Stop Being Reasonable - Training in Intellectual Self-Defense

There was one day I made sense of the bullshit.

Stop Being Reasonable - Training in Intellectual Self-Defense

In this video I go over the day I awakened to the various powers of human interaction, and how futile it can be to reason with someone who doesn't want to reason with you. Even more, I learned the danger of someone who can pretend to be reasonable with you in order to trick you into submission without a fight. Well, I have a solution for that.

Stop being reasonable.

Volitional Science Network Youtube Channel

There was one day I made sense of the bullshit.

I had been in Austria for over a year living in Vienna. I had taken up a martial arts class called Systema, and a group of us traveled to an all-week Systema seminar in Augsburg, Germany. We participated in the seminar at the beginning of the week, and on Friday many more people all throughout Europe began to show up for the weekend. A really big name in the Systema world was teaching this seminar, and it was attracting people from afar.

Friday night many of us were at a restaurant, relaxing and socializing before the two big training days that weekend. Before traveling to Europe, I had lived in Vermont for a year with a group of exuberant friends. We had a T-shirt press in the basement and I had made myself a T-shirt that proudly stated “FLUORIDE KILLS” on the front. I have a major in chemistry and I’ve done a bit of research on the history and effects of fluoride in the United States, and I have pretty strong feelings about it. It was bit of an empty political statement in Europe, as they don’t fluoridate the water there, but I didn’t have a lot of clothes and I found myself wearing it often, as I was that night.

Sitting at a table with my friends from Vienna and a few new friends from Germany, I looked with eager eyes as my Russian-themed meal was brought over to me. Just as I was getting ready to dig in, a guy I hadn’t met yet approached me from another table. He introduced himself to me. He was from the Ukraine and I could barely detect an accent in his English. He was polite and asked if he could sit down next to me. I responded in a friendly fashion and asked him to sit.

“Hey,” he said, “could you tell me about your shirt?”

In my entire time in Europe, that was the first time anyone had ever asked me about my shirt. I was eager to talk about it (I admit it—I can be a vomiting encyclopedia), but at the same time I really wanted to eat my food that had just arrived. Wielding my fork and pondering, I decided that if I was going to wear the shirt in public, I better be prepared to talk about it.

“Okay,” I said to him, “What version do you want? I can go for five minutes or an hour.”

“Just tell me.” he said.

“No really,” I insisted, “I have a lot of information in my head and I can really spend a long time talking abou—“

“Just tell me. Just tell me.” he said.

I scrutinized him carefully. His posture was straight, leaning back in his chair. His arms were crossed, one hand resting on his chin. The development of his face was approaching what I would describe as a shit-eating grin.

“Alright,” I said, and I dove into the details.

I barely made it to three sentences before he interrupted me, saying things like: “No, that’s not true. You can’t know that. That’s just a conspiracy theory. That doesn’t make any sense.” Disgruntled, I thought, I can’t know what? You didn’t even give me a chance to say anything.

I restarted, and again he didn’t let me get farther than three sentences before interrupting me. “Yeah, I’ve heard that from someone else before, and he was an idiot, so that can’t be right.” Someone else said something before that you didn’t like, therefore I’m wrong? What?

This interaction went back and forth a few times like this. I would do my best to present a well-argued civil discussion, and he would interrupt me like an ass. This was a position I had found myself in throughout my entire life. I would be doing my damned best to complete a well though-out and evidenced argument, acting civil in the process in order to maintain maximum valuable discourse, but for some reason I felt I was losing. Losing what? How do you lose when you’re just exchanging information? What was worse, the harder I worked to keep the discussion fair, the more it felt like I was losing.

Stomach grumbling and still holding my fork, I further scrutinized his shit-eating grin. It was glowing. Several of my friends were watching this unfold with rapt attention. Robert Anton Wilson was whispering Prometheus Rising in my ears; my subconscious was grinding while my conscious flitted about, trying to figure out what was going on and how to hold my ground.

Wielding fork and scrutinizing.

It clicked.

I lowered my fork, bore down his grin with my stare, and told him, “If you don’t change your tone of voice, I’m not telling you anything.”

The tension at the table spiked. Had I been looking at my friends, I’m sure their eyes were going wide. My foe expressed a subtle shock, but was quick with his reply. Again, he attacked my information. You can’t know that, there is no evidence, that’s not true, that’s just a conspiracy theory, etc.

I held my stare, stone-cold. “If you don’t change your tone of voice, I’m not telling you anything.”

The response changed. His glow began to fade, and he accused me of being mean. “You’re taking things too personally. That’s not what I meant.”

“If you don’t change your tone of voice, I’m not telling you anything.”

His glow was gone, and he became submissive. “Hey man, I just came over here to get some information. You’re the one getting upset and offended.”

“If you don’t change your tone of voice, I’m not telling you anything.”

He couldn’t take anymore. His glow and his grin gone, his posture broke and he slumped over the table. A clear sign of defeat. He apologized and began to speak to me respectfully, and it wasn’t long before he excused himself to go back to his own table. We did not interact much the rest of the weekend (I think he avoided me), but the few times we did, he remained very respectful.

After he tucked in his chair and left, my friends all leaned in on the table and said to me, “Woa! That was intense! Don’t you think you were a little bit rude?”

“No!” My blood was still pumping, “He came over and started the fight with me. Did you guys not see that?”

“Well,” they said, “if you didn’t like how he talked to you, you could have just moved to another table.”

“No! I was here first. He came over to me. HE can move.”

So what was it that clicked for me that even my friends, who had a chance to witness the situation first hand, were not able to see? I had thought he had come over to have a discussion (i.e. exchange information), but he had come over to humiliate me (i.e. dominate me in a social setting).

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This is a VERY IMPORTANT HABIT to develop in order to identify when you're having a reasonable conversation you should invest in or one you should walk away from.

What can be learned from this interaction? It's that emotion beats reason.

At the emotional level, interacts are win-lose. There must be a winner and a loser, which is why it operates and a scale of domination and submission. In order for this guy at the table to dominate me, I had to lose.

At the reasonable level, interactions can be win-win. We can use reason to deduct a solution that benefits both of us.

As I described in my story, you can paint an emotional attack up and down with reason all you want, but it stays win-lose. If a sophist wants to assure victory, he will make sure that the person he's attacking stays reasonable. Then the person will never defend himself, thinking he's having a discussion.

I would even go so far to say that my interest in critical thinking is more in identifying its opposite. Because as soon as I can identify it, I know I can drop being reasonable.

Sophistry is the chameleon technique. It is emotion pretending to be reason (i.e. it is domination pretending to be negotiation). It is the most effective way to dominate, because the sophist can have all the benefits of dominating you without the risks of you retaliating, as you think you're having a discussion and won't fight back.

My point here: use critical thinking to identify when this occurs, and when it does, DO NOT CONTINUE BEING REASONABLE. If you continue being reasonable, you lose by default. Recognize that you're having a fight and act accordingly.

-Dylan Lawrence Moore
@volsci

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