I can only operate on what my senses have revealed to me and knowledge I can encounter. This is my truth. I cannot see your truth because I do not share your mind, your experiences, etc. My truth and your truth likely overlap in many places through shared experiences, shared knowledge, etc. With that said my truth is unique to me. The things that are not different are those things we call facts. In actuality that is one of the distinguishing traits between truth and fact. A fact is something immutable and consistent. Truth on the other hand can only be subjective. I can know no other truth than my own. You can share knowledge and challenge my truth and if I am receptive and listen you will never make my truth identical to yours. You will however make my truth change. One thing that is an aspect of this is known as learning.
If you pay attention as you are debating with someone that has a different perception of something than you it is possible you may notice some of the things I have become aware of. First. People have been conditioned to think being wrong is a bad thing. They seem to view it as failure on their part. For this reason they absolutely do not want to be wrong. Second. People will seek reasons to dismiss you and what you say. I call this seeking the mental escape hatch so they can then toss what you are saying into their mental spam filters. I wanted to train of thought write this post about these two things. To me they are important to be aware of and they seem to be quite prevalent in the global society of today.
Being Wrong Does Not Feel Good
People have been conditioned that being wrong is a bad thing. I've on more than one occasion encountered people who insist they are never, or rarely wrong. They wear this almost like it is some kind of badge of honor. I've also encountered a lot of people that don't say this yet their actions imply they think this. They tend to be those people who always can blame someone or something else. Things that go wrong for them in life are never their fault. There is always some other target on which to pin the blame. There is always one or more scapegoats that can take the blame. In some cases those targets may actually share part of the fault/blame. In other cases they may not be to blame at all. The key part was that this person could not be wrong. It could not be their fault.
Another manifestation of this is what we call Cognitive Dissonance where your mind will begin to spin and twist to avoid acknowledging something that challenges your truth. Instead of allowing your truth to breathe, grow, and change as new information is encountered you have armored your truth and you do not want it to change. Change can be frightening and if the world around us hasn't shown you... People seem to react in irrational ways to fear over almost any other emotion.
In reality being wrong is a good thing provided the thing you are wrong about isn't the same thing you've already been wrong about multiple times. Being wrong is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to learn. It is an opportunity for your truth to adapt and become closer to an overall (but unattainable) truth. The model of the world and reality will be more accurate than it was before. You first must acknowledge you were wrong and then learn. Your truth must not be rigid. It must not be fixed and absolute. It must adapt to new information. Sometimes that information can shatter the foundation upon which we have based many other things. This can be frightening and usually leads to something we refer to as a Paradigm Shift. This can truly suck for awhile and can be quite scary because it forces you to rethink many things and and ways you had of thinking about things. This can take some time and some serious effort and often people will fight doing this simply because they don't want to put in that effort. It is easier to embrace the cognitive dissonance that acts as your armor and pretend that information that revealed a flaw in your truth does not exist. You never saw it, you never heard it, and therefore it didn't happen. Whew!! Don't you feel better? You don't need to change anything you can keep talking as you always have. You can keep pushing your truth and mentally hope no one you choose to debate with ever points out that flaw or others again. You are right, you know it. Now you just need to make as many people as possible share your vision.
Stop and think for a minute about that. Your defenses engaged, and you didn't allow your truth to adapt. Yet you fully plan to debate with other people and keep pushing your flawed truth as though it has no flaw. You didn't adapt, change, and allow your truth to adjust to not have that flaw. That would take too much effort. Instead you continue to peddle the flawed truth to as many people as you can. That sounds like a mental virus carrier to me. I think you should stop doing it. What do you think?
The Ways and Means of Dismissal
This brings me to the second point. The seeking of mental escape hatches. This is a technique I notice many (I'd even hazard most) people do. They seek reasons to discount someone that is challenging their truth, or perhaps just some topic. Recall I've already addressed people not wanting to be wrong. It is good to put up a good defense. It is the ideas that survive the defense that can be important. However, what techniques do you use and do they actually allow for the truth? You see debates generally speaking do not have to be an ALL OR NOTHING type of exchange. You can be partially right, and partially wrong at the same time. It isn't a COMPLETELY WRONG or COMPLETELY RIGHT type of situation except in rare occasions. Those partially wrong areas are opportunities to learn and grow. They should be viewed as a good thing rather than a bad thing. They also are more of a VICTORY than a loss.
If you were wrong and learned something to me that sounds like a victory. What about the person who is never wrong and thus really never learns anything new? That sounds like a very sad state of being. I'd call that a loss.
With that said I've noticed a lot of very intelligent people seem to use what I'd call an escape hatch technique. They look for quick excuses to mentally discount what you are talking about. Sometimes they are not particularly intelligent people but they have been conditioned to seek out words and phrases that then can justify them engaging their mental spam filters. Perhaps for example you used their wrong pronoun. At that point they fixate on that and they either choose to ignore everything else you said or they are just so mentally enraged by your disrespect that they fail to pay attention to the rest while their mind is raging internally about how wrong your mis-pronouning them was.
This is not the only way. Perhaps someone shares an Infowars article with you or one that mentions Alex Jones. You may decide you don't even need to read it because it is Alex Jones who you have been conditioned to view as a "conspiracy nut", "domestic terrorist", "white supremacist", or some other label. You can ignore everything.
Remember above I said it is not an ALL OR NOTHING situation in most cases. You can read or watch something from any source without having to believe it is completely wrong, or completely right. You can read an article from someone you despise or think is crazy and still find grains of truth you may have been unaware of. You don't have to believe everything you read, see, or hear. In fact doing so is a very dangerous and naïve way to approach life.
Looking for reasons to discount something without actually looking at what was presented is not a very good way to do things. I have a huge pet peeve against the term TLDR. Sometimes something may be too long or too much for you to devote the time to at that time. This is one of the few good reasons not to engage. Yet you don't need to tell someone about the fact. It is even worse when someone says TLDR but carries on a conversation anyway.
This was my typical train of thought post. If I lost you at any point. My apologies. This is simply how my mind works.
EDIT: Those two Lysander Spooner quotes when considered together lead to some interesting corners of the mind. At least they do in my case.