[387] Put Your Dukes Up

Why do we fight?

Immediately there are easy answers. To defend yourself from harm. All-consuming fear that makes you lash out uncontrollably. Insecure conditions leading to competition for resources. At the basic animal level, the picture is pretty clear. We're still programmed to “win or die.”

I suppose I'm more intrigued by the more trivial realm. We battle with ideas. We don't all get an hour-long spot with a moderator, and often there reaches a level of emotional investment that the more I contemplate it, the more I wonder why it's there.

Perhaps I'm just losing a sense of self. The more I learn, almost in fact with each thing I learn, I become more and more aware of how many branches led up to that thing. It's easy to simply theorize, “well of course everything is connected.” The picture becomes eerily clearer though with each new puzzle piece. Significant parts of you are tales of history and politics you find yourself intimately familiar with.

I suppose you have to have a charge. Something that is tied to a need maybe. If you don't express your idea, you'll go through very real emotional pain. You'll suffer depression or anxiety. Your body now physically reacting and making you push. You're not just convinced something is true, you think that the implications are so big they have a direct line to your well-being. Your fight is to keep something from dying.

There's a pattern in debates. Whether I'm watching a philosopher and linguist meddle over the usage of the word “creativity” or two girls fight about whether there should be feminists, almost immediately the same things happen. Semantics. You're rarely even in that much opposition to anyone. If 20 minutes of an hour debate is devoted to “well when I say cunt bag I really mean raving lunatic,” you know, to assuage fears of appearing sexist or something, I feel the goal of the dialogue wasn't clear from the onset.

You've not only got the wordplay at the level of the topic, but you've got the political game of what you can get away with characterizing the other person as. Can you show them to be grossly misinformed, yet make it sting like you've called them an asshole? Probably not, but every other explanation you're gonna try. And if you like your combatant, or he's also a high minded intellectual who's barely present during the proceedings, you'll direct the volleys towards their weakest ideas or worst representatives of their camp.

It appears as if the real winner, every time, is the one who can get away with explaining their position whilst at the same time showing, either through body language or an inability to focus on whatever the main point was, that they're not really that emotionally invested. The facts speak for themselves as translated through their disposition. In the right crowd, skilled orators don't even need to be right.

It's why I sort of got bored with arguing. I think there needs to be a kind of shorthand impersonal form you should fill out before you ever get started. A clearly stated goal, a mutual acceptance of the question to be debated, and a sorting program to quickly skip past the built in stumbling points.

When you learn we're having the same religious “debates,” in practically the same words, that started thousands of years ago, it gets immediately boring. You know it's smarter to take up another method if you feel the compulsion to show someone they're wrong. But again, what's in it for you? Why does it initially stress you out? Why does it come packaged emotionally charged first, then you get too used to it, perhaps to the point of eventual complacency?

I suppose for me, it boils down to a perceived importance of ideas as they pertain to well-being. I argued religion because I saw religious friends justifying an abusive relationship of someone I cared about. I learned everything I could because I tied myself up in a crusade centered around her. These religious lies and happy-faced justifications had dramatic and inexcusable consequences. I couldn't “act” in a sense and like kick his ass or something, so I armed myself with knowledge to try and pull back the veil.

When I removed myself from that situation, the biggest fight I had in years involved business partners and assumptions. I was defending my hundred miles an hour thoughts about what I could achieve, and no one was going to take it from me. My partner at the time seemed motivated to undermine the foundation we built for it. This I arguably saw coming, it's detailed in a string of blogs somewhere, but I don't really yell, so it got bigger than I was anticipating.

Then other than getting attacked by the dooshy gay kid while being super drunk or the inevitable lover's quarrel, I retain my general low-key style. For anyone who's seen me drunk and engaging with something I find perplexing, I stress that asking a lot of pointed questions I don't equate with fighting. Which, it occurs to me, I've sort of lost the drive. Until two nights ago when Malibu's Most Wanted decided to sucker punch me at random, I wouldn't have thought you'd survive attacking me. I was more concerned with picking up my glasses.

It's not that I don't care, it's that I don't feel I have the right tools. I use words and videos and books. I simply want to aggregate and sort. But I don't have the people who operate like that. Or, I haven't incentivized them correctly is the more explicit statement. Combine this with perhaps too much security? Malibu got 3 shots to the head, but I certainly wasn't on my way to the pavement. I know I'm not made of glass and I know what I'm capable of.

I know leading by example is best. I know plugging people into an environment churns out the most immediate results. I know there's a way to engage with information that makes it proactive and useful and not a semantic nightmare. And apparently I know that none of that matters right now. That's why I'm not really fighting.