The future and past

Debate involves the mind-god-trick of self evident goals. Debate operates under a myth involving the effects of personal reward and direct investment with an end we can see. The operation of the ballot is mechanical and absolute: win or loss, with minor gradations of speaker points. The incentive, because of the clarity, (moral – win good, loss bad; normative – what should be done inscribed with similar starkness) produces its own peculiar motivations for action, and means for thinking of the world. More than anything, recently, debate has struck me as egocentric, obscuring the ends for which it operates. The question becomes for me, whether the habituated structure of engagement of debating for a ballot overflows its original container, and spills into other forms of political engagement, whereby the expectation and structure of change must be as clear for me to be motivated to act. The normative function seems relevant too: if an argument appears to be true, is supported by a weight of evidence, someone ‘wins’ (in their ability to convince or effectuate change), how do these things determine how I act? Does debate structure my relationship to the world in an axiomatic sense? That is the loss I face: the loss of self-evident goals and means.

Thus I willed it: I also face options on how to perceive/define the past. Should I view my past investments with debate as less-valuable for the fact that they did not produce an end I feel satisfied with? What value/feeling should I feel towards them, for the appearance of futility now?

The past is the mirror image of the challenge I feel to treat the present with the worth and weight of a lived life, rather than a means to an end.

Duncan