Arjun Khemani

Debates—professional, political or informal—are one of the few things in the list of activities in existence which I find very unproductive, rather to some extent, inevitably useless. Why? Well, there’s a lot of reasons why I find debates just pointless. Here are a few, please do (or don’t) feel free to debate on these points with me:

·  No one wins in an argument: Ben Franklin noted—
“A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still.”
Now, isn’t that just the way it is! If you strongly believe for a fact that some thing is true, no man on earth can make you change your mind and believe on the contrary. Sure, you can get persuaded. You can get summoned and forced into acting in a contradicting way by someone “respectable”. You can even be told to admit and agree that you are wrong and promote and speak of that the other person’s view is right even though it’s completely against and opposite your strong point. This can happen. But, it still won’t change what you really think of the topic, your real belief, and the thought that’s actually going on in your head. No one can win an argument. The contradicting persons in a debate always,—always—even if the dispute has been settled and a debater announced winner, will go home with the same mind-set that they had with themselves when they stepped in. Unless, obviously a miracle happens and the person understands the point and his new belief becomes the same of that of the other. But that’s only when he wants to change his mind.
So that’s what I think. In reality, there’s no winner in an argument.

• We think in the “or” sense: I’ve written a whole article on this subject, you can read it later, here.
  We always think that there’s only one right answer, choice, decision to make, good thing, or person: to the dispute or discussion. We usually never accept the fact that both the answers, choices, decisions to make, good things, or people: to the dispute can be the “right choice”. And in debates, again—professional, political or even informal or a friendly argument—we think only in this way, because debates are of totally contradicting topics which CAN work together, which I’ll get to in a moment, but we—as it’s always been needed to—have only one distinguished “winner”, don’t we?
  Now, to my point, we can actually work out peacefully even the two most contradicting topics in theory and make them work together. There’s something known as a 50/50. Not even a 50/50 is required for this, we can distribute it in any magnitude such as 80/20, 70/30 or 60/40. The important thing is for both individuals of humankind to agree on a topic, heartily and not due to persuasion.

There’s many other reasons I believe for debates being useless. But, there are some reasons why they aren’t useless at all. In fact, they are important. We get exposed to different perspectives and become less like the man who only lives within his four walls and is unaware of the world just a click of a doorknob away from him. And then after being “exposed” to these newer, fresher perspectives, we can easily without persuasion change our mind and shape it as we want to and as we understand the world.