The Eighteenth Brumaire of Ben Shapiro
Arguing Online for Fun & Profit
As a poster in the turbulent world of The Online™, I generally try to keep The Discourse® at arm’s length. I try to resist the urge to reply; to do epic clapbacks against reactionaries, or to own the feckless liberals and the victims of terminal K-Hive brain. I won’t pretend that I owe the motivation to do so to some brand of personal enlightenment, though. I’m not doing it because I believe I’m somehow above the fray. Nor, for that matter, is it borne out of nihilism, or a belief that The Online is a space that should be ceded to the reactionary right.
My resistance to participating in The Discourse is, in part, a means to preserve my own sanity. It goes deeper than that, though; down to the fundamental shape which contemporary argumentation takes online.
Winners & Losers
Although I’ve been a poster for years, I really can’t recall a time I’ve indulged in the internet’s favorite pastime-arguing on social media-and walked away from it feeling good about my interaction. Even on occasions when I “won” an argument, it was never a satisfying experience. In fact, I would almost always walk away with a sense of deep purposelessness and frustration. I would experience this sensation regardless of whether I owned or wasowned.
Although it’s anecdotal, I suspect the same is true for a lot of posters. We engage in The Discourse everyday. However, we remain aware of a truth that, despite how fervently we try to brush it away, still gnaws away at the recesses of our minds: our posts won’t change anything.
The topic of an argument may be something of actual consequence. It could be a question of vital importance, like police violence, apartheid, or the looming ecological disaster which threatens to doom us all. Still, we can’t shake the awareness that there was no point to even having an argument, other than seeking entertainment through the act of arguing.
The nominal purpose of engaging in The Discourse is to change minds. We operate under the pretense that we can win people over to a position that we understand as “correct,” whether that be intellectual, moral, or spiritual. However, the truth that we try to ignore is that there is no way to accomplish this through the framework of argumentation. This is because the purpose of argumentation is not to achieve any kind of transformation in understanding.
Debate Club & the “Free Marketplace of Ideas”
Anyone familiar with the practice of the formalized and staged debate, of the brand conducted by school debate teams, knows that the purpose is not to change the mind of your opponent. The purpose is to argue with clear diction and purpose, relying on facts and evidence while avoiding fallacies and appeals to emotion. The “winner” of the debate is not the person whose ideas are most correct. The winner is the contestant who can most effectively argue their case, regardless whether they actually believe in it or not.
Receptiveness to a fiery, empassioned brand of “pop-debate as dialogue” was first ceded in the minds of mass consumers decades ago. We can track its descent over the decades, from the famously heated televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley to more sensational programming like CNN’s Crossfire. From there, the advent of video platforms like YouTube inflicted on us a crop of charlatans and hucksters eager to monetize their prep school-honed debate skills. The Discourse is now lousy with overgrown debate kids who gained prominence by leveraging their rhetorical skills into a career. The result is that millions of marks have been swindled by a cheap bootleg of the Oxford Union marketed as intellectual discussion.
Ben Shapiro would be the most obvious example of this grift. Shapiro built his brand not on the vigor of his intellect, but on his ability to outmatch his opponents in rhetoric. His fast-talking presentation, coupled with practiced debate skills and marginal subject matter knowledge, allowed him to build a media fiefdom on a foundation of YouTube videos in which he “DESTROYS” meeting hall after meeting hall of weeping college freshmen with facts and logic.
It’s unclear if Shapiro earnestly believes that he’s engaged in some advancement of The Discourse, or if he’s merely performing to secure a lucrative role in the media ecosystem. For all I know, he may be a swindler of the highest order; a media remora fish feeding off the talents of others. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. In any case, Shapiro’s brand of presentation reflects a profound disinterest in parsing his ideas and evaluating their correctness, and whether their correctness persists as conditions change.
There are plenty of other media grifters occupying positions similar to that of Shaprio, though. Dave Rubin, who is generally less rigorous than Shapiro (but no less lazy), is the host of a YouTube series called The Rubin Report. The show is, in effect, an opportunity for Rubin and his viewers to applaud themselves for their enlightened, “classical liberal” values. To them, while nothing of value may have been achieved through argumentation, the fact that we had an argument seems to be a worthwhile endeavor on its own.
There are plenty more media figures of this same variety, all offering different “takes” within the broader stream of liberal society. From Bill Maher to Charlie Kirk, we have countless debate team opportunists of varying flavors within the prescribed bounds of ideological acceptability, each operating at varying levels of intellectual rigor.
Regardless of their ostensive politics, though, none of these actors are ultimately more effective than any other. This is because debate is fundamentally not a neutral methodological framework for ascertaining truth. It is a skill; like any skill, debate demands tact, specified knowledge, and practice. The art of argumentation can tell us who is the most adept at conveying ideas through rhetoric. What it can’t tell us, however, is whose ideas are correct.
Doing a No Growth
This wouldn’t be a serious problem if debate were properly understood. Debate is akin to a sport; you’re rooting for the sake of your team, not for that of truth. The problem is that, both online and off, there is widespread conflation of debate skills with correctness. Mistaking debate skills for intellectual rigor and “correctness” is a category error. It is one of the primary forces poisoning The Discourse, and it ensures that no meaningful resolution can ever come about there.
If The Discourse is to be something meaningful, then shouldn’t it provide a way to achieve an end to a conversation that could be a genuinely positive transformation? A method to justify the madness?
As good Marxists, we know that the only reason to engage in The Discourse is to achieve a dialectical synthesis of ideas; an “end” which reflects neither premise, but seeks to reconcile thesis and antithesis. However, that can’t be achieved through a medium of engagement in which one party will “win” while another “loses.”
When it comes to matters of significance, in particular, there is no real “winner” of an argument. You either achieve dialectical synthesis, or both parties lose because no advancement is made. Nothing is learned, and no growth is accomplished. This is the key distinction between debate and dialectic. The former is a game, in the sense that it is a contest to determine a winner and a loser. A dialectic, however, is a process by which ideas are synthesized so they may advance toward truth. The former allows for no growth by either party, while the latter facilitates the growth of all.
What is to be Done?
In short: we must abolish the “own”-based economy of The Online. “Abolish” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, as the object that is to be abolished does not exist in a formali sense. What is meant is that the objective of The Discourse can’t be to win a debate and dominate an opponent. Rather, we need to transform our relationship to digital space, and how we leverage it to effect material change.
We tend to view The Online as a place in which power can be contested. This is a mistake, because when posting, we are not acting as part of a coordinated political project. We act as atomized individuals butting up against other atomized individuals. There is an incentive structure in place; clout can help one build a following, which can be leveraged into a lucrative career as a commentator or podcaster. As long as that hangs over our heads, The Discourse will remain an environment in which nothing happens but a super-ego colliding against another super-ego.
That’s not to say there’s no utility to posting. Posting can be a valuable means of distributing information, and of connecting the disconnected. The key lies in using online space as a tool for organizing, not as a space in which we do battle.
The only way to escape this trap, to “win,” is for debate to give way to a dialectic. To work toward a genuine and transformative end. This is a scary prospect, though, because it demands qualities which online culture quickly drills out of all posters: empathy, openness, and good faith. It demands earnestness in our engagements, which is, for lack of a better term, cringe.
Most frightening of all, it demands personal investment. It demands belief in a political project sufficient to motivate individuals to organize and act in a coordinated manner. In effect, to do the one thing liberal society teaches is the greatest heresy: to suborn one’s short-term, individual will to the long-term interests of the collective. To give up the intangible, personalized political fantasies we pursue online for the chance to build a tangible, collective political project.
Unless we achieve this, all we will do is continue arguing about the shapes of the shadows on the cave wall as the fuel of the fire burns lower and the smoke grows thicker.
Originally published at https://arguechat.substack.com on August 12, 2021.
