Honest Debate

I believe in honesty. Hard, unflattering, say-the-thing honesty. But honesty is a two-way street, and it took me too long to accept that pouring mine onto the wrong person is just waste.

There’s an old line for this. “Cast not your pearls before swine.” It’s Matthew 7:6, and the full version is better: don’t give what is holy to dogs, and don’t throw your pearls to pigs, because they’ll only trample them underfoot and then turn and tear you to pieces. None of that is about hating the pig. A pig is a pig. It can’t tell a pearl from a rock, and being angry at it for that is a you problem. The line is about where you spend the good stuff, not about who deserves scorn.

I used to think honest debate was owed to anybody who showed up wanting one. Now I run a test before I spend anything. I ask, straight up, can you steel-man the other side? Can you make your opponent’s best case, the strong version, the one that would actually give you trouble, before you go tear it down? If someone can do that, I’ll go all day with them. We can disagree hard and both walk away sharper for it.

It’s rare. Most people can’t do it. Most people can’t even straw-man honestly. They’re not arguing with a real position, they’re swinging at a cartoon villain they built in their own head, a dumb caricature that exists so they never have to meet the actual argument. You can’t debate a man who’s fighting a hallucination. There’s no shared board to move pieces on. He’s playing a different game and doesn’t even fucking know it.

So the first job in any real disagreement is just getting onto the same page about what’s even being argued. Winning comes later, if at all. And in a time this polarized, that first job is often flat impossible. The other guy’s whole identity is fused to the cartoon. Ask him to state your side fairly and he hears betrayal. There’s nowhere to stand.

So what do you do? Nothing. That’s the answer nobody likes. You don’t engage. You spot the tell early, the caricature, the bad faith, the refusal to hold your position honestly for even a single sentence, and you abort. You walk away. Not with a speech, not with a mic drop, just gone. It feels like losing. It isn’t. You declined to throw pearls at a pig, and the pig is happier for it, and so are you.

Save the honesty for the people who can catch it.