~ Retrieved from my old blog, written in December 2018
Around three years ago, I was a member of the debate club in my high school. In the club, we were taught how to defend any perspective, how to win a debate whether we were in favour or against the topic, regardless of our opinion or without considering what was the right answer. Basically, we were taught that all answers could be right if they were presented well enough. Sometimes, we would even jokingly call ourselves sophists, in reference to a group of ancient greek philosophers, who are known because they practiced rhetoric and public speaking to be able to defend any statement, no matter how ridiculous or untrue it was.
Society nowadays seems to be filled with sophists. Open twitter or turn on any tv, you’re very likely to find some debate about the latest controversial topic. And the problem is not necessarily that there’s debates, the problem is what type of debates they are. Most of the time, although not always, they are debates in which none of the speakers actually intend to change their minds at any cost. They will usually follow one of these two roads: debate endlessly until they go off topic and probably derail into some name-calling or debate for a bit until they decide to finish peacefully by saying “let’s agree to disagree”. Rarely any debate ends with someone admitting they were at least partially wrong.
In my debate club, our goal was to debate as hard as we could for as long as we could, so that we could convince the impartial judge with our point of view. The thing is, real life debates aren’t the same as a competition debate. There are many differences: competition debates have rules to avoid going off topic, time limits to ensure they aren’t endless debates, and in some cases there’s even a list of criteria that judges need to follow in order to decide who won in a completely objective way. The main difference however, is that real life debates almost never have an impartial judge, and in the rare instance that they do, the judge will hardly be impartial and will probably just look for a way to reinforce their previous perspective. This causes that in order to “win” a real life debate, you need to convince your opponent that you’re right and they are wrong – something we already established your opponent probably isn’t going to allow. In the end, winning the debate doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re right, it only means that you’re the most stubborn person in the room.
And the problem is that when you follow that trend for long enough, you end up with some “conceptual nihilism” in which most people don’t pay attention to debates, because they know they won’t find any answers there. They might even say: “After all, it’s all relative isn’t it? So what does it matter”. Each of us is entitled to our opinion, so it’s pretty useless to try and fight about them. After all, what matters is that everyone is able to express their opinion in a politically correct way, not the actual content of their opinion. As long as everyone can speak their mind, it’s alright.
But it’s not alright. It’s not that we don’t care about content, or that we only care about some types of content, we need to care about all content. Each of us has the right to express their opinion, and we should do so, but we should also be ready to be wrong about things, to change our minds. Debates need to have an end. I’m not saying I know what that end should be – I don’t know the right answers to the questions we ask. But I know my answer, and it should matter. All answers should matter, they should be considered, and they definitely should be discarded if they turn out to be wrong. Because if we’re not willing to accept that and change our minds, then debating is useless and truth is just some pretty word we use to refer to what we’d like to think.
It’s easy to end up taking part in an endless debate, even if at some rational level you agree with everything I’ve said up until this point. I know I have done so many times. After all, it’s human nature to want to defend your ego from being proven wrong in front of everyone, or even simpler, to be so focused on how to prove yourself right that you forget to consider why the other person might also be right to some extent. A good way to check if you’ve been blinded in this way by a debate is to ask yourself, when was the last time that you admitted that you were at least partially wrong in a debate? What’s more likely, that you have been right every single time since, or that there’s something you’re not seeing about those debates?
To be honest, I don’t remember when was the last time I admitted I was wrong in a debate. That has something to do with me being blinded by the debate, but it’s also largely because at some point I stopped taking part in most debates, whether they were about abortion, criminal offences, politics or anything else. Maybe it’s because I ended up becoming an actual sophist in my debate classes without noticing, or maybe it’s because every debate I saw seemed to be just another endless debate, but I think that when I write about conceptual nihilism, I might just be writing about what I’m afraid happened to myself. That’s one of the reasons why I start this blog. Because it’s time for me to stop avoiding debates and believing that truth is only what we call a well-spoken opinion. It’s time for me to learn not only how to express any perspective in such a way that it sounds right, but also to express the perspective that I think is right, and to be ready to discard it if I end up mistaken.