A Look into the Toxic: Thirteen Ways Political and Social Debate is Done Wrong (Part One)

A Look into the Toxic: Thirteen Ways Political and Social Debate is Done Wrong (Part One)

Oh boy.

Since posting my Ten Strategies in Engaging in Political and Social Topics, I’ve tried to use them both in person and online. What I’ve seen consistently is how messy so many these conversations, debates, and arguments are when it comes to politics and other social issues. In order to make any progress with at least some people, it hasn’t been enough to just offer ideas in a way that’s effective and ethical, but to also be able to recognize what mistakes others people are making, to be able to work with or around those mistakes.

And the list I’m making is of mistakes. At least for America (I won’t make a blanket comment about the world), we’re not taught how to negotiate with people well. There is not a “Getting Along with Others” class after Kindergarten, we take it for granted. I took debate my senior year of high school, and learned nothing helpful. To be fair, I did the minimum, just trying to win brownie points for college applications, but I do remember that debating between two groups, having a hopefully impartial judge give numbers through different criteria isn’t how life works. The knowledge I gained that did teach me how to engage better with others was mostly from the U.S. Peace Corps and taking specific electives for my Masters Degree, I had to go out of my way to learn even basic negotiating principles.

I really want to emphasize that most people’s toxic debate strategies are not done with malicious intent. We’ll be covering some of that (in Part Three), but the majority of what I’ve seen out there is well-intentioned people frustrated because they’re trying to reach across the table, to understand better, but come up short. At least for the strategies in this first part, doing any of the following doesn’t mean you or I are bad people. It means we’re bringing the wrong tools to the task at hand.

Trying to Win

Summary

This is probably the most common toxic strategy I’ve seen. It’s pretty much what it says, that entering a political or social conversation with the intent to “win”, to score more imaginary points, to bring people to our side whatever the side may be.

Similar to trying to win, is also just trying to make the other person lose. The difference is that someone trying to win is attempting to do so on their arguments while someone just trying to make the other one lose does not offer their own insights, only tries to point out the flaws in others’.

The Temptation

This is how we’re taught about debates. As I mentioned, I did a brief stint doing debate club in high school, and we were given a numerical score across several categories and told who won. Even in Presidential Debates, we like to talk about who won or who lost as if it were a competition.

And we like to win. Winning’s fun. Winning means more people agree with us about political matters, making it just a little more likely that our country will reflect our own values. Why wouldn’t we want to try to win?

The Problem

There are no scores in life to who debated better. The person who made the most coherent, evidence-based arguments does not necessarily get what they want. Most people don’t abandon long-held political and social views over one conversation, or even over half-a-dozen. In reality, we are fighting over inches, not miles. It’s easy to ask another person to change, but it’s not so simple when the situation is flipped.

And it’s easy to feel we won because we liked our own arguments while another person feels they won because they used the talking points that they felt were more relevant. It leads to nowhere.

Solutions

Seek to learn and to teach instead. That is what discussions are about, they are sharing ideas. It is about putting evidence, perspective, and context to the world, informing people, and they in turn doing the same for us.

When dealing with someone trying to win, who is clearly trying to score points, to feel that they’ve made the better ideas, just bring it up. “Hey, I know we both feel passionately about this and neither of us will change our minds. Let’s just try to understand each other’s perspectives a little bit better”. Change the rules from a competition to a dialogue. One other way to help bridge the gap is recognize their valid points. “Hey, you make a good point here, and I agree with that part. Here’s where I still feel a bit differently.” If someone wants to win, let them win a little bit to keep them engaged.

When dealing with someone trying to make us lose, then just try to learn.  We can use people like that to find flaws or weaknesses in our own arguments. They’re not going to try to learn in return, which is their loss, but that doesn’t mean that some good can’t come from it.

Misinterpretation

Summary

Not so much as a strategy per se, but an issue that constantly rises up when dealing with heavy political matters is misinterpretation. Language is imperfect, we all see the world and interact with it in different ways. Although there is certainly a range of what “freedom” means, there will be inevitable variations depending on our values and experiences along with other concepts and ideas.

Though not always, we usually treat ourselves as the protagonist of our own stories. So if another person is talking about how a political matter relates to them, it’s easy to misinterpret it and think they’re talking about how a political matter relates to us.

Example: A person living on the main street in a town may say a new bridge will help reduce traffic. The person living by where the bridge would be built can’t understand because for them it’ll create more traffic.

The Temptation

I’ll emphasize it again that we are the protagonist in our own story. To a degree, we won’t understand one another, no matter how hard we try. Different people are different. Even more universal values like love and family and prioritized and interpreted differently. This disconnect we have is frustrating to try to overcome, to open our minds to.

Cross-cultural communication and engagement is rewarding, but it’s also tiring. It’s easier to just focus on what we know and understand.

The Problem

I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory. If we don’t understand each other, it makes building bridges, learning, teaching a lot more difficult. Some misinterpretations are going to happen, but when they are not resolved, when we don’t strive to get a better understanding, the discussion is stagnant. We can still vote, can still lobby, but our ability to come to any sort of consent or consensus becomes lost.

Solutions

Empathy is a wonderful tool, sharing people’s feelings. Stepping away from our own feelings and trying to realize another person’s can accomplish a lot. When we get confused, rather than try to ask ourselves, “How do I understand this?” instead try, “How does this other person, with their different values and experiences, understand this?”

Failing that, simply ask. “Let me clarify,” “This is how I’m interpreting what you just said, am I right?” “What did you mean by so and so?” Questions are a powerful tool to overcome misunderstandings.

Oversimplification

Summary

We have to simplify political and social issues. An expert can devote their entire career to one aspect of one major issue, dealing with new information, changes in public opinion, legislation, and so on and so forth. And there are a lot of complex and contentious issues in our society today, with limited time in our daily lives to dedicate to them.

Oversimplification comes in two forms. One is leaving out crucial information. It can be leaving out any piece of information that could significantly change the perspective on a certain issue, and often it’s highlighting only the positives or only the negatives. The other form of oversimplification is not only simplifying an issue, but truly believing the issue is simple when it’s not.

The Temptation

The balance between simplifying social issues for public consumption, and oversimplifying them to the point of causing toxicity isn’t clear, and there is likely no perfect solution for all of us. When we are given the choice of how much time to talk to people about contentious issues, it’s easy to shorten that time. When deciding which main points to cover, it’s easy to focus only on the ones that support our position, or those dissenting views we feel we can easily counter.

And we want things to be simple. It’s comforting to feel we have a grasp on the world, realizing that there’s a lot we don’t know can be annoying. Spending hours and dollars on a semester-long college course, only to find that we only just scratched the surface of whatever it is we learned isn’t all that fun. It’s so much easier to stop and pat ourselves on the back, and feel we’ve conquered it. 

The Problem

When we focus only on one side of the argument, we fail to prepare ourselves for engaging with people we disagree with. Without being able to say, “I agree with this movement, though admit that it has a weakness with “X” and falls short on “Y”, we make our positions fragile. We set ourselves up to have to confess to them later, or to try to hide them. When people find out that crucial information was left out, it takes away a level of trust that’s hard to win back.

Believing that issues themselves are simple kills nuanced conversation. We start throwing out terms like “common sense” or comments like “Well I don’t know much, but what I do know is that [I’m correct when it comes to this complex, ever-changing issue that I think is simple]”. When we not only simplify an issue, but believe it to be simple, then we don’t feel a reason to sit down and talk about it.

Solutions

Accept that issues are complex that rarely any one person has all the knowledge, and thus it takes a community or more to fill in the gaps. Be skeptical when someone only thinks there are positives or negatives to any given issue, and try not to fall into that habit yourself.

Inform yourself.

When coming across someone who’s trying to dumb things down, or truly believes something is simple, bring up the scope of an issue. If we’re talking about tens or even hundreds-of-millions of people, surely we’ll all be affected a little differently. By bringing up those who may not benefit, or even be hurt, by a given position it can lead to a more nuanced discussion about how taxation, regulation, conflict, and more can be tweaked and changed to mitigate those problems. Those conversations can lead to a better dialogue.

Poor Metaphors and Comparisons

Summary

Related to simplification, metaphors and other comparisons are means to help us describe and illustrate our points. However, metaphors and comparisons aren’t inherently accurate or useful, it does take thought and effort to make them relevant.

Definition of metaphor

: a figure in speech in which a word of phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.

In essence, it’s comparing two or more things that are not literally the same. There is a limit to what metaphors can convey, great in small dosages, not so much when we rely on them exclusively. The same applies to all comparisons, most of the time comparisons can be made in general terms, but not with specific details and nuances. “Poor” metaphors and comparisons either fail to understand these limits, or fail in even the most basic functions.

The Temptation  

Metaphors are one of those literary terms I learned, and I believe many of us learn, quite young. It’s ingrained into our minds early, and sticks with us. Metaphors can offer a visualization to whatever we’re discussing, or can put things in terms that we understand better. Do we know about geopolitics? Likely not. Do we know fast food chains? Sure. Let’s make a metaphor.

We naturally compare and contrast our world, it’s how our brains work. We categorize things. It would be an even more difficult world to communicate in without comparisons. However, sometimes those comparisons come spur of the moment before we have the time to think them through. Given the imperfect nature of comparisons, it’s easy to not worry about where they aren’t true. It’s only a comparison after all, right?

The Problem

Black Lives Matters, the Alt Right, militia groups, Antifa, and other political groups are not liberal or conservative counterparts to one another. Each has their own agenda, their own methods, their own membership, their own history, and more. The problems that Democrats face are different than the ones that Republicans face both internally and externally. This isn’t even getting into other countries. Comparing groups like these almost always generalizes and misses the point to one if not both groups.

Metaphors done wrong can compare human beings to inanimate objects, a dangerous narrative to have for those people described (more on this in Part Three). They can also be wildly inaccurate, the most famous one recently being Donald Trump Jr. comparing Syrian refugees to skittles, if we would eat a bowl if we knew some of them were poisoned. This would suggest that a single bowl’s (around 20-30) worth of refuges would have 3-4 as terrorists, which even the highest estimations get nowhere close to.

These mischaracterizations lead to misinformation, of us believing things that are inaccurate. We can’t build an understanding with one another when we ourselves are wrong about the facts.

Solutions

Don’t rely on comparisons and metaphors. Use them sparingly to complement your arguments, not define them. When we come across those who do try to make false or tenuous comparisons, push the conversation away from it. “I see where you’re going with this, but I don’t feel comfortable trying to compare this serious issue with something like fast food chains/ice cream flavors/whatever it is” or “You know, these two political groups really have nothing in common. I’m good with talking about both of them, but maybe not at the same time.”

By putting the actual situation, the actual people involved as the focus on the conversation, it’ll be easier to avoid troublesome metaphors and comparisons that mislead or misinform.

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ACTION!

With the four toxic strategies in Part One, as well those I’ll be discussin in Parts Two and Three, identify which ones you’re prone to use. Once again, it doesn’t make you a bad person, but consider how you can avoid them, or do it less in the future. Of the first four, I admit comparisons and metaphors are my Achilles heel, and I have to always be mindful of it.

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What’s Next?

Parts Two and Three. Part Two will cover the remaining strategies that though not ill-intended, are still toxic to creating understanding and building bridges. Part Three will cover those strategies that do cross over that line between genuine and malicious more times than not.