All Hypocrites Together

An argument on Twitter I bore witness to yesterday brought something that's been bubbling in the back of my brain into sharp relief. Several people were calling each other liars - yes, I know, shocking that people would argue on the Internet - and to prove their points, dredging up old tweets, old blog posts, old bits of whatever, all easily accessible with modern search technology.

Were they right to do so? Well, that IS how you win an argument. You point out flaws and inconsistencies in thinking. But 'flawed' is another word for 'human.' People say things they later take back. They change their minds, and we let them because just as they have the capacity to change how they think, we have the capacity to forget what they used to think.

I'm beginning to think that with search technology refined as it is and with so much of our lives online, and with online anonymity slowly but surely coming to an end, it is making it easier than ever for us to point out each other's flaws as a cheap shot. And therefore, the argument goes to the one able to utilize this technology quickest and best, and not to the one with the soundest reasoning in the present. And the one who wins the day most of all is the one who is the least flawed and who changes their mind the least - the former an admirable enough but rare trait, the latter not that admirable at all.

If you support, say, a piece of legislation despite flaws, and I can dig up a post from months ago where you say the opposite, and do all this within minutes - is the argument really served well? Does someone really deserve an accusation of cognitive bias or flip-flopping rather than a simple "what made you change your mind?" And do we have to post about it whenever we change our minds on anything? Is it even possible - or desirable? Forget it just being politics, too. If you're enthusiastic about Zack Snyder on the new Superman movie and I can, with minimal effort, dig up your review where you stated that 300's title must refer to the number of seconds they spent writing it - am I contributing anything to the conversation or am I just scoring cheap gotcha points?

People might reply, "well, the purpose of an argument is to prove your point." I'd disagree. The purpose of an argument is not to prove you are right, but to become right. To find out what the correct outlook is, whether it's yours or theirs. To take your ego out of the equation and to judge the statements on their own - hard enough under normal circumstances, but when the perfect gotcha is a few clicks on Google away, how much harder?

People change. Their politics change. Their tastes change. Search engines will notice, but they won't pick up on how important it is. Search engines don't pop up with a note saying "this guy later on changed his mind about Afghanistan" when you go digging for their 2007 post about the war in an attempt to call them hypocritical. We are all hypocrites together. It's just what being human is. Maybe we should start accounting for that, that behind those words is a human who forgets and has bad days just like you - even if what they wrote doesn't look too different than what a search engine robot spits up.