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Don’t ever say “you always want to be right.” It’s not an argument
My mother and I did not have the best of relationships. To put it mildly. It took me a long, long time to come to terms with the fact that she abandoned my brother and I to our (very lovely) grandparents after she and my father divorced. Indeed, it was only in the last period before she died that things improved a bit, in no small measure because of my Stoic practice and the acceptance of others that comes with it.
But this essay isn’t about that. It’s about a tactic that my mother invariably deployed near the end of our discussions, and that recently another of my relatives, as well as two of my close friends, have also thrown at me. When my mother ran out of arguments, she would close the conversation with something along the lines of “Massimo, you always want to be right.”
I pointed out to her that, as far as I could see, she wanted to be right at least as many times as I did. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be engaging in discussions in the first place! I learned later — from Socrates — that the point of conversations shouldn’t be to show that one is right, or even to convince one’s interlocutor of something or other. The point should be to learn more about one’s own thoughts — as they are challenged by the other person — and return the favor by nudging whoever we are having a discussion with to perhaps examine her own positions.
But that’s a high standard that I still fail to apply consistently. Still, the point is that ending a conversation with “you always want to be right” does absolutely nothing, other than probably piss off whoever you are talking to. And why on earth would you want to do that? It is also, I think, an implicit admission that you have, in fact, run out of arguments. If so, perhaps a better way to disengage might be something along the lines of “okay, let me think about this and we’ll revisit the issue.”
(Some people use the phrase “let’s agree to disagree.” In my mind that’s not much better than “you always want to be right!” because the implication — usually by way of one’s tone — is that the other guy is hopeless, so the best you can do is to walk away. But I could be too pessimistic here.)
Indeed, one of my above mentioned friends a few days came close to admitting that he was out of…
