To say this effectively, I need to talk in either abstracts, or fractured pieces. There's no easy way to explain the specific line of reasoning without defining it completely or breaking it down. We just don't have the words, but we're getting there.
Still, the nature of words, especially words that represent abstractions, is variable dependent on the receiver. Therefore it is imperative that our abstracts mean the same thing. This means I have the responsibility of aiming accurately - I will try not to stray off on wild hypotheses or tangents, but my nature is to match patterns easily and verify them later, so I will certainly err. Therefore you have the responsibility of pointing out when, from your perspective, the arrow strays from its course. If I make a connection you don't see, please say so. I will try to explain it so that we can work more efficiently in the abstract. If I am unable to do so, it means I do not have the fundamental understanding to support that hypothesis. That is also extremely useful to know, I think.
Where do I begin
The beginning seems like a safe bet. All the archetypal stories begin at the beginning.
But this story has two beginnings.
One is in reality, and one is in me.
I'll be selfish and start with my beginning, since many of my abstractions are derived from my experiences - so to give you the abstraction I must give you the pieces, and vice versa.
After college (and before, and during) I was something like a leaf on the wind, and not in any romantic or pleasant sense. Leaves on the wind are dead leaves, after all. I mean that I was buffeted around, driven by forces and interactions that I could not understand, but were inherently tied to my shape and nature, just as a leaf's path to the ground is determined by its drag and mass, which are determined by its shape, and only manifest as fluttering, falling, when combined with gravity and wind. Like the leaf, I did not understand my nature, much less that of the forces which seemed to act upon me, though I knew they were somehow a part of me. Like the leaf, because I could not understand the forces driving me, I could not aim at a specific mark on the ground and say "I will fall there". So, like the leaf, I was buffeted by the winds of chaos and incoming experience, driven only by my existing nature and the inevitable pull of gravity - for humans, I believe the inevitable direction is the maintenance of existence - primary physical needs, leading to inevitable death - and like falling leaves, this force manifests no matter the shape or size of the leaf. It is absolute. Still, altering the direction of the fall, the path it takes, can be accomplished with sufficient understanding and time. Take, for example, the leaf-like helicopter structures exhibited by diverse tree species including Ash, Maple, and Olive. Before the emergence of structures like these, seeds were entirely bound by gravity. They fell close to the parent, eventually crowding the area and crowding the elders out. But at some point, a mistake was made - a seed in a leaf. And the offspring of the tree with a seed in a leaf spread far and wide, and did not choke out each others light. The error was a boon, for it was the combination of two insufficient parts to make something more.
I like debate, ideas, and argument. I play devil's advocate a lot more than I should, and I'm often quite arrogant - I believe firmly in my own ability to reason in abstracts, though in my actual interactions with the world I act in ways quite contrary to the principles I believe in.
Debate, as a discipline, forces its adherents to soak up all available information that could even remotely be applied to a given subject, then form concrete, defensible arguments on both sides of the question.
In any given round, the knowledge of which side you will be representing and who your opponent will be is kept secret (and often unknown, since tournaments become seriously disorganized and require time & effort from the organizers to figure it out) - until the very last moment. When the postings for the next round go up, that means it's time to GO THERE NOW and when everyone arrives it's time to FIIIIIGHT.
Okay, so what that means is that debate plays out far less as it's perceived in media and movies - as two brilliant brilliances of smart-alecness battling with witticisms. Nah fam. Debate plays out exactly like chess.
So, bear with me (hahaha literally 'trust in the initial direction I set, and help me maintain it, such a great idiom')
because we're going on a tangent about chess.
Chess has rules. Every action, by nature of the combinatorial complexity, has a counter, and no action is reversible.
To understand the rules is to be able to make a move that does not immediately get you disqualified, or force you to rescind the action (if the opponent is generous)
To be able to play chess is to be able to decide on a specific action given the current situation.
To play well is to know that no action is isolated. A move which gains you a piece advantage is worth nothing if it leaves your queen vulnerable, or prevents you from using certain strategies later in the game. For if the opponent understands this, they will use the strategy which can only be countered by the strategies you have prevented yourself from using, and they will certainly lose.
Thus each chess game must be seen as a line. Each action has a reaction, and from each reaction the set of possible winning moves for both players grows smaller, the direction of the game becomes narrower and more clear.
But no chess game is in isolation. At minimum, it is the intersection of all the experience and theory created by each of the individuals sitting across from one another, both during the game and before. But chess has a time limit - a move must be made. One cannot spend endless time calculating all the potential results of a given move. They must know, or gamble. If they know, it may be because they are a genius of the highest caliber, able to calculate future divergences with absolute precision given any game state in isolation. And certainly there are some humans who can do extraordinary things like this, but even they rest on literal thousands of years of combined wisdom of past players and theorists - those whose strategies wounded enough egos to force dignified old chess whizzes to puzzle out counter-strategies, and those who wrote down as much as they could, first to selfishly store extra data for themselves, then to share with others to make the game more interesting. The game gained a dimension again.
First, seeing nothing but chaos.
Then, the ability to determine if a single move as allowed or not, possible or impossible, true or false
Then, with understanding of how the abstract rules function in concrete motion, one gains the ability to see that even if a move is allowed, it might still be false, given the proposition "This move will help me win this game" and the fact that your opponent can react to it.
Then the ability to see that this move within this game is just an isolated instance on a greater curve, defining the direction of Chess as a whole right here and now, distinctly and differently from every other place and time and pair of opponents.
So chess is not a line, but a curve, defined at discrete points by individual lines.
No matter how far it goes, there is no certain strategy. It's a continual stalemate, driven by self-interested desire for victory. But, like every natural curve, it bears this way and that, but the curve as a whole progresses ceaselessly in a single direction. We cannot completely understand the true purpose of "The Game Of Chess" in all its forms in all its games - the time and thought that has gone into its current state is utterly beyond the individual human's understanding. Still, we can abstract from the pieces - the individual games and theories and books - that we've experienced or understood. From this, the purpose of Chess, the abstraction of Chess, and to some degree, every game and thought devoted to that abstraction, becomes clear, even if it variant and incomprehensible - utter chaos - at the smaller scale.
The way we win Chess, the abstraction of Chess, is to play the most interesting stalemate. That is, the abstraction moves as a whole to higher information density. The entire set of all chess players is continuously and methodically, through their own inherent polarity in desiring a single goal (victory) - mapping the entire infinite set of possible combinations of chess games Over Space and Time in the hopes of producing a formula, or a Combination of All those Games that, given game state X, can always produce a Y that leads to victory, or at least an interesting stalemate.
Chess is a perfect analogy for debate, and for the point I am trying to make about the universe at large, because its nature is the combination of so many intersecting truths. It is much easier to show the other intersections when starting with such a strong foundation.
Debate is chess with words. There are rules.
There are two time limits - the obvious one is the speech - you only have so much time to lay out your pieces and move them.
The less obvious is Prep - a limit specified by the tournament on how much uninterrupted time you get to structure your arguments between speeches. Prep is interesting - it's a total timer, and it cannot be regained. Therefore using it strategically is paramount. At the same time, using prep time gives your opponent the same resource. You have an inherent advantage, given that the person who decides whether to use prep is the one who speaks next, but they still get the time to think.
This puts the focus of debate even more strongly on the higher dimension - the curve of all possibilities - since there is significant limitation to time within the round. So, when one structures a debate argument, or two debate arguments (since the player must be able to play, and win, on either AFF or NEG, they are uncertain which is more important and thus must build both) it is always expedient to then attack that argument from every conceivable angle, write those arguments down for use later on the opposing side, then break apart and rebuild the case from what held strong.
Continuously doing this on the individual level (each individual producing two cases of their own), the team level (teams share fundamental building blocks, strategies, general information and evidence), the competition level (separate teams play self interested games in order to win, and some things work and some things don't, so that information is incorporated by the individual (and their team) into a greater understanding of the potential spectrum of incoming contradictions, which the team busily figures out ways to contradict in turn, each working out of a combination of self-interested desire to win more and altruistic desire for the team to win more)
Lincoln Douglas debate is focused entirely on Ethical questions, or higher-order abstractions. It poses its questions in the abstract, and generally the debaters must argue simultaneously at the abstract and the concrete to prove their points. But in this form, it is the abstraction that carries more weight.
Policy debate is focused on Active Decisions - The US Government should do "Some thing", the thing is definitely a feasible action in reality, but is defined broadly enough to allow significant specification, so it is in a sense, an argument that exists in the space defined by the intersection between an ethical decision of Should and a physical decision of Can. Since all of the things in Should that matter fall into Can anyway (that is, there is no point saying we Should all ride flying pink unicorns over candy rainbows, since it does not fall into the subset of Can) I believe policy debate frames reality more... realistically, than Lincoln Douglas. It's all well and good to talk about perfect love and compassion, and it's all well and good to talk about cold hard utilitarian pragmatism, but each one, applied to every situation, has gaps, inconsistencies. Each defines points not on the line. It's only when ideas and abstractions collide with concrete action, and predicted reaction, that they become anything like a simulacrum of reality.
Policy does precisely this. It gives the state of reality X, the propositional function F, and the goal Y is inherent to the phrasing - should.
The argument can happen at all of these structural levels simultaneously or independently, because, as with our conversation now, it is important to ensure that these abstracts are accurately defined between all parties before higher-order conversation can emerge. If there are proven errors at any level of the hierarchy of abstraction, the whole thing will be flawed. It might be otherwise entirely accurate, but one FALSE in any level of the abstracted binary tree joined by AND gates flips the whole thing to FALSE.
The argument is broken down, roughly, into
Defining the state of reality as clearly as possible (and preferably very quickly, as there is a time limit and much to say)
Specifying the proposition to a single, discrete action (implicitly, the passage of some law) which falls within the broad propositional space of F
Predicting, from history (verified collective experience) abstracted into fundamental principles, the effects of the action
Claiming, from philosophy (verified Abstractions) that the effects of the action will be, in some way, good.
The opponent then attacks this at any level they desire. They might propose that your depiction of reality is horribly flawed, and to put forth such a proposal without complete information is, by its nature, detrimental to the species, or to some other ideal related to the importance of dialogue, or to the discipline of debate as a whole.
They might say that the action specified does not fall within the terms of the propositional space. It's outside the rules of the round, and thus should be disqualified.
For example, "The US Should significantly increase it's civilian and/or military presence beyond the earth's mesosphere (or something)" many many many rounds were spent arguing over the exact threshold of Significantly.
One can claim the predictions drawn from history, or the principles that underly those predictions, or the opponent's entire perception of history is fundamentally flawed. If they can't understand why things happened then, knowing the result, what chance have they of understanding what will happen now, with only the present to go on?
And one can claim that the opponent's entire lens of Good is fundamentally flawed.
That is, you are striving for "Good" in some way, but because you have failed to define good entirely, presuming that particular abstract is universal, unchanging, absolute, and presuming that you, in your arrogance, have defined it properly and know how to carry it out.
By doing this you have already broken one of the fundamental components of good - you have lied, knowingly or not. Not only have you told a partial truth (at best), you have been unwilling or unable to fix the obvious flaws in it.
So judge, take MYYYYY definition of good instead, which conveniently frames the round so that I am the hero of speech and honor and truth, and this peasant with his materialist, pragmatic, utilitarian proposition is but a fool, a liar, a snake! He is the true evil!
What this means, and god it's the point of this whole tangent (interesting and productive though it has been) is that moral frameworks, perspectives, and lenses become just as much the subject of dispute as any other factor in the debateosphere. It is necessary to read and understand an incredible variety of philosophical-leaving work, then build from it arguments and counter-arguments for every conceivable position. The game keeps getting more complex, and debaters (sneaky lot that they are) are basically allowed to argue anything, up to and INCLUDING the actual rules of the game. So weird, ridiculous, stupid-as-fuck philosophical arguments can actually win, because if you fuck up and fail to address them, that one error, if the opponent can maintain it and expand upon it, flaws your entire case permanently.
So I spent, out of necessity, a lot of time trying to push my skull through the works of many of the more... unconventional philosophers. Because the crazy ones are the useful ones - they're the ones nobody has ever taken time to argue against effectively, so they're the most useful to learn about and the most useful to prepare against - then you will be less likely to be caught off guard.
The fundamental framework debate is, in my mind, a tug of war between Utilitarianism and the Categorical Imperative. Util is pretty straightforward. It posits (depending on the formulator) that life sucks and everyone knows it. There's stuff that makes life suck less - it reduces total suffering. We should do that. The usual argument against util is the combination of some other framework (like Kant's rights-based stuff), and the idea that boiling down the entire span of morality to a single imaginary currency (the util) is stupid.
Kant's categorical imperative says for an action to be considered RIght or Good, one must be able to abstract the action from the circumstances and apply it as a universal principle. So if telling the truth is good, you must be able to abstract it as a principle and apply it universally. Always tell the truth. But this is also the fundamental flaw in the framework.
No set of circumstances is precisely the same, no one action is always the perfect choice in a given situation. The classic counterexample is the axe-murderer at the door. An axe murderer shows up at your door and asks where your kids are. He states clearly that he just wants to kill them, and then he'll be on his murderous merry way.
According to a strict interpretation of the categorical imperative, you are not allowed to lie to this man. Violating the general principle of honesty is of a higher order-of-magnitude than protecting your children. This is obviously dumb, so out with the categorical imperative!
I like a specific variation of this example:
You are at home and hear someone at the door. You open it and find a young child, not 10, dirty, bruised, and terrified. The child says "Will you hide me please?" You say yes, and bring the child inside.
Sometime later, a loud knock.
You open the door, and the axe murderer stands before you. He says "I've come looking for a young child, not 10, dirty, bruised and terrified. I was preparing to torture him when he escaped. Now I am angry, but I cannot let him live. Therefore, if you tell me where he is, I will not harm you and I will kill the child swiftly. If he is here, and you do not tell me, I will find him, I will torture and kill you, and I will torture and kill the boy"
Now, that's a can of fuckin snakes, eh?
You've got the promise to hide the child, breaking it falls into the scope of Falsehood
You've got the choice (to some extent) whether the child gets tortured (more suffering) or killed swiftly
Built into that choice comes the consequence that you will either live unharmed, or be tortured as well - more than doubling the suffering.
There's suffering no matter what you do. There's torture no matter what you do. You lie no matter what you do. So what do you do?
Either you lie, and hide in fear in the house hoping you have deceived him - unlikely, and quite possible he'll become so frustrated, so angry, that he'll later decide to kill you regardless, and the net suffering will be vastly more
Or you tell him the truth, and have the child's blood on your hands, along with painful shards of the shattered promise.
But that's the thing - the axe murderer has given you the rules of the game. You can tell him where the boy is or not. Certainly, it's true, no matter what you do, your action will fall into one of these categories. But the situation is not a point, not just a yes/no question, and to boil human experience down to this is foolish.
What happens in such a situation in reality? When a human being is backed into a corner, every way leads to death, every choice leads to pain?
Either they give up lose the will to choose at all, and wait to be destroyed by time (or expedite the process somewhat in various creative ways)
Or they lose their shit, go absolutely curb-stomping hair-pulling flesh-biting arm-ripping fucking mental, and jump straight at the murderer with every fiber of their existence, gambling everything on the idea that the rules as they've been explained to you are false, that because none of them lead out, the rules themselves are the problem and must be overcome. One rule is "he has an axe, and therefore I am subordinate". When a human being turns into a whirling frenzy of genuinely righteous protective rage, an axe might as well be a twig, and a bullet (unless it PHYSICALLY prevents movement, will be as effective as a mosquito bite).
That, that right there, is the truth, and it's what made this whole idea coalesce for me. Out of two seemingly irreconcilable opposing forces emerges greater truth.
The greater truth from the debate between util and the categorical imperative is something I've been seeking for a long time. Jordan Peterson put his finger on it (and on a whoooole bunch of other shit), and from that the spark was born.
He's a canadian Psychologist and professor, and he's been gaining a lot of flak (And very, very significant, well-deserved fame) for having the gall to suggest that Ontario might want to think twice before establishing a system of Extrajudicial Social Justice Courts and designating the refusal to refer to an individual by their specified pronoun as a hate crime - a punishable criminal offense. He made a couple longish videos saying "Hey hey whoa whoa science talking, this is fucking bullshit and also basically a precise repeat of the early stages of soviet revolution - you know, that thing where tens of millions of innocent people died in work camps in siberia because their friends turned them in for petty offenses, and then the whole system of people thinking they understood how to rule a government better than HISTORY ITSELF managed to destroy thousands of years of priceless culture in order to establish a failing regime that couldn't even perform its one specified goal - the redistribution of GRAIN!? Seems a little similar."
I, like many, caught wind of him after this (I believe I saw the first video on this topic about a week after he posted it) and immediately became super-duper interested, since the science he touted was interesting and seemed valid, and his speaking/writing/thinking style is very neat. So I watched his "Metaphysics Maps of Meaning" lectures (he's been putting all his classroom lectures online for years, smart) and while they started off kinda fuzzy - like "oh this is just gonna be one of those professors who talks in purely hypothetical ultra-abstract bullshit" - but with a little time I've come to seriously respect the guy's opinion, and to see What He's Doing as something truly admirable - even if I didn't have the solid understanding of why. He delves deep (quite deep) into analysis of symbolism, starting with a MANY class section on Pinocchio, then moving into religious (modern and ancient) imagery.
The position he's taken in the public debate, boiled down to a single statement, is a direct and unconditional refutation of the postmodernist claim that truth is purely subjective, and to the extent that it does exist, it is because people with power define truth so that they can use it as a means to gain and maintain power.
His position is that yes, there are infinite statements that are propositionally possible, infinite value frameworks that could potentially be true, infinite possible actions within each of those value frameworks, but those actions are absolutely not equally valid or valuable, and to posit otherwise is to undermine the fundamental truth that truth exists and is worthwhile.
He couches this statement in a few places, but for him it's necessary top-down or "psychology outward". He shows deep metaphorical symbolism in various religions, and posits that these symbols become guiding principles for societies. His primary focus is on the Order/Chaos dichotomy, and giving people a way of framing existence within that dichotomy - setting out the rules and stakes of this game of life that we're already playing - in a way that motivates action.
Existence is essentially pain. There's pleasure, too, but we know pain is universal, so it's far, far more real. Also, things fall apart, always, and we cannot prevent it. We fall apart, and this causes us physical pain, but it also causes us existential pain.
So pain is real, and pain is inevitable. So reducing suffering is a moral good, this is true. Minimizing suffering is, by extension, the highest moral good. Utilitarian so far
But it is not a complete truth. One cannot simply reduce suffering here, now, for oneself, because one is not simply an individual. Human beings are part of a society, and that society's existence reduces more suffering for each individual than they could possibly reduce by themselves. In modernity, that means the reason we even get to contemplate reducing suffering, organizing ourselves differently, distributing funds more equally, whatever - is because the society we already live in has functioned well enough so far that we haven't all died. So there might be some value in the things that make up that society. What makes up that society, in the west? A liberal somewhere shouts "RIGHTS!!!"
Well, Peterson says FALSE! Rights ain't shit! Rights are absolutely meaningless unless combined with equal and opposite RESPONSIBILITY
Responsibility means SACRIFICE. It means sacrificing the set of all actions that conflict with another's RIGHTS! Therefore, says Peterson, the foundation of our (judeo-christian-rooted) society is sacrifice. By pulling up the whole plant and saying "Everything is all about power, a lie imposed by the ruling elite to keep us in check, so it doesn't matter what we do, tradition is just the patriarchy expressing itself, religion is just utter bullshit, let's scrap it all for FALGSC!!"
And Peterson says whoa whoa whoa hold on a minute. The most successful societies have deep roots in traditions that emphasize putting the whole over the one, while maintaining the 'divine sovereignty' of the individual. If we start to pull on those strings, we might be asking for trouble.
He posits, then, that Christianity has, for a long long time, been something like the cultural DNA of western society - the thing which determines its structure from fundamental principles. He claims the bible, especially the Origin Story and the Christ Story, contain a crucial archetypal truth about how we should exist in the world.
And he defines truth as such:
Chaos is permanent and inevitable
Human beings experience pain when exposed to chaos
Pain is universal, and universally disliked, so reducing pain is the highest moral good
Actions have consequences
We can imagine actions that are not physically possible
A principle defines a set of actions that are guaranteed to result in reduced net pain
Therefore, for a principle to be good, it must reduce suffering, in actual practice, for the individual, for all people connected to the individual, for all people connected to them, here and now and in the future.
His principle is sacrifice.
But what he's done, at least in my mind, is finally defined Good and Principles in ways that make sense.