In these posts I will state the case against debate.
I doubt this will change anyone’s mind.
I think debate is a perilous waste of time for obvious and not so obvious reasons. In this six minute post I begin to explore some of these reasons in detail.
Here is a brief summary:
To debate is to participate in your own subjection.
You self select as a target for permitted hatred
You submit to rules which exclude reality
You tacitly accept that debate produces a better society
…and that the best of all societies is that which debates
To debate is to naively submit to a system which is designed to isolate and neutralise any and every serious critic.
To take part in this pantotmime is to legitimise a system which is illegitimate by design and rules by the manufactured illusion of the freedom of expression and the adoption of the best ideas.
CONTENTS OF THE SERIES
In this first part I discuss our society as a spectacle, and consider the role of c*nservatives in policing discourse acceptable to the politics of national suicide.
In later parts I will show why attempting honest debate in public is to invite someone to murder you.
I will investigate some of the philosophical claptrap which underpins the rotten system of our locked discourse, showing why participating in debate is submission to a humiliating game whose rules are fixed - against the honest and the sane.
DEBATE IS A SPECTACLE
If you like to make a spectacle of yourself, feel free to engage in public debate.
If you dare to gainsay any of the obviously ridiculous ideas of the current dispensation you will be insulted, perhaps assaulted, maybe prosecuted and possibly even killed.
In 1967 the Situationist Guy Debord wrote “The Society of the Spectacle”.
Later a film, the argument is that authentic social life has been replaced by its representation. Debord said society was a performance contrived to produce "a social relation among people, mediated by images”.
Debate is one aspect of a performance of a free and open society whose politics and culture are said to be constantly enriched by the best ideas. This is in turn a factor of the false belief in the inexorable moral and intellectual uplift of mankind as a function of time, known as “Progress”.
The belief in debate is a progressive totem. To gainsay it is taboo. We do not live in the product of the best ideas, which do not win for obvious reasons. The startling and largely unnoticed absence of any of the major crises of our time in popular culture suggests we are socialised on a compost of slopaganda.
Men detest the truth about themselves.Popular belief is a matter of repetition, not reason.
Mass beelief is made, it is not the result of free interrogation of the case.
It is a product of a system which rules us by the manufacture of the contents of the public mind.
A serious understanding of ther role of belief in political economy demonstrates that our duty is the supply of better beliefs, rather than participation in a staged sideshow offering only the humiliating defeats known as “moral victories”.
THE PSEUDO ENVIRONMENT
We have lived all of our lives in a climate of manufactured opinion. This is the “pseudo environment” of Walter Lippmann, who said the dominant use of mass communications could produce a worldview based on its output - a replacement for reality whose control furnishes the contents of the hearts and minds of its captive audience. This is how public opinion is made.
Here is my post explaining the Lippmann Method and the technique of producing consensus in “Liberal Democracy”:
For over a century, the political economy sold as Liberal Democracy™ has suffused our hearts and minds with a system of make belief. These beliefs, which were made to make us believe in liberal internationalism, continue to shape our behaviour and thinking today, whether we consider ourselves to be liberal or not.
The belief in “debate” is one example. It is a ghost of the machine by which we are ruled, and which is now breaking down.
The role of belief in political economy is foundational to power which prefers not to use explicit force to secure compliance. Another reason is that we do not believe what we believe due to reasoning. What we often see and hear is what we come to accept as the case. Belief is a matter of preference, of convenience and of familiarity. It is not commonly the result of intellectual work, and its contents usually demonstrate its complete absence.
You can read about the Bernays Technique in the making of mass belief here:
WHY DEBATE IS CHAMPIONED
The reason debate is championed is a pernicious one. If you accept this fool’s bargain, you accept the terms and conditions too. The locked discourse of the liberal system achieves a superficial legitimacy through the transmission of the religious belief that the liberal system is the product of the best ideas winning the debate.
In reality, only liberal ideas are permitted in debates. To take debate seriously is to seek the meaning of life in a cartoon produced by the morally agnostic.
The result is not a free-thinking individual who has rationally chosen their ideas. The beliefs supplied to us through the control of cultural production are as foundational to the personality as they are to the power of the political elite.
This means that consumer beliefs consume us. Liberal ideas about rights, values, politics and society become the baseline, and they are not mere opinions. They furnish the structure of our identity, as in order to integrate into this mass society we must integrate its dogma into the armature of our personality.
To ask someone to “Change their mind” is often to demand they destroy their career and their identity.
The relation of one idea to another is like that of a component in an engine. If you swap out a pipe for a piston the machine breaks down.
This explains the limits of debate. There are countless examples of hysterical and violent reactions to the public presentation of arguments. What you see in these cases is the reality which cannot be reconciled with the fantasy premises of debate: questioning people’s beliefs is perceived as an attack, not as the free exchange of ideas inspired by some telos towards a superior thesis.
In this example of the function of debate, a c*nservative says that to question the rules breaks the rules. We shall see where this paradoxical reasoning originates in a moment.
What is unspoken about debate is most revealing about its function. Here a c*nservative is saying Restore Britain have “left the bounds of normal political debate” because they challenge the liberal consensus of national suicide.
The implicit reference to unspoken rules shows that debate is a construct permitted within the limits of the ruling ideology. If you say that ideology is rotten, and is responsible for the rotting state of our lives and of our instutitions, you are out of order.
Debate about the production of disorder as business as usual is not acceptable. Debate which changes nothing is the order of the day, every day it takes place.
Restore Britain is not engaged in a debate about the state of the nation. It states the case. If you recognise the ruin of your people, your economy, your society and the destruction of your children’s future in the political designs of the liberal consenses you will agree with them. If you do not or will not, you won’t.
The desired product of cultural propaganda is a people who cannot or will not recognise reality. You cannot expect to persuade people by compelling them to see what their identity and their worldview relies on denying.
Debate is a means of legitimising a fixed agenda and an inflexible, liberal-limited conceptual sandpit to play in whilst your house is burned down at your expense.
Our energies are better spent in preparing to replace this rotten state before the arsonists have reduced us all to ashes.
If you would like to tell your friends why debate is pointless, consider doing this:
If you would like to sponsor my thought-dictatorship, you could also do this:
Yes Frank, I want the days of debates, especially election debates to be over. Good choice for a heading picture. Poor Charlie. Why are they tearing him to shreds, even right after and still over a year after he was murdered?
Debate makes sense only when most of the audience are reasonable, logical, and knowledgeable. Very few of human organizations ever reach this state. As for national politics, especially US national politics, debate is useless.