Debate

A debate is an intellectual ‘fair’ fight over opposing issues. keep in mind that the winner is not necessarily aligned with reality. Truth is reality based, and no amount of strategy, intellectual acuity, or deflection changes what it is. There are consequences for not understanding its relevance, and the behavior it inspires.

Time changes what people are capable of understanding. Debating the possibility of reliable communication around the world would be different today than it was a century ago. That is because knowledge about the subject has expanded. Arguing against the possibility of rapid communication at the same it was happening would be ridiculous.

The intellectual paradigm changes slowly. There is a reverence for past convention that clings to fallacy long after the delusion is accepted as not being true. Over the past century there has been a paradigm shift from Earth being perceived as a place where people were held hostage by their environment to a place where their environment is held hostage by their behavior.

Debate clings to past convention. Sources of information still deemed credible, actually are not. People who are esteemed in history were not operating with all of the facts that are available today. Due diligence is necessary if the behavior of people is to progress fast enough to safely use the technological ability they already have.

Political debate seems especially egregious. Truth seems not to matter. People who have been dead 200 years are quoted as if they understood the future. Their thoughts and worries were constructed with limited knowledge in a sub-economic paradigm. Scientists, historians, news reporters, theologians, psychologists, farmers, doctors, politicians and business people include but a few of the myriads who have been studying reality every single passing day. 

There is irrefutable evidence that the tribalistic struggle for power of past centuries is not only an ineffective manner to achieve peace, justice and tranquility, but tribal behavior is a serious environmental pollutant. There is but one earth, People have the capacity to improve it. If they don’t make the effort the environment they share will quantitatively and qualitatively shrink, as is the trend. Human survival will become increasingly difficult and unrewarding if people fail to use their most valuable attribute. That attribute is the ability to improve the environment all people share forever. PIE, people improve environment, but only if they try to improve it. Improvement is not a right. It is an ability.

A debate compromises reality if it allows superstition to have a voice. Truth is true even if intelligent people win debates that argue to the contrary. WIP (war, injustice, and poverty) is still viewed and documented as a permanent part of the human environment. It is in fact, an erasable environmental pollutant. It seems to have never dawned on intelligent people that WIP was unnecessary. Economists still seem to deny that poor people need money, that war torn countries have populations that migrate to more peaceful locations, and that nobody can reasonably trust institutions that receive power by denying service. Monetarily, civil society is set up to reward environmental pollution. 

As technology speeds up the environmental clock, harm happens more quickly, and it is less reversible. It shortens human life, and diminishes its quality. Two-hundred years has physically redefined each person to be an important integral part of humanity.  

People once tribally banded together for protection, and the for the power to increase their capability. Years of study have revealed the folly of this practice. Debates that allow superstition to take a side impede the slowly emerging paradigm. People have the ability to understand and improve the human environment at a faster rate than the harm that is being technologically accelerated. There is a need for haste however, because that may not always be the case.