Wink wink

It's been a while since I posted here and it will be a bit longer before I return. I'm in the midst of finishing up some business that will be over, for better or worse, at the end of this month. You see, I'm posing as an academic, and I have to say it's frustrating. More and more, I am besieged by the need to argue my points in discussions that, let's be honest, have not final answers.

Having grown up under the tutelage of several high-class ladies, I was always taught the best way to win any argument was to begin the conversation with the complete conviction that you and the other person already agree--there's just been some slight misunderstanding. Belief systems, I learned as a kid, are very organic, arising out of one’s context rather than one’s person-rather like a language or a dialect. People who lose arguments are the people that take their context with them rather than recognise the new context that surrounds them. A person can carry a true belief or a real fact from one context to the next.

This is, I'll admit, the sort of insidious reasoning that missionaries use in their spread religious fervor: Of course, I can't make the natives believe in my God—I'll just show the natives how our God is already there. And remember, missionaries for various religious (and economic and political) beliefs are some of the most successful salespeople on the planet. Not because they have an argument, but because they are simply exposing facts.

Thus when I’m accused of being neutral, or not having an argument, or not pursuing a clear consensus, I tend to treat it as an introduction into a good conversation—an opportunity for mutual reflection. It’s not that I don’t like to debate—I love a good argument, it makes a person work through exactly what s/he thinks and why. But arguing for the sake of domination, for the pure joy of winning, well, that makes no sense to me.

After all, if I explain myself correctly, you and I will already agree.