- See, you're telling the enemy everything you wanna do.
No wonder you've been fighting.
- I watched the 2016 presidential election debates
between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Several months after, what was then my greatest triumph
in the world of debate, which was winning
the World University's Debate Championships.
The thing that struck me most about those debates
is how quickly a stage set up with rule,
with moderators, with the values of a community
that had decided to make debates a part
of the democratic process,
how quickly that could be turned
into a kind of a brawl,
where the only thing that mattered
was the display and the spectacle of dominance
over the other side,
where embarrassment was the currency.
Those darker impulses that feed into bad disagreements
are not only within the activity of debate,
but they're within all of us,
that just the way that we have the capacity
to disagree well,
we also have the capacity to disagree badly.
Having seen how the debate format can be broken down,
can be hijacked by bad faith debaters,
a resolve to list the common tactics
that are used by bad faith arguers,
and the four common personas I came up with
were first the dodger, the twister,
the wrangler, and fourth, the liar.
So the dodger wins by essentially changing the topic.
So you might say something like
we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels
because climate change is getting out of hand.
Then they might say on the topic of climate change,
why do you drive a four wheel drive?
It is a kind of a response on the same topic,
but not to the point that you had raised.
And so the response to the dodger is to stay the course
and to keep bringing the discussion back
to the original point and highlighting
that they are trying to change
what the disagreement is about.
The second kind of persona is the twister,
and the twister's signature move
is to misrepresent the point that you'll making.
If you say I'm opposed to increasing taxes,
the twister might say
does that mean you have no concern for social security?
It's not the argument you are raising,
it's the one they're thrusting on you.
To respond to the twister,
it's imperative to correct the record and say
no, that's not what I'm saying.
You can often get into a position of arguing
for something you don't believe,
or at least the conversation's splitting
and you not being able to connect
and talk about the same issue.
The third kind of bad arguer is called the Wrangler.
And this is the person for whom nothing is ever good enough.
They're very good at coming up with critiques
against just about everything that you're saying,
but they never offer an alternative of their own.
And so the appropriate response to the wrangler is to say
well, what do you believe?
In other words, to pin them to a position
so that they too have to argue in favor of something
rather than always saying no.
The fourth personality and someone we see
just about everywhere is the liar.
They usually don't tell one lie, they tell many.
The strategy against a liar is to choose one
or two representative lies
that you think best exemplifies the approach
that the liar is taking in a disagreement.
Then debaters do something called plug and replace.
You replace the lie with a truth,
and so by plugging in the lie and then replacing it
with the truth,
you can demonstrate the ways in which the lie falls short
and try and explain how that symptomatic
of a broader approach that the liar is taking to the debate.
One thing that knowledge and mastery
of this kind of defense
against the dark hearts allows us to do
is to challenge the bullies in our lives.
Some of that is a necessity because they're there,
and they often bring the fight to us,
but it's also an important thing to engage bad faith actors
as early as we can, and in many instances
as often as we can because the power of bullies
increases without challenge.
Even at a time when we might feel hopeless
faced with a bully or a bad faith debater,
we need to have tools so that we're able to respond,
but we also have strategies available to us
to reset the kind of conversation we want to have.