Why Do I Argue?

I have taken time to explain. Why do I argue?

Today’s post is about: why do I argue? I have been a big fan of arguments. I don’t like to get into them, but I love to observe. I find argument to be one of the most interesting things that humans do.

It is not a very profound idea, but it’s something that I have understood by talking with people around me and reflecting on them. So, if you find your ideas in it, it’s probably yours. I am just a medium through which this thought is coming in this blog.

I’m really fascinated by this topic, and I thought I should write a post about it to share my thoughts with the world and, most importantly, with my students. As an educator, I find arguments to be the most underrated method of teaching and learning. And our school systems have not helped or encouraged us to argue. So I would like to put some positive light over this word “argument” and encourage people to have more fruitful and interesting arguments.

The Misunderstood Word

As I previously said, the word “argument” has been very negatively portrayed in our society, and most often, we discourage people from having arguments because arguments often take a very not-so-good turn and end up becoming a fight. It happens mostly because of the limitation of the vocabulary of people, which in turn ends up becoming a very foul confrontation.

Why Do I Argue?

The answer has multiple reasons. All the reasons are equally important, but here through this blog post, I would like to give emphasis to one reason which has been bothering me for a while. I have encountered this reason very frequently these days.

I argue to unpack oversimplified thoughts, to build a thought, or to find the beauty of the complexity of a thought—how our thoughts are interconnected.

The Trap of Oversimplification

This is a new kind of pandemic, which is spreading very fast and very easily through our social media sites and applications. As more and more people have stopped reading books and do not consume knowledge and information through slower mediums like reading and writing, and rely more on visual and auditory mediums to gain knowledge, people often fall into the trap of oversimplification.

There is no harm in understanding any idea or thought in simpler language or a simpler medium, but I have seen that rather than understanding, we misunderstand a lot of things and fall into the trap of simplified ignorance.

As social media is decreasing our attention span and putting us in the trap of overconsumption of information through visual mediums, people have become prone to such misunderstandings. And society has become more prone to impatient behaviour. On top of it, the quick-commerce applications have further decreased our level of patience as we want things to be consumed faster and with minimum effort.

A Loss of Patience, a Rise in Conflict

There is no harm in minimizing the effort, but I believe this is making people, society, and country more impatient. Patience is lost. No idea, however profound it may be, will ever be understood by anyone if people don’t understand you. The conflict keeps rising, and you won’t be able to find harmony around you. And if there is no harmony around you, there is no satisfaction, and if you are not satisfied, you keep looking for more and stop seeing beauty in things that are already with you.

I think that is what is called depression.

Not seeing beauty in day-to-day life, not seeing happiness around you will not make society better.

There Is No Simple Knowledge

There is nothing called simple knowledge or simple information. The only thing simple is your ignorance and laziness, which do not let you see the beauty in complexity. To understand complexity, you need to use your brain’s analytical and logical side, which requires time and energy to process.

Our body does not help us in that either because anything that requires time and energy—our body simplifies that. And rather than putting your thoughts into complex thinking, it shifts to another side of the brain where you creatively bypass the entire complexity of the thought and come to an understanding that there must be a higher power or find a shortcut to misunderstand it completely with the closest clue in your head.

The reason for that is the law of conservation of energy. Even our body does that. Even our brain does that. I believe that is the place where a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance take birth in you.

A Word on Belief and Skepticism

Again, this is my understanding of things. Everyone’s experience would be different, but I find this to be a prevalent fact around me.

I don’t have anything against the higher power that we call God to simplify things in our head, but on the path of knowledge, it’s really important to be very critical about these thoughts.

Socrates often engaged in longer arguments to find knowledge and often took people through argument to the source of knowledge. The Socratic method of teaching was very criticized in his contemporary time, which ended up in his death and made him paranoid throughout his life because of his skepticism.

But I believe a certain level of skepticism is important to operate in this world—and even more so in this time—because of information overload and the fog of facts around us.

Silence Over Dialogue

In recent times, we are seeing a lot of conflicts between countries, society, people, and even within individuals. And still, I see there is no dialogue about it in our society because it’s more convenient to find a therapist and talk to him or her in a room rather than confronting the conflict.

The conflict arises from the duality as well—of being right and wrong, good and bad. But we often misunderstand the purpose of an argument, which is to untangle thoughts and unpack them to be shared with each other. We often get lost in this falsehood of being right or wrong, which derails the entire purpose of an argument. One needs to be very mindful of that.

Learning from the Greats

Time and again, there have been many people in society who have uplifted people's thinking, and in recent times, I have found Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to be the most important people who have uplifted society—at least in this part of the world—through their words.

My admiration for them comes from the beauty of their language and the complexity of the ideas they expressed. Their language remains simple, yet the idea is profound.

I find them even more important because they were writing in the language in which they could best comprehend their thoughts. Both of them used Bengali, their mother tongue, to write most of their literature, which made it very easy for them to express their thoughts and ideas—even when they were writing in English, during a time when Johnsonian English was popular.

Writing in elaborate vocabulary and complex sentence structures, often employing classical rhetorical devices, was very prevalent. Yet both writers—especially Vivekananda—never equipped themselves with such language, because I feel when the idea is profound, the language becomes simpler, and it’s a responsibility to do that.

If the idea is simple, I have often seen people using complex language to share it.

With the growing use of ChatGPT and other AI tools to write things, it is becoming more complex to understand things that could be simply put in words.

Confrontation as a Tool

Have a way of confronting your own thoughts, people around you, society, and even countries. The only way to resolve the conflict is through better understanding of language and words—and the ability to share them.

I see fewer people reading these days. If more people read, they would have better words to express their thoughts and ideas, and to share them with others. If you have better mediums to do that, you wouldn’t find yourself in conflicts.

These days, I often see people using foul language because they don’t have the words to express the intensity of emotions that they feel. And often that intensity turns into a foul word. And if you use a foul word, the argument becomes a fight.

Final Thought

So, I believe better vocabulary, better understanding, better articulation of your own thoughts, ideas, and things that you know about can make your life a little more happy. Because sharing helps you grow and become a better person. If you share your thoughts and ideas with yourself in the language that you understand, you would be able to share it with the people around you. And if you’re able to share those ideas with the people around you, you would be able to share them with society. And if society is better, the country becomes better—and so on—the world becomes a better place to live.

And I would like to end this with a thought.

According to stories in Islam, when Gabriel came to Prophet Mohammed to give the message of God, he said “Quran, Quran, Quran” three times. Like every language, words have multiple meanings. The word Quran is a verb, which means to read or recite. So, the latest message from God to the entire humanity was to: Read. Read. Read.