Can we really still debate if no one can be wrong?

I can think of one reason why apathy thrives in democratic spaces: often it is the enlightened, ironically, who is convinced that ignorance is bliss. In many democratic societies that adhere to the values of free speech and free debate, there is a misguided belief that grading ideas is undemocratic. Ideas are not equal. They span the whole spectrum from the valid to the absurd, from the benign to the downright dangerous. But somehow it is considered politically incorrect to regard one idea as superior (or inferior) to another. 

     So how else can dialogue achieve anything meaningful except for valid to overcome farce? One of the tragedies of modern dialogue is the discarding of the universal truth standard. Truth is coerced to concede  that its antithesis is not falsity but alternative truth. To hold two kinds of truth is not the anomaly itself, but the insistence that at the end of the day you don’t have to choose between these two. For debate to resolve anything, the disinterested listener must make a choice which truth to believe. He cannot demur from making a choice  as being the proper way to observe neutrality. 

    When  all is said and done, debate does not aim to achieve neutrality. Debate aims to persuade opposition to yield its position. If it doesn’t achieve this goal, debate did not fail--only persuasion did. But when both sides of a debate agree to respect each other and to leave each other unchanged in the end, they launched their effort to persuade fully accepting the  ultimate futility of the exercise. Then each one ponders the question, why did we debate at all in the first place? 

    Human philosophy grew because the thinkers of antiquity recognized that ideas must either flourish or perish. You are either wrong and your antagonist right, or vice versa, but you can neither be both wrong or both right. It is naive to think otherwise, but the tragic thing is that this naivete can be so arrogant. It can insist that anybody claiming to be right is evil in the eyes of one who is wrong but who has the right to be wrong. Permit an idea so weak it could not defend itself against the onslaught of reason to stand in the court of true debate and you grant it the convenient excuse not to engage. You validate the pointless modern political school of thought that truth and error can coexist.

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON