Empathy begets peace.

— Anonymous

I disagree. Democracy finds strength in diversity of ideas and viewpoints.  How do we passionately advocate for a viewpoint without destructive divisiveness?  The simple answer comes from kindergarten, you play fair in your argumentation.  

Learn to recognize common fallacies, avoid them, and identify them in others.

1. Attack ideas, not people: You would think this would not need to be said to adults. Little children use name-calling, which most adults avoid. However, they use surrogate words such as lib-tard, fascist, anarchist, communist, and traitor.  Even worse, they attack other people’s families, including their children.

2. Listen respectfully: What is the idea that the other person is espousing?  What do you really disagree with?  Is there anything good that you can find and agree with?  Why do you disagree with that part?  Listen without interruption. Ask questions for clarification.  There is nothing more disarming than allowing someone to feel heard.

3. Shooting at the straw man: It’s hard to listen. Sometimes, it’s hard to analyze what others are saying and pull it apart to understand exactly what it is you disagree with and why.  It’s easier to have a library of counterarguments you read somewhere and to force-fit what someone is saying into a box that allows you to pull out one of those sound-tracks.  It allows you to avoid doing the hard work of being in a conversation. Choose to do the work.

4. Smuggler’s blues: “Have you stopped beating your spouse yet?”  There is no correct answer to such a question. It smuggles the premise that you beat your spouse, which, presumably, you don’t. There are a million variations on this.  Often, premise-smuggling is subtly implied.  One of the oldest sounds like this: “All immigrants are dirty, parasitic criminals, therefore we should stop immigration to protect ourselves and our families.”

5. Appeal to popular opinion: “Everybody knows…” or “people are saying…” are phrases to avoid justifying a position. We all want to be accepted, therefore we tend to do what everyone else is doing. Tribalism is in our genes. Just filter out such phrases and see these statements for what they are, unsupported statements.

6. Real facts matter:  Yelling and repeating assertions does not transform them into facts.  Similarly, citing one screwball or completely biased source, in the face of dozens or even hundreds of studies, does not make something true. Without truth, there can no rational discussion.  

How do we fight those who fight unfairly?

Unfortunately, cheating sometimes works, particularly in the short run. Is the only solution to fight fire with fire—cheat and lie yourself? Once you do this, you support the underlying premise that playing fair is not a requirement. You justify the opposition’s tactics, and to a degree, that their cheating and lies are on equal moral footing as yours. This is a losing tactic.  What can you do?

1. Call them out on cheating: If someone cheats, calmly point it out at the first opportunity.  If you allow people to cut across your property long enough without stopping them, you may unintentionally create a public-access easement to your property. Similarly, if you let people cheat long enough, you become complicit with the cheating. It is said that lying is a tacit agreement between the liar and the lied to; the lied-to must agree to be lied to for the lie to work. The same goes for cheating.  

How do you call out a cheater? It depends on the context and the audience. In the field of politics, you have a wide variety of education levels. Pointing out that someone is committing an ad-hominem fallacy will almost certainly cause everyone’s eyes to glaze over except for those trained in logic and rhetoric. Decrying, “Liar, liar, pants on fire” or “cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater” is probably not the right answer either. What reasonable strategy lies between these two extremes that has some chance of working?

The best strategy is to shine a light on cheating and ask someone if their position is so weak that cheating is the way to make their argument. Invite them to reconstruct their argument and show openness to a non-cheating discussion. Maybe even help them reconstruct their argument. We must not normalize cheating.

2. Don’t unintentionally amplify lies: Restating a lie, even if only to refute it, amplifies the lie. The more people hear a lie, the more truthful and normal it sounds. If someone claims widespread voting fraud tainted an election result, the response must be simply that all evidence points to the fact that we had the safest and most trustworthy election in history.  This applies to the news and social media as well.

3. Defend truth-sayers: Cheaters attack truth-sayers—fact-based journalism outlets, law-enforcement agencies, and intelligence agencies. Cheaters claim to have secret knowledge or intuition that somehow overrules logic, reason, and evidence. This is the mark of cultism. We must rabidly defend truth-saying institutions. Amplify them by: (1) spreading their truths as widely as possible, (2) explaining the principles to which they adhere in developing truthful statements (e.g., three independent sources), and (3) touting the long-history of integrity these institutions have earned.

Embrace diversity of thinking

As a society, we must embrace diversity of thinking because the essence of truth derives from the crucible of debate.  To get there, we need to adhere to a simple playground rule.  Let’s making cheating wrong again.