A Firm Basis in Reality

I get in philosophical arguments a lot. I wouldn’t exactly call it a hobby, I can’t say I really actively seek them out; I just have an odd lot of friends. This odd lot of friends has a tendency to bring up arguments ranging from politics, religion and philosophy to the merits of movies and games with a frequency that – I’ve been assured – means it’s utterly impossible that we should still be friends. The last is only enhanced by the fact that our views concerning, oh, virtually everything above are incredibly divergent. We cover the political spectrum of our region, are diverse in our beliefs and tend to argue philosophies over weeks rather than mere nights. The really isn’t any purpose behind them all bar entertaining ourselves. You see, we find them a bizarre sort of fun. This has of course led to a number of arguments I’ve had with people who don’t fit into this weird little collection of friends that weren’t entirely anticipated. You see, when you hammer out personal ideas and concepts over half a dozen years of rigorous nick-picking it seems you get some very well supported thoughts that occasionally run contradictory to what we’ll call conventional wisdom, and the urge to spout these things at the damndest moments.

A regular patron of this phenomenon would be our title today; ‘a firm basis in reality’. It’s how I like to phrase it at any rate, and it’s a concept my friends and I agreed upon in rather short order if I recall correctly. It’s one of the most important things to have when making an argument – I won’t say the most important simply to avoid sparking another one of those week long debates, but establishing the need for it usually goes without complaint. The idea is simplistic; whenever an idea or concept is brought up concerning society or politics (or whatever’s on the menu that day for arguing) whoever proposes it needs to have a firm grasp on how it’ll actually react when introduced to reality itself, or the basis of the argument become hypothetical and irrelevant to actual changes that could be brought about. This isn’t to say hypothetical arguments have no place themselves, it’s just a category a lot of people don’t like their idea getting shuffled into.

For example; utopia can easily brought about - if everyone got along together and worked to make it so. Making such happen in reality is notably harder because people tend to be bastards, and consequently won’t do that, so the argument ‘if everyone got along together’ doesn’t really have any merit in the face of how people actually function.

This becomes a problem when you realize how often this is actually used in an argument. It isn’t every single time some one uses the word ‘if’ when describing their idea, but its damned close. To further exasperate things; in my experience the people who make that fallacy tend to have a hard time grasping why it doesn’t work. The idea that they can’t just change reality or basic human nature to make their concept work isn’t one that readily comes to them. I believe it stems from the fact that they perceive the aspect of humanity that ruins their idea as flawed, and thus dismiss it as an element that would simply disappear once confronted by their obviously superior logic. Human stubbornness is both extremely prevalent and apparently something we’re completely unaware of at the same time, oddly enough even when exhibiting it.

Anyways, it’s come up a couple times recently and started to kind of annoy me. I realize I could just, y’know, not break apart people’s ideas by pointing out how they’d never succeed, but I keep getting the misfortune of coming across fairly arrogant people who make these mistakes. And god-dammit, I have an enormous ego. It’s impossibly hard not to dramatically deflate some one else’s – especially when you think they’re a prick.