<p>Louis Althusser attributed to Lenin the following argument in support of radical ideas: “When a stick is bent in the wrong direction, said Lenin, it is necessary if you want to put matters right – that is, if you want to straighten it and keep it straight – to grasp it and bend it durably in the opposite direction.” The metaphor can be taken to suggest that some well-established ideas can only be displaced by an argument that exaggerates their flaws or suggests alternative ideas that are themselves too extreme to be accepted without qualification. The strategy of bending the stick in the opposite direction is not only a rhetorically powerful strategy in some contexts, but one that may be morally acceptable when the stakes are high enough and the established ideas harmful enough. Although this was probably not Althusser’s view, it could be argued that bending the stick in the opposite direction is a common tool of philosophical argument (to be found even in the work of such mainstream philosophers as Descartes). It is also found in literary argument and other non-academic contexts (think of Candide, Gradgrind and other caricatural representatives of philosophies targeted in fiction). Bending the stick in the opposite direction, whenever it takes the form of an exaggeration of the flaws in a rival view, is a violation of the principle of charity. The violation may sometimes be said to take place even if the distortion is open and avowed by the person who does the distorting. This paper argues that in many circumstances such distortions are justified – e.g. if the distortion is employed as a strategy for disturbing a morally or epistemically harmful consensus.</p>