By Andy Valencia
Imagine you’re in an argument – you, your opponent, and some people listening. Your audience is nodding their heads when your opponent speaks; they’re expressionless when it’s your turn, and you’ve already used all of your best material. The honorable person will graciously acknowledge their defeat. What do the other kind of people do?
One of the most demanding military arts is the “fighting retreat.” You’re backing away from the conflict, but if you just turn tail and run, your back makes a dandy target. The military have a whole operational art on how to cover a retreat so that the force is as intact as possible afterwards.
Retreating from an argument has its own collection of techniques. When successfully played, your audience will barely realize that the argument is over. For actual military operations, the basic approach is to have some of your people provide covering fire while others leapfrog backward, then take their turn providing the covering fire. For arguments, the three best ways to retreat are: distract, distract, and distract.
Back when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I read a newsgroup about local transportation. As a daily Caltrain rider, I had become quite knowledgeable on which local politicians helped or hindered the service. Heading home one evening, I stepped off the train to see that a politician I recognized had set up at the station and was glad-handing the public as they stepped off the train.
She was declaring her unstinting support for all things Caltrain, and hoped all riders would support her re-election. I listened for a bit in puzzlement, finally asking her why – if this was so – she had consistently voted against system improvements and more trains?
She went off her stride for just an eyeblink, then waved her hand with a smile and declared that I didn’t know what I was talking about. I named the latest council meeting, and the specific bill she had fought against. She suddenly stepped right up to me, her face close to mine, and hissed with a poisonous, furious, hateful intensity:
“Why don’t you just get out of here?”
She then stepped back, a politician’s smile back on her face to continue with the crowd. Myself, then just a naive little tech bro, and shaken by my first exposure to evil people and their evil tricks, walked home without saying anything else. She was on the losing end of the argument, but she still prevailed.
My introduction to the dark arts.
The first great way to distract from losing an argument is “bike shedding.” When you’ve lost the big-picture argument, turn it into a bog of minutiae. A quick look across recent news articles shows one claiming the United States debt is not a problem because a key threshold is for debt to reach 100% of gross domestic product, and we are only at 97%. Getting your opponent to argue about the last 3% takes attention from the reality of how close you are to that disastrous threshold. If you can’t convince them, fog them with details until they lose interest.
Here’s another way to distract rather than lose the argument – start throwing in irrelevancies. One article, avoiding the topic of whether our $35 trillion in debt is dangerous, noted that China’s debt problem is nearly as bad as our own. While misery loves company, our problems are neither better nor worse because of some other country’s problems. But inserting China in the conversation draws eyes away from the US problem.
Another example is a developer in Las Vegas who wanted to build an enormous new lake. When challenged that Las Vegas was short of water, he noted that – per acre – golf courses use even more water than lakes. It’s true, and yet it avoids the fact that neither is a good idea in a water-constrained region.
Bike shedding requires that you have a mastery of the subject matter. If you’re defending a losing position without even understanding it that well, you may not have the details needed to drive the argument into tedious detail. It can be flustering to be losing an argument, and you might not be able to think up a suitable irrelevancy on the spot. But there’s one simple way to end an argument that requires neither knowledge nor mental dexterity.
It’s the ad hominem attack. You can’t defeat your opponent’s arguments, so attack the opponent themselves. Insult them. In my own childhood, “Your mother wears army boots!” was the go-to insult. In modern times, you can accuse them of being a member of a certain political party that held sway in Germany in the 1940s. One famous interview was derailed when the subject moved his chair away from the interviewer, asking if the other guests had noticed his bad breath? To insult them while also terminating the argument, simply shake your head sadly and state that they’re not intelligent enough for this conversation to continue, then walk away.
I hope you won’t use any of these techniques. However, when you see them used, you can be pretty sure that it’s a dishonest person covering a weak argument. If the argument was in favor of something you currently support, at least consider the possibility that you might need to change your mind.
