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- Everyone of us enters debates with preconceived notions, baggage, and a truckload of biases. It’s up to you to manage both your demons and to help whoever needs help with theirs, so that a productive conversation can become possible. Without that, the debate will degrade into nothing but a clash of dark sides in which one’s goal is no longer to learn and grow but to convince.
- Some of us are in just it to win it. Not to learn or grow. Which by definition is already a loss or a regress. The best way to debate is to be in it with humility, and with the understanding that ignorance is a puzzle to us all, as both the wise and the ignorant know what it feels like to be wise even though that’s only possible for one of them.
- Do your homework before you get into debating or arguing. Not just for the sake of not looking like a fool, but also for the quality of the interaction. You will be surprised how the nature of a mutually enhancing interaction changes from something only mere and mundane mortals do into the kind of thing the greatest intellectuals among us engage in. To debate not for the swelling of one’s ego is to debate not only for its shrinkage but for wisdom.
- The more you learn the better intellectual discussions you can have, simply for the virtue of not having to deal with the basics, but to instead venture towards the edge of known knowledge. And maybe, just maybe, to be able to shed new light into some of the unknown that puzzle us all, and thus make the collective unconscious a little wiser within your lifetime. Just by taking the time to educate yourself and to submit to the practice of critical thought.
- By openly admitting to one’s ignorance at the start of any conversation/debate, one sets the interaction up for success, as without the threat of inferiority, the ego loses its purpose. By accepting ignorance as a part of the self, the ego no longer has anything to defend, which frees the brain for true knowledge and wisdom.
It is all about knowledge and experience 😉
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