Enablers and Adversaries (Part 2)

In a very real sense, adversaries of this type enable our progress forward in a similar way that our encountering of adversity does. Having a very similar etymological derivation in Latin, what we see in these two words is the necessity of turning towards that which challenges or opposes us on our path. Key to this process of progress is our willingness or volition to face what confronts us. In every moment, we have a choice as to how we will respond to the circumstances of life that appear before us, and the decisions we end up making in these instances will be pivotal to the course that our life will take.

In many respects, I think we have a lot more riding on the decisions we make in times of challenge than those we make in times of comfort and stasis. This presents us with a fertile opportunity to exert leverage in changing the course of our lives for the better when we embody courage, strength and resilience (among other human virtues) to face those things that will really test us at the core of our being. In my experience, I have never much grown from decisions I made during easy periods of my life which I was happy to go along with, but where I feel I did take large strides in my personal evolution were during periods of personal hardship.

An exception to this was when I chose to voluntarily take on challenges that would stretch my ability to deal with, and eventually overcome them, such as undertaking my PhD project which I wasn’t sure I could successfully complete at the time I commenced the project. The benefit of choosing to volitionally face what confronts us is that we become energised, empowered and resourceful in ways that we cannot be when we are reactively forced to deal with problems that we feel incapable of effectively dealing with. By reconnecting with the sovereign nature of our spirit from which we are equipped with what we need to meet the challenges that confront us, we enable our own advancement along the path of actualising our potential.

The outgrowth of this self-enabling is that we can serve as enablers of others’ development and progress. This can be done in a variety of ways that are context dependent, and experienced as inspiring by those who are assisted, which is an accurate characterisation of what has intrinsically moved us to affect that contribution. What is not nearly as inspiring and can cause others harm is a faux form of enabling that indulges others dysfunction and fosters a co-dependence which has a disempowering effect on the person in need. There is a lot of wisdom in the saying, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’. While no doubt there is a time for giving to others in order to meet an immediate need, over the longer term of people’s lives where a real difference is made, this impact is affected by capacity building that makes others more competent, confident and self-reliant.

It takes a genuine care and selflessness to want to make that contribution to another’s life and to extend those qualities to achieve an outcome that is in that other person’s best interests. This nudging of others towards the precipice of transformation often takes the form of tough love or pushing them out of their comfort zone, which requires sacrifice on the part of the person assisting because they will be fought along the way, and won’t be seen in a favourable light by the person being assisted as they experience their own struggle of doing the difficult work that transmuting one’s dysfunctionality requires. This perceived adversary is in actuality an indispensable ally, without which that person needing help couldn’t find their way back to centre. On any journey to reconciling the broken parts of ourselves, we require guides who have done their own integral work that allows them to effectively lead the way and help us navigate the pitfalls that we don’t yet know will be ours to encounter. Absent of this person who has walked the path, we will find ourselves in the company of those who may promise salvation or success but in our following of their lead are much more likely to lead us astray.       

Rules for Argumentation or Debate to Succeed (or Fail) by (Part 4)

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Remember the metaphorical talking stick; practice active listening – This one is so obvious that it is easily forgotten. Debate situations can be similar to many of our personal interactions where as our opponent is talking, we aren’t really listening to what they have to say, but are instead thinking about what we want to convey to them at the next opportunity. This mode of responding, if it can even be called that, is perhaps more heavily ingrained in a debate context because of the presentation format and the imperative that one has to make their own points during the limited time that they have to speak. Absent of this space to offer a considered argument in response to what your opponent has just said, which can induce a sense of pressure to ad lib on one’s feet, and it becomes understandable how one might recoil into defensiveness, or the safer position of reaffirming key points already made that give their position legitimacy.

But what does this accomplish in facilitating an understanding of the alternate position? Not much. When people are just talking past each other, the groundwork cannot be laid for consensus building or finding a potential resolution to the issue at hand. While a debate isn’t necessarily aiming for that outcome, I believe that the participant who can skilfully address their opponent’s main arguments while also emphasising the strength of their own position will enjoy greater persuasive power in the eyes of an audience. Demonstrating a willingness to empathise with an opponent’s position, when authentically embodied, is a potent quality that will distinguish you from them, especially if they are unable or unwilling to reciprocate for fear of coming off as weak to the audience. What they perceive to be their strength by refusing to give this ground will be interpreted as insecurity and pettiness, which can’t help but work in your favour. Be cautious though in using this as a manipulative tactic to turn a debate in your favour as the previous rule about performative insincerity having a scent will be just as applicable to you in the circumstances.

Use both anecdotal and empirical evidence to win others over to your side; appeals to emotion are the strategy of the desperate who will inevitably taste defeat – Whatever is your perspective on an issue that has been informed by your lived experience, that is by itself, not compelling enough evidence to validate your perspective as being generalisable across a broader representative sample. While it may be suggestive of a larger truth, we must reconcile this possibility with the epistemic humility which will bring us to the realisation that there are things beyond what we can see, or have allowed ourselves to see in the world. What I mean when I say ‘allowed ourselves to see’, are the biases, selective sampling of events and blind spots that have us perceive the world in a way that is consistent with our pre-judged beliefs about it. Out of this pre-judging comes a narrative story or ideological framework about how the world works which we can easily become overly invested in and emotive about when other people call its validity or accuracy into question. You see this emotionality spill out in debate settings quite often, to the detriment of those who don’t have the evidentiary support to back up their claims.

As human beings we react viscerally both to and with emotion (which animates our fight or flight response), so when confronted with a person arguing vehemently with anger or some other strong feeling, our inclination will be to verbally bite back just as hard, or to demonstrate a greater level of situational awareness in a debate context by adjusting our mode of communication to turn down the temperature of the interaction. Knowing the latter course to be the preferred option of most people who will choose to be agreeable when faced with opposition, our opponents will often use blusterous displays of emotion as a shield to protect themselves, or more accurately their tenuous position, from dissection and greater scrutiny. Yet, bringing to light the contamination of their own perspective is what we must do. Regardless of how a person feels about a topic or their subjective experience of it, they can’t be so hubristic as to deny the objective nature of what it is they are making claims about. Scientists know this. While they may have an idea of how an aspect of the world works based on their observations of particular phenomena, they don’t mistake their hypothesis for a truth claim, and using that as a starting point for inquiry, their next step will be to prove or disprove their hypothesis empirically in a laboratory experiment or other form of social study. Were they to go around dogmatically shouting at others the purported but as yet backed up truths they have found, they would be openly scorned as a pseudoscientific charlatan.

Like the Yin and Yang gives a visual representation of what appear to be opposing but are actually complementary forces at work, so must we come to appreciate the place that both anecdotal and empirical evidence have in leading us to the truth. Just as the capital ‘T’ Truth of reality is better grounded than any small ‘t’ truth claims that we subjectively hold, so must we be better grounded than in our emotions, and not fall hostage to the pull that they have towards self-serving narratives of righteousness (reflected in our position) and malevolence or ignorance (reflected in our opponent’s perspective). Ego fuelled indignation is a hell of a drug, and if we are not careful to temper its influence over our rational faculties, then we shouldn’t be surprised if people look at us as if we are crazy when we give it a voice.

Rules for Argumentation or Debate to Succeed (or Fail) by (Part 2)

Focus on the argument; don’t engage in Ad hominem attacks – In every debate or argument, there will be fundamental points of contention that need to be put forth and worked through by the parties. Whoever of them can best set out their position and rationally resolve the tension of competing positions will prove more persuasive and win the contest. This is the very definition of success as the context defines it. What is not acceptable or looked upon favourably are Ad hominem, or personally directed, attacks by one party against another. In the eyes of an audience, it is a losing and unbecoming strategy to take that low road. Those who genuinely have points of substance to make, don’t need to resort to personal attacks to make their points because they know that attempts to undermine the messenger rather than focusing on the message can’t help but detract from the substance of their argument. No doubt, things can get heated in the throes of battle, and when egos get involved in the process, personal feelings can become inflamed by the sense that one is losing ground or face to the other side. This is where self-awareness and restraint needs to be exercised before one gives expression to their emotionality. Even when one is being baited to reflexively react to a point being made, they need not take that bait, and being present to their state of being as they engage in the discussion will go a long way to keeping calm and remaining in control of their case to be made, and winning the respect of those who might need to adjudicate a decision between the parties. All of this also explains why we yearn for statespersons in our government and not for politicians. Most politicians are incredibly petty and aren’t adverse to taking pot shots at members of the opposition who question what they want to do or how they want to do it. This is because their ego is invested in the proposed plan that they want to have implemented, often for their own career objectives and advancement. Statespersons, on the other hand, don’t allow that ego interference, and they can push forward and get behind policies that are in the broader interest of the constituents they serve. Because they also have a thicker skin in the face of challenges to their perspectives or plans, they are less inclined to become triggered or experience the defensiveness that could prompt an underhanded attack against those critics.

Establish common ground at the outset and proceed from there – There is no surer way for a debate to go immediately off the rails than for each of its participants to commence by going hard in on their opposing viewpoints. I think why this deleterious strategy is often advocated for is because it is thought to be an effective starting point to put forward the strongest points that one has against the other side at the outset. A better strategy, and one that will paint the participant advocating for it in a better light, is to establish common ground at the beginning of the discussion. For most topics that are up for debate, there will be a middle ground that most reasonable persons of good will can land in determining the issues in question. For example, in the recent Voice referendum debate, I think the vast majority of Australians would agree with the proposition of wanting the condition of the most vulnerable Indigenous Australians to be improved, and their recognition as a people being integral to the narrative history of this country. Obviously, there were very different positions taken about how that should be formally enshrined or affected, and the details surrounding this ended up hijacking the debate and being decisive in how it was settled. If there was a missed opportunity to come from the debate, it was not proceeding from the base of common ground, and instead allowing opposing (and often extreme) ideas which deviated from that mean to become entrenched in the public discourse. The problem with opposing ideas that lie at the extremes of a spectrum is that they appeal to the ego so strongly that when we choose a side that we can invest this aspect of our identity in, we don’t want to give any ground to an opposing side for fear that this may erode our identity or call into question what we have been conditioned by this positionality to believe is right about the perspective we hold. It takes a strong person however, who is guided by truth, solidarity and the integrity that strives to cohere elements into a whole, to rail against this egocentric temptation, and not many are evolved enough to look beyond what they want to achieve in winning the battle of ideas to generate a win-win outcome that can be fruitful for all of those persons sitting at the table together. Despite this being a rarity, you and I can develop ourselves to want to find this shared space of mutual flourishing, and have this be the base that we orient ourselves from to reconcile division or conflict in the domains we occupy.

Performative insincerity has a scent, and so does genuine authenticity. People can tell when you are merely an avatar parroting an ideology for a tribe or base – Have you ever watched an interview and observed a guest who doesn’t really answer any of the questions posed to them and just responds with what appears to be segments of a mental script filled with buzzwords or ideological talking points? I remember taking in such a performance by a woman, convinced of the modern prevalence of systemic racism, on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Despite this woman being presented with evidence against her hyperbolic and selective claims about the phenomenon, she bulldozed forward, talking rapidly in conveying her ideological views that she wasn’t interested in having challenged by others who would take a different position. As I listened to her rattling off one talking point after another that I had previously heard spewed by others who were similarly indoctrinated into a progressive woke ideology, it occurred to me that this woman was in essence merely an avatar for the ideas she was putting forwards, and that you could have put any other person who thought the same way in front of that camera, and their vacuity would have been similarly transparent to those who were watching. Hers was an agenda to push, not a reality to be elucidated. Had she been there to genuinely shed light on the matter by presenting a perspective that was informed by both anecdotal and empirical evidence, she would have taken a much softer and humbler line that was open and willing to be influenced by facts that contravened her initial presumptions.

Many Factors, not One Cause (Part 1)

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Whatever situations we are confronted with in life, or decisions that we have to make, the chances are that there will be many factors that we need to consider in judging an effective response to these scenarios. The world is a complex place, and for many of these situations there is not a prescribed or clear cut ‘right’ way of dealing with them. While we may end up satisfied with how we have met those challenges, it may be, and is likely the case, that we could have deployed other strategies that worked just as well or even better in delivering a desired outcome. While we shouldn’t spend our time stewing on what these alternate realities could have produced, what I think is useful is staying open to how we could have produced better outcomes by keeping a fuller range of salient factors or competing interests in view. On this point, American Economist Thomas Sowell offers us the wise perspective that “there are no solutions, only trade-offs” to the conundrums we face.

As we may attempt to respond to these scenarios, one of the surefire ways to come to an inaccurate determination of what has occurred, is to think mono-causally, or to attribute an outcome to just one cause. Individuals who are prone to emotionally react to circumstances, or automatically defer to their ideological conceptions of the world as an explainer for what has taken place, fall victim to this way of thinking all the time, which in many instances has the perilous side effect of exacerbating the problems that they are trying to alleviate. When we think too myopically, we are incapable of getting to the heart of problems, and will at best only allay the symptoms that are associated with the underlying malaise. To borrow a Swiftism here and a Dr. Philism there, “band-aids don’t fix bullet holes” and “what we misdiagnose, we will mistreat”.

Here, I will offer three examples of this phenomenon, and why the explainers given for their presence are inaccurate representations of reality (naturally, for the purposes of this blog, I will only offer an abbreviated set of considerations to make my point, lest I appear to contravene my own advice and lead you to believe that only what I have canvassed is what I believe to be pertinent to the discussion of these issues):

1. Conspiracy theories – These theories are rife with simple, ill-considered, unnuanced and prejudiced claims that localise blame for particular happenings in the world on an ‘other’, whether that be a person (e.g. George Soros, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci), a group of people (e.g. the Jews, ‘elites’, ‘the deep state’) or institutions (e.g. the FBI, World Economic Forum or Freemasons) to fortify the identity of an in-group (often framed as being victimised or marginalised by society) whose identitarian worldview is sought to be propagated. Rather than admitting that there is so much about the workings of the world that they are unaware of and will never be able to fully comprehend, the people who subscribe to these theories play the unsophisticated game of connecting the dots with things that they have observed, or more likely been told and conditioned to believe, to present a picture of how the world functions. Not coincidentally, the forming of these conclusions serve to externalise their strongly held biases, grievances and paranoid sensibilities. Why these theories proliferate so wildly is because they bypass the logical and rational workings of the brain to hijack the emotional circuitry of our limbic system. Leading on from what I have stated before about these theories serving to support a narrative of marginalisation or victimisation, if because of an economic recession that causes hardship, someone wants to blame Jewish bankers for their situation, what the emotional reactivity of their fear, antisemitism and associated resentment won’t allow them to see are the various actions they could have taken previously to fortify their financial resources, through saving, continuous learning to present opportunities for upwards mobility or investing their money, which are more accurately predictive of the predicament they find themselves in. Having to take responsibility for our failure to help ourselves in such a situation is not easy, and projecting that blame onto a out-group is a convenient, yet entirely ineffective, form of escapism.

2. Social disparities – As unfortunate as it is to observe the adverse impacts of this phenomenon, we mustn’t let our compassionate inclination towards others obscure the reality that differences are a fundamental aspect of life. While each person has an unalienable intrinsic worth that should be honoured by others, inherent in those individuals are variations in ability, native intelligence, personality, genetic health and attractiveness, among other features of being. In this respect, each of us has strengths and weaknesses relative to others that will either enhance or inhibit our ability to advance in the world on its terms of value or success. But by themselves, none of these characteristics will be determinative of how far we can progress because there are a multiplicity of other factors at play that can be leveraged to improve our and the broader human condition. Despite many blaming the capitalist system for economic inequality, it is in many ways an enabler of this progress as the rising levels of innovation, entrepreneurship and prosperity in emerging economies like Africa and India attest to.