funeralxempire wrote:
Half-joking, half-serious.
With verbal arguments I'd say the more bad faith the other party relies on, the weaker they and their cause look overall.
Sometimes you can win by how you present your argument, other times more so with how you dismantle the other person's argument. One doesn't always win in the moment though, sometimes the other party will dwell on something that was said and reflect upon it.
Regardless though, I'd say winning rarely makes one look worse, unless they conduct themselves like a bad winner. If there's an audience, even if one considers engaging in the contest lowering themselves, in the eyes of the people who saw it the winner typically gains respect in some degree by winning.
Yes I've noticed that thing where after an argument in which my "opponent" has appeared to not back down, they later altered their behaviour to accommodate me. Those arguments were started by my complaints about practical matters, not theoretical, so I'm not sure they count. They were more cases of me directly trying to get somebody to make a change and them seeming like they didn't want to. Almost as if they were scared of losing face by giving in at the time.
Politicians engage in a lot of verbal Punch-And-Judy stuff, presumably because the public can't tell the difference between the skills necessary for that and the skills necessary to govern a country, and sees only "general intelligence," not specific aptitudes, as important. It reminds me of those stories about cave-men picking leaders by getting them to have a physical punch-up. In terms of verbal combat, it seems that if you can make your opponent
look stupid then onlookers will think they
are stupid. Society likes to see itself as wise and compassionate, but it's still largely true that everybody loves a winner and nobody respects a loser, even though they can't quite define what a winner and a loser is. And compassion doesn't seem to be in the equation.
24 Jan 2024, 8:17 am
