Generally, when someone on the internet approaches someone else, they tend to take one of a few different responses. It's possible the best case happens and they happen to both say exactly the right things to each other and they end up liking each other - but that is exceedingly rare. The second, more common, possibility is that one of the people in the conversation will be less informed or educated, or unitiated, into the groups of the other person, who then responds with a knee-jerk elitist response ("How do you not get this?" or "RTFM" (acronym for "Read The Fucking Manual") or "I can't help you if you can't help yourself."). Conversely, there is the opposite side of this conversation, where the person who knows less either comes to a snappy conclusion about the whole situation and leaves it at that, or has his own sort of elitism in his personal defense of his dignity, by claiming that the things the other person knows are "nerd stuff" or "cringe", saying, "Why would I ever need to know something like that?" or, even more commonly, "I shouldn't have to know how to do that, I shouldn't be required to learn that; there's smarter people in the world or better programs in the world that will do that work for me without me having to bother with something so tedious." This kind of dynamic is very common in many fields; most relevant to me, I see it both as a Linux enthusiast and as a mathematics educator.
My profession at the moment is that of a math tutor that can tutor up to the community college calculus 3 level, while I work on my degree to become a researcher. I often find that I have multiple students come in one at a time asking about the exact same material in their exact same college algebra homework over and over again. It would be really easy for me to say to them, "How do you not understand what a function is? It's obvious; you put a number in and get a number out. Some people are born not to do math, I suppose." But what would that accomplish? I might have thoughts like that from time to time while I'm at work, but those thoughts benefit nobody. They are simply the easy way out of the situation - instead of confronting the other person's misunderstanding and trying to build them up to my level, I would be pulling the rug out from under them and giving up. Very few people succeed in life because they were born to succeed - the majority of people need to expend effort and have effort expended onto them in order to make real progress. That's just how things are; no amount of elitist complaining that people aren't as smart as you about XYZ is going to solve the issue, regardless of what elitist people will tell you.
In the Linux community, this type of thinking is also very common from those that think, "If you can't figure out how to read journalctl and modprobe a specific kernel module for your wireless card, you shouldn't even be using Linux." Obviously, as someone who makes meticulous guides (which are admittedly a little advanced, but are designed to be accessible to those who follow them step by step), I don't feel that way. If I think something I do is effective or powerful, I want others to see the potential for it for themselves. I'm not necessarily the most knowledgeable about everything Linux (I know enough to comfortably install and maintain a Gentoo installation with frequent references to the Gentoo and Arch wikis), but in the places that I know a decent amount, I want to teach others. In my opinion, that is a very compatible mindset with that of libre software, which itself is meant to be free for others to not only use, but learn from and build upon.
There is a follow up thought which comes in after the elitism which is commonly used to justify it, which is the thought, "This person doesn't know as much as me because they don't expend as much effort; therefore, why should I expend any effort of my own to help them?" (To put it in short, "RTFM".) Often, people do not expend any effort precisely because nobody has yet expended effort in them. They feel like it's hopeless, or it's too daunting a task, and the process of breaking it down into something digestable is impossible for someone who starts out knowing nothing about the material. One of the greatest benefits of college and university is being able to follow a straight-line path of learning X as a requirement for Y which builds into Z, where at each step along the way there is a buildup and an expected amount of knowledge for the next class, so that, theoretically, a student should never be left significantly behind or get caught off guard. But the only reason we have this pathway to learning is because the masters of these subjects built this pathway for us.
Imagine what it would be like otherwise? Imagine if I walked into a preschool of kids that only know how to count on their fingers and told them to just bluntly "learn math." Even if I handed them a library card to a university library, how many of those children do you think would ever actually, over the course of their entire lives, ever get far enough with mathematics to compute a partial derivative or be able to prove Green's Theorem? Not very many. Just because an infinite amount of resources exist, doesn't mean that one can instantaneously carve the right path out of all of those resources to learn the material; in fact, with more resources, the path to take becomes less and less clear, not the other way around. Some resources are bad; some resources are good, but require a lot of prerequisite knowledge; some resources are deceptively bad where it's not until you've become familiar with material a few levels above what you just read will you realize the holes in your knowledge.
This is really the situation for a lot of people when it comes to using Linux. If they encounter an error with a program, they will either know how to decipher the ancient runes to come to an accurate conclusion about what's going wrong pretty much immediately (or can figure it out in a few minutes), or otherwise they're going to have to rely on copy/pasting the error into a search engine or onto a forum to find out what the problem is and how to fix it. And if someone comes up and replies "RTFM" or gets frustrated in every single one of these threads, almost like it's their hobby, what have they actually accomplished except to muddy the water and turn away someone who was willing to try and work through their issue using the only resource that they know is available to them or that they have the current skill level to turn to? And this isn't even touching on the fact that error messages are often cryptic even to those who are initiated, or tell you the wrong thing is happening, or barely tell you anything or nothing at all. I mean, other people have made this argument before but that doesn't make it any less valid: it would have been more helpful for everybody involved, including yourself and your own mental well-being, to not reply "RTFM" at all and either help the person out (even a little bit), or just say nothing. Maybe in this particular case, there really is an argument for the comeback of, "Why not just have software that doesn't have all of these horrible bugs, and then I wouldn't have to know all this crap?" But, if people are willing to push aside those thoughts enough to take the dive into Linux, we should be meeting them halfway, not trying to shame them for not knowing the Arch wiki and its contents backwards and forwards their first few weeks or months using Linux.
I didn't want to make this entirely about Linux because this mindset is prevalent in all sides of our culture. In fact, it's very prevalent in politics, where people feel that when they are the most educated, other people are wrong because they don't "do the research" or don't "think critically" about the situation, and when they feel less educated, they push the topic to the side and don't want to actually invest themselves in learning more themselves. In politics, elitism is really a defensive shell used to protect people's egos from being shattered when it comes to some of the most important decisions and beliefs that they hold, turning the world into an Us and Them duality. It really doesn't help that, as a citizen of the United States, we have a horrible winner-takes-all system which allows only two political parties to ever really take a substantial amount of votes, further reinforcing and justifying this duality.
I want the main takeaway here to be that elitism is a destructive force, and it's usually the quick instinctual response to situations where there is a potential to be wrong or another person is struggling - hence, it is the easy way out. But the nice thing about being human beings is that we have some (perhaps illusory) feeling of free choice and can do things that go against our base immediate instincts. I think that a nice practice to do is to try and find points of elitism in one's life and take a moment to confront them and try out the more difficult route of being understanding, willing to cooperate, willing to communicate, and willing to change. That's what makes being a human being special, and that's what makes society work; not just telling people to "RTFM".
September 22, 2022