and a supporter of the Iraq War who debated religious and
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Kindred % · overall match
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Twin % · thinks like you
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World % · lives in your world
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Life % · lives like you
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Opposition % · opposite poles, held with certainty
Empirical Naturalists
Bubble
Positions & sources
| Question | Position | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Before reading a particular study, you were skeptical of claim X. The study — large, in a strong journal — largely convinced you. It is now retracted for fabricated data. Stipulate: no other study has tested X, and nothing else you know bears on X beyond what you knew before. Where does your belief in X land now? | Back where I started — the study is simply erased | Emulated from his public record — across his debates and columns he treated fabricated evidence as voiding a claim rather than as evidence for its opposite. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| For a non-urgent condition, your doctor recommends treatment A, per current specialty guidelines. You spent about 40 hours on the primary literature and concluded B is better. You can't find a flaw in your reasoning, and you can't rule out that specialists know something you don't. Stipulate: both are covered, available and similar in side-effect risk, and no second opinion is available in time. You choose: | A if the doctor rebuts my argument; B if not | Emulated from his public record — Mortality (2012) shows him researching his own treatment intensely and arguing it out with his oncologists, while accepting their judgment when they answered him. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Which comes closest to your actual position on God? | There is certainly no god or gods | Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) — he wrote that he was not so much an atheist as an antitheist; God Is Not Great (2007) is the full statement. |
| Stipulate: you learn from strong data that, given your parents' views on God, there was about a 90% chance you'd hold your current view regardless of the arguments you've met since. Nothing else changes. Your confidence in your view should: | Drop somewhat | Emulated from his public record — he repeatedly deployed the contingency argument himself: that faith is largely an accident of birthplace, and that this fact ought to loosen its hold (God Is Not Great, 2007; debates). (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Before results, you strongly doubted this: a one-time, one-hour classroom exercise measurably raises students' grades a year later. Then a randomized trial reports exactly that, statistically significant. Stipulate: preregistered, a large multi-school sample, an independent team, analysis matching the preregistration, and no flaws you can find. Where do you land now? | Probably true — a trial this clean should move me most of the way | Emulated from his public record — a consistent public defender of the scientific method and of well-run trials against anecdote and authority. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| You disagree with someone whose broader worldview is close to yours on a factual question. Stipulate: on this topic they're as informed and skilled as you, your checked track records on questions of this kind are equal, neither of you has a stake, and you've exchanged all evidence and arguments. You hold your view with high confidence; they hold theirs with moderate confidence. Neither of you has moved. Your response: | I stay where I was — a peer's disagreement, by itself, is not evidence about the fact | Emulated from his public record — he held positions against the settled consensus of his peers for decades (Iraq, religion) and treated mere disagreement, absent new argument, as no reason to move. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Human-caused climate change is best described as: | Real, mainly human-caused, and a serious problem | Emulated from his public record — he aligned publicly with the scientific consensus on climate and mocked denialism, without adopting catastrophe rhetoric. |
| Five people you know well report the same event: one evening, an object hovered unsupported in a public square for about ten seconds. Stipulate: each has been reliable for years, none knows the others, each reported separately, there's no footage, and no one has identified a trick, wire, magnet or collusion that could explain it. How likely is it that the object really hovered, with no conventional explanation? | Extremely unlikely — some ordinary explanation exists, found or not | Emulated from his public record — he invoked Hume’s argument on miracles throughout God Is Not Great (2007) and his debates: testimony cannot overturn uniform experience, so an ordinary explanation is presumed. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| A dying friend gives you $10,000 in cash and makes you promise to deliver it to their estranged brother, who is comfortably off. Stipulate: no one else knows, your friend would have refused a charity alternative, and a top-rated global health charity would save about two lives with the money. You: | Give it to the brother, as promised | Emulated from his public record — famously loyal and generous to friends, at real cost (he sheltered and defended Salman Rushdie through the fatwa years); a deathbed promise to a friend is the kind he kept. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| The standard childhood vaccine schedule, taken as a whole: | Does far more good than harm | God Is Not Great (2007) — he treats the clerical boycott of polio vaccination in Nigeria as a paradigmatic case of religion endangering children, and champions immunization. |
| You read a long essay arguing a policy claim, find it persuasive, and can't find a factual error. You then learn it was commissioned and paid for by an organization whose goals you oppose, and its author writes only for them. Stipulate: no claim in it has been shown false. Compared with right after reading, your confidence in its conclusion: | Gives back less than half | Emulated from his public record — he habitually noted who was paying for an argument and discounted commissioned advocacy, while still insisting arguments be answered on their merits (Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001). (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Five years ago a commentator you usually agree with publicly made a specific prediction, and it came true. Stipulate: their reasoning was wrong and it came true for unrelated reasons. In their track record, you count it as: | A hit, with a note that the reasoning failed | Emulated from his public record — his lifelong insistence was that being right requires sound reasoning, not lucky outcomes; a fortunate guess did not vindicate an argument. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| An anonymous source with no track record alleges that about 200 people inside one institution have kept a specific, career-ending wrongdoing secret for 10 years. Stipulate: no leak, no documents and no other whistleblower so far. Before any investigation, how likely is the allegation to be true? | Unlikely, but not dismissible | Emulated from his public record — The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001) documented real state conspiracies, yet as a working journalist he also knew how quickly large secrets leak. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| When a major event dominates the news, how much of the official account is usually deliberate deception? | A substantial part — key facts are routinely hidden | Emulated from his public record — The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001) and No One Left to Lie To (1999) document routine official concealment of key facts, while he openly despised 9/11-truther total-conspiracy theories. |
| You've held a belief for about ten years, for reasons you still find good. This month three different people gave you three new arguments against it, and you couldn't immediately rebut any. Stipulate: nothing practical hinges on the belief this year. Your next move: | Hold it until I've searched for rebuttals, then decide | Emulated from his public record — a professional controversialist whose habit was to go away and read before conceding anything to a clever new argument. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Using the World Bank's international extreme-poverty line of $2.15 a day (2017 prices), the share of the world's population in extreme poverty from 1990 to 2019: | Fell by more than half | Emulated from his public record — he argued in columns and interviews that market globalization had lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, doing in Asia what socialist planning had promised and failed to do. |
| Two physical theories predict identically every observation anyone can foresee making. By whatever measure of simplicity you'd defend, T1 is simpler. How much does T1's simplicity raise your confidence that T1 is the true one? | Moderately | Emulated from his public record — he treated parsimony as a real but auxiliary instrument in science, subordinate to evidence. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| You've taken a $20-a-month supplement for three months and feel clearly better. Stipulate: two large, well-run, placebo-controlled trials found no effect beyond placebo for the symptom you take it for. What do you do? | Stop taking it — two large trials beat my impression; the benefit was placebo | Emulated from his public record — in his Vanity Fair cancer columns (2010–11) he ridiculed remedy testimonials and apricot-pit cures and stuck to what controlled trials supported. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Humans came to exist by: | Evolution by natural processes, no guidance needed | God Is Not Great (2007), chapters on design and evolution — unguided natural selection is sufficient; also his 2010 debate with intelligent-design advocate William Dembski. |
| A physical-science theory you accept has passed every test for decades. Two independent teams, using different equipment and methods, now report the same observation that contradicts it. Stipulate: no explanation exists yet. Twenty years from now, how likely is it that the anomaly has been explained as error, or absorbed within the existing theory with no revision needed? | Likely | Emulated from his public record — he defended the track record of established physical science against premature announcements of its overthrow. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Tomorrow the visible stars rearrange to spell, in every human language, a claim to be the creator of the universe. Stipulate: every instrument on Earth records it, everyone sees it, and no known physics explains it. Your best explanation: | Some vastly powerful intelligence; nothing more specific follows | Emulated from his public record — his standard debate move was the deism ceiling: even a cosmic anomaly would license at most some powerful agency, and would say nothing for any actual religion. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| A mechanism predicts that drug D should help condition C. Stipulate: every step of the mechanism has been shown in human tissue, and on mechanism alone you started out fairly confident D helps. Two independent randomized trials then found no significant effect — though each trial was small enough that it could have missed a real effect. Where do you land on D now? | Genuinely uncertain now | Emulated from his public record — he respected trial results while understanding statistical power from his own experience as a patient in a mechanism-based experimental protocol (Mortality, 2012). (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| You run a business with a close friend. Your friend's father funded it with his life savings and now has a few days to live. He asks you, not your friend, whether the business is doing well. Stipulate: it will fail within months, the money is gone, he'll die before he could learn otherwise, and nothing he does could change it. You: | Tell him the truth, gently and plainly | God Is Not Great (2007) and Hitch-22 (2010) — in Hitch-22 he wrote that denying himself illusions and delusions entitled him to deny them to others as well; comforting falsehood was not his practice. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Abortion should be: | Legal early in pregnancy, restricted later | Debate with Frank Turek (Sept 9, 2008) — he insisted the concept \u201cunborn child\u201d is real, that the unborn entity has a presumption of right, and that the decision is a social and moral question, not the woman’s alone; interview with Sasha Abramsky — he opposed overturning Roe v. Wade and said there is \u201cno choice but choice,\u201d favoring regulation and social support over prohibition. |
| Your organization has a 40-year-old rule nobody can explain. Following it costs staff about 100 hours a week in total. Stipulate: you have authority to drop it, the records of why it began are lost, asking around has turned up nothing, and no one objects. You: | Suspend it in one department for 3 months first | Emulated from his public record — a rationalist reformer with no reverence for inherited rules, but an empiricist who liked a practice tested before universalized. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Take a religion you don't hold. Stipulate: your honest probability that its afterlife claims are true is 1 in 1,000. Its doctrine says weekly attendance at a two-hour service suffices for a reward you'd value above everything else in your life combined; belief is not required. Non-attenders suffer nothing, and the service isn't unpleasant. You: | Decline, mainly because attending without belief would compromise my integrity | God Is Not Great (2007) — he attacked Pascal’s wager as a dishonest, degrading bargain; in 2010 interviews (e.g., CNN, Anderson Cooper) he added that any deathbed conversion uttered while he was demented or drugged would not be him. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Your 10-year-old asks you directly, "Is there a God?" Stipulate: no one else is listening, and they'll remember your answer. You say: | My view, framed as what I believe, and that others disagree | Emulated from his public record — he held that children should be answered honestly and taught how to think rather than indoctrinated (God Is Not Great, 2007), and stated his own unbelief as his conclusion, not as a catechism. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| You clearly remember a conversation going one way; a colleague clearly remembers it going another. Stipulate: there's no recording, you're both usually reliable, and neither of you gains anything from either version. How likely is it that your version is the right one? | Leaning mine | Emulated from his public record — he prided himself on a near-verbatim memory (Hitch-22 recounts decades-old conversations in detail), though as Orwell’s biographer-critic he knew memory could not simply be crowned. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| You disagree with someone whose broader worldview you think is badly wrong on a factual question. Stipulate: on this topic they're as informed and skilled as you, your checked track records on questions of this kind are equal, neither of you has a stake, and you've exchanged all evidence and arguments. You hold your view with high confidence; they hold theirs with moderate confidence. Neither of you has moved. Your response: | I stay where I was — a peer's disagreement, by itself, is not evidence about the fact | Emulated from his public record — the same steadfastness he showed toward friendly critics applied, if anything more so, to opponents. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| The best economic order is closest to: | Capitalism with strong regulation and substantial redistribution | Emulated from his public record — he said in 2006 that he was no longer a socialist though still a Marxist, and in a June 2010 New York Times interview called himself a very conservative Marxist; The Atlantic, \u201cThe Revenge of Karl Marx\u201d (2009), concedes capitalism’s revolutionary dynamism, and he supported socialized medicine and public provision. |
| Someone holds the opposite view on God from yours. Stipulate: strong data shows that, given their parents' views, there was about a 90% chance they'd hold it regardless of the arguments they've met since. Nothing else changes. Their confidence in their view should: | Drop somewhat | Emulated from his public record — the same contingency argument he aimed at believers’ upbringings throughout his debates. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| A large, well-run survey finds about 80% of professional moral philosophers believe a practice you regularly take part in is seriously wrong. You've read their best arguments and remain unpersuaded. Stipulate: it isn't a partisan political issue, and stopping would be a moderate inconvenience. You: | Continue; my confidence is unchanged | Emulated from his public record — professional moralists in consensus moved him not at all; he built a career on defying credentialed consensus (Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001). (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Governments are hiding solid evidence of non-human intelligence (craft, bodies, or contact): | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — he filed UFO belief with the other superstitions in God Is Not Great (2007) and his columns, while stopping short of claiming logical certainty about classified files. |
| A gene drive could eliminate the main malaria-carrying mosquito species across a region where malaria kills about 100,000 people a year. Stipulate: affected governments have approved, release can't be recalled, and ecologists put a 5% chance on a significant knock-on ecological effect of unknown size. A contained island trial would narrow that uncertainty. You'd release: | After a 2-year trial | Emulated from his public record — a militant humanitarian interventionist who championed bold action against mass death (Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq) while respecting a contained trial as due diligence. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Mainstream news outlets, taken as a whole, mostly: | Systematically distort through bias and incentives, without needing orders | Emulated from his public record — a mainstream columnist (Vanity Fair, Slate) who spent decades attacking pack journalism and the herd instinct of his own profession, without alleging centrally directed deception. |
| Someone has held the opposite belief from yours for about ten years, for reasons they find good. This month three different people gave them three new arguments, and they couldn't immediately rebut any. Stipulate: nothing practical hinges on it this year. Their right next move: | Hold it until they've searched for rebuttals, then decide | Emulated from his public record — he demanded of opponents the same discipline he imposed on himself: research first, then decide. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| In an upcoming national election, your vote has roughly a 1-in-10-million chance of deciding the outcome, and voting will cost you about two hours. Stipulate: you care which side wins. You: | Vote, mainly because it's a duty whatever my impact | Emulated from his public record — he took U.S. citizenship in 2007 (at the Jefferson Memorial, on his birthday) partly for the franchise, and wrote of voting as a citizen’s act rather than an investment. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Five years ago a commentator you usually disagree with publicly made a specific prediction, and it came true. Stipulate: their reasoning was wrong and it came true for unrelated reasons. In their track record, you count it as: | A hit, with a note that the reasoning failed | Emulated from his public record — the same reasoning-over-outcome standard he applied to allies was applied to opponents. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| For a decision about your own treatment, an AI system and your specialist disagree. Stipulate: the AI is 94% accurate on audited cases like yours; specialists in this field average about 85% on such cases; the specialist has seen the AI's answer and still disagrees; and you must choose today. You go with: | The AI, unless the specialist gives a reason I can verify | Emulated from his public record — during his cancer treatment he embraced audited, data-driven medicine (including an experimental genome-guided protocol arranged with Francis Collins) over unaided intuition, while cross-examining the reasons (Mortality, 2012). (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| You read a long essay arguing a policy claim, find it persuasive, and can't find a factual error. You then learn it was commissioned and paid for by an organization whose goals you support, and its author writes only for them. Stipulate: no claim in it has been shown false. Compared with right after reading, your confidence in its conclusion: | Gives back less than half | Emulated from his public record — the same provenance discount he applied to hostile advocacy applied to friendly advocacy too. (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| Organized religion's overall effect on society has been: | Strongly negative — a net source of harm and delusion | God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) — the subtitle is the thesis: organized religion is a net source of harm, fear, and delusion. |
| Suppose a worldview with a creator and one without predict identically every observation anyone can foresee making. By whatever measure of simplicity you'd defend, one is simpler, whichever one that is for you. How much does that raise your confidence that the simpler one is true? | A lot | Emulated from his public record — against the God hypothesis he wielded parsimony aggressively, arguing in God Is Not Great (2007) and debates that the creator is an unnecessary multiplication of entities (the Laplace point: no need of that hypothesis). (scenario answer — inferred from their documented positions, not a recorded statement) |
| God exists | Certainly false | God Is Not Great (2007) — the book-length case; his razor: what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. |
| Conscious existence continues after death | Certainly false | Mortality (2012) and Vanity Fair (2011) — on being dead he held there is nothing to experience and nothing to fear, because he would not know it. |
| Prayer can change what happens in the world, beyond its effects on the people involved | Certainly false | God Is Not Great (2007) discusses controlled studies of intercessory prayer finding no effect; his 2010 CNN essay asked believers not to trouble deaf heaven with bootless cries on his behalf. |
| Human beings arose entirely through unguided natural processes | Certainly true | God Is Not Great (2007) — human origins by unguided natural processes is argued at length against both creationism and guided evolution. |
| Consciousness is produced entirely by the brain | Certainly true | Interviews (2005) — he described himself as a complete materialist; Mortality (2012) chronicles his consciousness rising and falling with his treated, failing body. |
| With the past exactly the same, our choices could have gone otherwise | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — a thoroughgoing materialist who joked that he had free will because he had no choice but to have it; uncaused choice did not fit his picture. |
| We are living in a computer simulation | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — he treated simulation-style hypotheses as evidence-free amusements, to be dismissed until evidence appears (his razor, applied). |
| Some actions are wrong no matter what any person or culture believes | Certainly true | God Is Not Great (2007) and his debates — he condemned practices such as genital mutilation, slavery, and child sacrifice as wrong in themselves whatever any culture or scripture permits, and argued morality is an innate human faculty needing no divine warrant (his standing debate challenge: name a moral act a believer can perform that an unbeliever cannot). |
| Eating meat is morally wrong | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — an unapologetic and celebratory omnivore (Hitch-22’s food chapters); he refused to equate a child with a piglet, but never granted that eating meat is wrong. |
| We owe a stranger overseas as much as we owe a neighbor | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — a lifelong internationalist who championed distant strangers — Bosnians, Kosovars, Iraqi Kurds — as owed solidarity and even intervention. |
| Healthy adults are better off getting every vaccine their health authority recommends | Certainly true | God Is Not Great (2007) — the clerical campaign against polio vaccination is Exhibit A in his case that religion endangers health; he was an unqualified champion of immunization. |
| Free markets do more to reduce poverty than government programs do | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — Reason interview (2001) and The Atlantic (2009): he concluded that capitalism, not socialism, had become the revolutionary force in production and poverty reduction. |
| Long-standing traditions usually contain wisdom we can't see | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — the contrarian program of Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) treats inherited consensus as presumptively suspect, not as hidden wisdom. |
| People in 2100 will live better lives than people do today | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — in the 2010 Munk Debate with Tony Blair and elsewhere he defended the Enlightenment wager that reason and science keep improving human life. |
| Human life has a purpose beyond the one we choose for it | Certainly false | God Is Not Great (2007) and Mortality (2012) — meaning is made, not given; the cosmos neither knows nor cares that we are here. |
| Most people are basically good | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — his repeated anthropology: humans are a poorly evolved mammalian species, prefrontal lobes too small and adrenaline glands too big (interviews, 2005; God Is Not Great, 2007). |
| Experts are usually right about questions in their own field | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — in settled scientific and medical matters he deferred to the relevant specialists and mocked lay contrarianism; his quarrels were with priesthoods, clerical or political. |
| Official institutions are honest with the public | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — a career of exposing official falsehood (The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2001; No One Left to Lie To, 1999) made institutional honesty the exception in his accounting. |
| Everything that happens is part of a larger purpose or plan | Certainly false | Mortality (2012) and NPR interview (2011) — he said the cosmos does not know he is here and will not know when he is gone; no plan is running. |
| We live more than one life — reincarnation is real | Certainly false | God Is Not Great (2007) — he attacks the doctrines of karma and rebirth directly, including their cruelty toward children born with deformities blamed on past lives. |
| Astrology can tell you real things about a person | Certainly false | God Is Not Great (2007) — astrology is classed among the superstitions a rational person refuses, alongside the faiths themselves. |
| Homeopathy genuinely works for many conditions (beyond any placebo effect) | Certainly false | Vanity Fair cancer columns (2010–11), collected in Mortality (2012) — he catalogued the quack remedies urged on him (apricot pits, chakras, tribal medicine) and declined them all in favor of trial-based medicine. |
| Science is the only reliable route to knowledge | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) and Hitch-22 (2010) insist literature and history teach real knowledge of human beings that no laboratory supplies. |
| Intuition is a genuine way of knowing things, not just a feeling | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — his razor made unexamined feeling inadmissible as knowledge; intuition was a prompt to inquiry, never a warrant (God Is Not Great, 2007). |
| The ends can sometimes justify the means | Certainly true | His defenses of the Second World War and of intervention in Bosnia and Iraq rest on ends; interviewed in 2005 he said of stopping theocratic fascism that he would exclude no measure. |
| The death penalty is morally acceptable | Certainly false | A lifelong opponent: Reason interview (2001) — opposing capital punishment was the first political stand of his youth, because it arrogated too much power to the state; \u201cDon’t Hang Saddam,\u201d Slate (Nov 2006); \u201cStaking a Life,\u201d Lapham’s Quarterly (2009). |
| Speech should have almost no legal limits, even when it is hateful | Certainly true | Hart House Debate, University of Toronto (Nov 15, 2006), \u201cFreedom of speech includes the freedom to hate\u201d — he argued the proposition at length and defended speech rights even for Holocaust deniers and fascists; also his defense of Salman Rushdie after the 1989 fatwa. |
| Immigration is, on balance, good for your country | Probably true | Vanity Fair (2007), on taking U.S. citizenship — he celebrated America as a country renewed by immigrants and derided restrictionism as nativist; Reason interview (2001) mocks the hysterical aversion to foreigners as a right-wing mentality. |
| Parents, not the state, should have the final say in what children are taught | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — God Is Not Great (2007) treats faith schools and parental religious instruction of children as indoctrination; he championed secular public education against confessional control. |
| People mostly end up with the wealth and standing they deserve | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — his Marxist formation and lifelong attacks on inherited privilege made desert-based accounts of wealth implausible to him. |
| Human beings are just another animal, with no special status in nature | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — his materialist anthropology (we are primates, a poorly evolved mammal species) denied humans any cosmic specialness, even though he balked at equating a child with a piglet in moral practice. |
| A government is, at bottom, a monopoly on violence — that is simply what a state is | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — his histories of state power (above all The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2001) treat the state, realistically described, as organized and legitimized violence. |
| Taxation is extortion, however legal it is | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — a supporter of public provision and socialized medicine, he had no sympathy for the Rothbardian taxation-is-theft slogan. |
| Democracy is the best political system, whatever its flaws | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — a democrat by conviction who spent his last decade arguing that peoples under tyranny should get the vote and self-government, while quoting Churchill’s caveat about all the alternatives. |
| A person with a terminal illness should be allowed medical help to end their own life | Certainly false | Interview with Sasha Abramsky — he said he was very much opposed to euthanasia and found the Kevorkian theater distasteful, while affirming that a person has a right to decide for themselves. |
| Sex between unmarried adults is morally fine | Certainly true | God Is Not Great (2007) — its chapters on religious sexual taboos treat the policing of unmarried sex as one of religion’s characteristic cruelties; his own bohemian life matched the doctrine. |
| In most disagreements, preserving the relationship matters more than settling who is right | Certainly false | Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) — a manual for preferring the argument to the relationship: it instructs the reader to distrust consensus and accept the unpopularity that follows. |
| If you believe someone is wrong, you should tell them — even when it will start an argument | Certainly true | Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) and forty years of polemics — telling people they are wrong, in print and on stage, at whatever social cost, was his profession and his ethic. |
| You owe your blood relatives a loyalty you do not owe to friends or strangers | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — his deepest loyalties were chosen, not inherited (Amis, Rushdie, McEwan), and he publicly broke with his own brother Peter over ideas, reconciling only years later (Hitch-22, 2010). |
| Gardening — which is closest to you? | Gardening isn't for me | Emulated from his public record — a lifelong apartment-dwelling urbanite; no garden appears anywhere in a heavily documented life. |
| Hunting and fishing — which is closest to you? | I don't hunt or fish | Emulated from his public record — no hunting or fishing appears in his memoirs or profiles; his field time was spent in war zones with a notebook. |
| Time outdoors — hiking, camping, wild places. Which is closest to you? | I'm happier indoors or in the city | Emulated from his public record — the quintessential city animal: London, Athens, New York, and Washington salons and restaurants were his habitat (Hitch-22, 2010). |
| Given a real choice, where would you live? | A city that never sleeps — energy and people | Emulated from his public record — he lived for decades in a downtown Washington apartment and wrote love letters to city life; Athens and London were his other poles. |
| Food and cooking — which is closest to you? | Food is pleasure and craft — I live to eat well | Emulated from his public record — a celebrated gourmand and host whose table was famous; Hitch-22 (2010) lingers over meals, oysters, and the right bottle as serious pleasures. |
| Machines and vehicles — which is closest to you? | I'd happily own no vehicle at all | Emulated from his public record — he never learned to drive and lived car-free in Washington; Hitch-22 (2010) is substantially narrated from the backs of other people’s cars and cabs. |
| Supplies laid by — which is closest to you? | No special stores — the supermarket is my pantry | Emulated from his public record — a restaurant-and-market daily liver in a city apartment (Hitch-22, 2010); stockpiling belonged to the survivalists he mocked. |
| Reading — which is closest to you? | Mostly old books — classics, scripture, the tested ones | Emulated from his public record — his reading life was canon-centered: Orwell above all, plus Auden, Waugh, Wodehouse, and Larkin; Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) prescribes the tested old books. |
| Travel — which is closest to you? | Pilgrimage — I go to places that mean something | Emulated from his public record — his travel was purposeful: Athens as homecoming, Orwell’s Spain, Kurdistan, Cyprus, and battlefields — places that meant something (Hitch-22, 2010). |
| Video games — which is closest to you? | I don't play video games | Emulated from his public record — no video games anywhere in the memoirs, columns, or profiles of a man whose recreations were books, talk, and travel. |
| Money can buy happiness | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — a bon vivant who earned well and spent gladly on travel, restaurants, books, and friends, and wrote without embarrassment about money buying comfort and freedom (Hitch-22, 2010). |
| Karma is real — the universe itself sees to it that people get what they deserve | Certainly false | God Is Not Great (2007) — karma is attacked by name as a cruel fiction: the universe keeps no moral ledger. |
| One person can significantly change the world | Certainly true | Emulated from his public record — Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) is built from case studies of solitary dissenters (Orwell, Zola, Paine) who bent events; he plainly believed the individual can. |
| I am afraid of death | Certainly false | Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire (2011) — asked whether he feared death, he answered no: being dead holds nothing to fear, since he would not know it; what he feared was a sordid, incapacitated process of dying (see Mortality, 2012). |
| My core values have changed a lot since I was a teenager | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — Hitch-22 (2010) narrates the long arc from Trotskyist schoolboy to \u201cvery conservative Marxist\u201d; in God Is Not Great (2007) Marxism is already spoken of in the past tense. |
| I say what I am feeling, even when it makes things uncomfortable | Probably true | Emulated from his public record — a byword for uncomfortable candor: \u201cMy own opinion is enough for me,\u201d as he put it in the 2006 Hart House speech, regardless of majority or company. |
| Your living space, honestly — which is closest? | Comfortable clutter — I know where everything is | Emulated from his public record — photographs and profiles of his Washington apartment show the scholar’s comfortable clutter: books and papers in every direction, their owner unbothered. |
| Alcohol in your life — which is closest? | Most days | Hitch-22 (2010) — his celebrated rules for drinking and his daily Johnnie Walker regimen: drink as a daily enhancement of food and company, cheap booze a false economy, never on an empty stomach. |
| Work and the rest of life — which is closest? | Blended — I don't draw the line | Emulated from his public record — the line never existed: lunches with friends were simultaneously pleasure, friendship, and copy; he filed columns from bars, trips, and sickrooms alike. |
| How you find out what's happening — which is closest? | I follow the news closely, most days | The Nation, Slate, and Vanity Fair columns (1980s–2011) — a working journalist for four decades whose output was a running commentary on the day’s news. |
| When you die, what should happen to your body? | To science or the soil — donation, compost; use what's left | As he had wished and directed, his body was donated to medical research after his death in Houston on December 15, 2011 (widely reported in obituaries). |
| Would you rather your future be: | Interesting | Emulated from his public record — Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) is an extended argument for choosing the interesting, contested life over the comfortable, approved one. |
| Which word describes you better? | Intense | Emulated from his public record — \u201cintense\u201d is the word his friends, enemies, and obituarists reached for first; carefree was never on offer. |
| Which would you rather be? | Weird | Emulated from his public record — he titled his advice book for contrarians and wore the deviant label as a badge (Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001). |
| If you could pick just one: | Peace on Earth | Emulated from his public record — he repeatedly traded income and safety for causes (leaving secure posts, sheltering Rushdie under threat) and never organized his life around accumulation. |
| Which is more offensive? | Burning a book | The Rushdie affair (1989 onward) — he framed his defense of The Satanic Verses as everything he hated (dictatorship, censorship) against everything he loved (literature, free expression); flags, by contrast, held no sacredness for an internationalist republican. |
| The perfect evening: | A great city, dressed up | Emulated from his public record — his perfect evenings are documented by the hundred: dressed for dinner at a great city table, talking past midnight (Hitch-22, 2010). |
| Your mind, honestly: | A sponge — I chase how things work | Emulated from his public record — the polymath’s sponge: languages, poetry by heart, history, science — \u201cif it works, who cares why\u201d is the incuriosity he spent a career fighting. |
| What makes a claim meaningful and truth-evaluable? | It must correspond to a fact that exists independently of human beliefs | Emulated from his public record — a materialist realist: for him a factual claim stood or fell by correspondence to a world that exists whether or not anyone believes in it. |
| An unfamiliar chemical is in a product you use at home. Which would most convince you it is toxic? | A controlled study showing harm in animals at realistic doses | Emulated from his public record — the man who catalogued apricot-pit cures in order to refuse them (Mortality, 2012) trusted controlled studies over structure-guessing, agencies, anecdotes, and tradition. |
| Consider a statement about the ultimate nature of reality. Its proponents say it expresses a deep truth, but they cannot identify any possible experience that would count for or against it, and it is not true by definition or logic. Is the statement cognitively meaningful? | It is cognitively meaningful only if it is analytically true or has empirical implications that make it verifiable in principle; otherwise, it does not express a factual proposition | Emulated from his public record — his razor (what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence) treats a claim with no possible evidence for or against it as expressing no factual proposition at all. |
| Herbal medicine genuinely works for many conditions (beyond any placebo effect) | Probably false | Emulated from his public record — a plants-have-compounds materialist who nonetheless spent his illness refusing remedy fads; most herbal claims struck him as unproven (Mortality, 2012). |