Growing up, whenever my parents criticized me for my rather minor misdeed I had a foolproof and irrefutable response: “But what about him?”

The “him” was my younger brother, who was, by any objective standard of behavior, clearly worse than I was. Whatever my flaws as a son or as a person, he was so much worse. However, rather than rebut my airtight logic (which my parents could not do, because my brother really was an awful kid) they would tell me to worry about the “plank in my own eye.”

From my lessons in Sunday school, I knew they were referring to Jesus’s question in Matthew 7:3: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” Still, it didn’t make sense. My brother really was a brat and I, in comparison, was not so bad. Jesus surely couldn’t have been referring to my situation, because I was the one with the sawdust, and my brother—as anyone could tell—had the plank.

That was my first experience with “whataboutism,” a condition I would suffer from for at least 40 more years.

“Whataboutism turns the tables in an argument by responding to one accusation by deflecting to something else egregious,” Brett McCracken says in his recent article, “even if unrelated: ‘Yeah, well what about ______?’” McCracken explains why the “intellectual laziness” of whataboutism has become so prevalent, and why it’s so dangerous.

It’s unfortunate we didn’t have McCracken’s article when I was a kid. My misbehaving brother sure could have used it.