Debate Bro 2.0
The return of contemporary "debate culture" signals a deterioration in the search for truth, not its enrichment
In the wake of President Trump’s reelection victory last November, the digital politisphere has rebirthed the cardinal sinner of his first tenure in the Oval Office: so called “debate culture” online is comprised of a series of official “debates” and their participants going for a set amount of time under a series of rules and techniques to expose the mental deficiencies of their opponent’s logic, and thus their claim.
However, there is an underlying lie in the affinity for debate as a formal structure that has made it perpetually useless in the more interesting, more existential pursuit of knowledge. Being that debates have no concern for truth, and instead over rely on the spectacle of the debate to determine heuristic “winners” and “losers” as more of an emotional badge of honor than a legitimate exposition of any meaningful semblance of the real world we live in on a daily basis, let alone its existential substructure.
The object of this debate exists as a kind of product of the liberal age of reason in the 18th century that also birthed American Democracy and the late Scientific Revolution. It was assumed using the newfound power of human intellect alone, ideas could be sifted through and broken down into their composite parts, exposing the good from the bad to produce a new world altogether.
Political theorists and social commentariats convinced themselves the world could be purely reasoned with, and that a linear, exact kind of social and political progress would be produced from this reason that would be totally immune from nullification. The modern debate is the child of this idea, the culmination of this pursuit for truth in a world of dogma and fantasy. And it has been utterly disappointing.
At its face, the debate bro chic presents as if it is committed to this concept: pursuit of truth. A “marketplace of ideas” emerges from the structured fights on systems, policies and ideologies where ideas are bought by audiences and sold by debaters, whosever idea winning out amongst the crowd winning out in our lives, restructuring our world for us.
And yet it inexplicably hasn’t. In this marketplace, the so called “bad ideas” that were rejected keep making small comebacks, like a TV villain returned in a season finale revealed to have been working behind the scenes the whole time, pushed underground by the hero’s actions, but never really destroyed by them. Instead, he’s become more determined to destroy the hero, his core beliefs lost to his hatred of the existential fight he’s become locked in.
The hero, too, becomes lost in his beliefs, instead consumed by his duty just to destroy the villain at all costs. This is why we overlook the destruction the hero causes, it is justified. And they continue this vindictive charade for as long as we continue to be entertained by it.
The marketplace of ideas is not a marketplace at all, it is a boxing ring, and we are the fans, supple and simple and demanding another round. We feed on these debates not because they pursue truth, but because the spectacle they produce is like a comfort, it’s an addiction. Seeing our “side” in all its reductionist simplicity win is like a rush of adrenaline, the pain and defeat in our opponent’s stature like a fulfillment of existential purpose. Losing is a scathing vindication of our need to fight again until “we” finally have that exalting moment of cathartic release: the satisfying blow of an equal and opposite force against our fleeting oppressors.
The ideas are meaningless in this debate ring. They serve nothing more than a technical purpose. It is the fight we want. And it has been the inculcation of the debate as a formal structure of facilitating conflicting views that has led to a larger deterioration of that pursuit of truth we once vied for. It has in fact been nothing more than a temporal hubris, sustained by the delusion that we are the inheritors of some kingdom of reason.
That kingdom has been exposed by now to be held together by staples and scotch tape. For a moment, when our rational capacities exposed the grander universe around our superstitions, it may have been genuine. But soon enough, it served us a better purpose: new ways to destroy the kinds of existence we did not want, and uphold our own fantasies with some technical framework that we could dogmatize in itself.
It is natural and normal to disagree, and it is right to want to imbed these discrepancies into the framework of our societies so that we can pursue an enlightened path towards an actual form of truth that we can enforce and defend from con men and oppressors. But the debate has never served this purpose. It is a superficial representation of that deeper exploration of living between two sides of a semantic prism.
That exploration is carried about by a shared sense of wonder in the kinds of existential qualities being alive has produced not only for yourself, but this totally different person who remains, quite strangely, a person the same as yourself. This notion that they have reasons for coming to their opposite conclusion from you, that they lived through experiences and did not realize what you assumed was the only possible reality is a frightening and also exciting discovery. It upends truth and replaces it with truth all the same.
The debate squanders any opportunity for that discovery in the need to reject that fear for a more satisfying conclusion, a total rejection of the prism and instead an enforcement of your probably incomplete picture of existence. This is why debates are an addiction. They do not satisfy that need to know more. Once it is won or lost, you must jump to the next, for fear of the deafening silence of that linear, exact progress ringing in your ear, undermining the uniform existence you trick yourself into believing it will produce.
That existence is never coming. These debates will never expose it. Like Sisyphus rolling his stone atop the hill, you are destined to watch it roll back down again, forced to follow it and push the thing up once more.
All the same, you have your views. You know your truth, you’ve lived it. So what the hell are you expected to do when truth commits suicide? How can you live without it? Precisely, you simply must. For a moment, you must bury truth like you are destined to bury your parents, and grieve it like you will grieve them. It was never your place to determine it should live forever. It is a product of living like you are. And like you will die, it was bound to die as well.
Wander in that darkness with those whose truths have yet to die. Not because you have some obligation to adopt them, but because you will be curious as to what its like to live in that naivety once more. Watch them, challenge them, and know them well enough to know when to tell them their truths are going to die, too.
This is that authentic kind of progress I think debates miss. It’s not a boxing ring. It’s a funeral. We tell each other stories about the truth’s life, realizing each new conflicting account is a part that it kept from us. It leaves behind its composite parts for us to rearrange and make sense of, knowing it and ourselves in relation to it better.