Figure 10: Overdetermination demonstrates that societal outcomes resist single root-cause claims.
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The negative miseducates by twisting contradictory authors criticizing systems using broad terms like “capitalism” and calling to reject the capitalist mindset fully, which is not the same as making economic capitalism go away, so these authors use capitalism and live within it and work within the global system to apply their critique one issue at a time. Every generation loosens norms so that teams know which judges let critiques basically get away with anything while shifting to defend nothing and accounting for any counter-response with “that rhetoric means they link harder” which is the non-falsifiable cult logic of a child soldier brainwashed, like Jim Jones 1970s using conspiracy logic to make suicide justified with quotes that sound ethical, from the Bible or from Marx. We must publicly boycott these judges by having tournaments disqualify teams for taking the author's intent out of context. The negative manipulates fellow activists into pessimism to give up efforts until global capitalism is solved. They juxtapose authors of vague terms like “capitalism” contexts, in order to manipulate a judge's logic-flow to take the literature's intent out of context. Miseducation in how to apply theory when relevant is repugnant to the definition of debate since they will walk away misunderstanding and infect co-classmates in college to cynically reject specific causes. Those authors would want the negative to debate case in-detail and show a preferred solution. The affirmative already knows relevant philosophies because these political philosophers are often cited in academic fields and their base ideas are considered in fields. We have environmental protection, we live lives to our own purposes and resist capitalism's ads and verify businesses, news media organizes protests, medical safety is rigorous, and state officials have thousands of laws and corruption checks against secrecy. The critique's ideas are already being adopted in the real world where relevant, and the critics should not win for reading first observations to understand society. It is just an excuse to avoid learning to contradict a debate thesis, sell the judge it is better to endorse a truism, and say that it is better for us in the long run. What they are really selling here is a bribe for the judge to reject listening to any mainstream views in exchange for discussing what we already find so deep. Their authors prefer we debate, not manipulate hate. Žižek (2006) agrees that radical demands to reject and rethink mask their failure: “The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active,' to 'participate,' to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, 'do something'; academics participate in meaningless 'debate,' and so forth, and the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from all this. Those in power often prefer even a 'critical' participation […] bombarding those in power with impossible 'subversive' (ecological, feminist, antiracist, anti-globalist …) demands, looks like an internal process of feeding the machine of power.”
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The way debaters apply critiques is far more sustaining of the system to mask their Rejection of Everything is a descent into the Nothingness which Žižek alludes to. "We cannot get outside Capitalism; it has no outside. […] When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass collective movement. […] My intent is to help create the discursive conception under which socialist or other noncapitalist construction becomes 'realistic' present activity rather than a ludicrous or utopian goal" (Gibson-Graham, 1996, p. 260). Capitalism is everywhere in society, but critic teams twist that to falsely imply capitalist understanding is the central assumption upon which the empirics of the case rest. The plan may happen to sustain capitalism as an effect, but not if done in a post-capitalist society, so no public reader or Marxist would hold it against the proposal as intrinsic cost. If capitalism will end anyways, the plan is a drop in a bucket with a bottom hole and does not actually happen so cannot be rejected to influence. So what they really reject is discussion time for our specific solutions to issues we will go into decades later to build post-capitalism. Think of it like a virus ad that promises to solve all the problems, but deletes all your files. They critique the affirmative’s specific reforms to society, but not when they do it as their harms will need specific solutions. They trade-off with specific claims needed to persuade and to avoid revolutions hijacked into violence. This is ideological bribery repugnant to the other team, who retaliates against the unfairness and is toxic to a community's common purpose. Rewarding the critic is just a tokenizing co-option of writings that seem ethical in their context, yet it entrenches the privileged bourgeoisie teams who scout judge records and know which ones check-in to vote for their favorite critical theory. Demand that those judges set fair burdens and will find a way to justify cherry picking quotes to oppose and feel intellectual that the world could always be better if everyone understood these theories. We are not here to promote favorite fields of thought, but to assume the concerned reader. Their bourgeois Ivory Tower intellectualism is a performative contradiction by excluding the value to life of a class labor union of policy researchers. Critics oversell claims from others for selfish gain. Žižek writes so much on all issues with paradoxical aphorisms but hates how his quotes are easily misapplied in any way one wishes to, as happens in debate. He even justifies sex with animals as an anti-discriminatory demand: “we can safely predict that new anti-discriminatory demands will emerge: why not marriages among multiple persons? What justifies the limitation to the binary form of marriage? Why not even a marriage with animals? After all we already know about the finesse of animal emotions. Is to exclude marriage with an animal not a clear case of 'speciesism'” (Žižek, 2016). If we were to psychoanalyze the psychoanalyst, one has to wonder what experiences led him to believe that. And who exactly is the “we” in “we already know about [...] animal emotions.” All this makes one wonder, “what kind of videos has comrade Žižek been watching online?”
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Political history, institutions, pluralism, and economic freedoms check against modern atrocities. "Modern bureaucracy is not 'intrinsically capable of genocidal action,'" as centralized coercion does not inherently lead to terror; rather, deliberate policy choices drive genocidal actions like secrecy, forced labor, terror systems, or extermination, often diverging from modernity as seen in Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR (O'Kane, 1997, pp. 58–59). "But neither in their acquisition of power nor in their use of it do modern authoritarian rulers much resemble Hitler. International organizations [...] provide barriers" in modern times unlike in prior eras (Kershaw, 2007). If war and genocide are inherently risks of modernity, that’s all the more reason to evaluate plans to stop them. We can only see evidence through a concerned reader who can be persuaded on multiple changes. Human nature makes war inherent, but using calls to reject & rethink how modern systems are still imperfect as reasons to avoid detailed research co-opts the very in-round space we have to persuade the public concerned with exigency. We cannot let critics walk away with the wrong mindset of reframing discussions from the intended perspective to justify callousness: one may be like a doctor sued for malpractice telling the family of the deceased to see it as a debate in a medical philosophy journal. "Schoolchildren are being fed the disinformation that people in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species' greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law" (Pinker, 2002). The critic's systematizing is more likely to replicate history's errors, like Hitler's rejecting compromise with Stalin since mirroring Frederick the Great's absolutist ethic of “reject surrender” came before calculating the lives saved of any compromise (Hirschbiegel, 2004, 2:10). The greater weight of more deaths when the war became unwinnable did not matter, because many would still die as long as the root causes of corruption and diseases existed: the Jews. Marx's red book appealed to talk of the day in 1848 where most blamed the Jewish Rothschild bankers and royal monarchs, but didn't know what caused society’s corruption. Some had a limited grasp of evolution and thought working in city factories would literally evolve one into a machine with no moral soul. Misapplying Marx's red book just led to reductionist systematizing to spill the blood of comrades-at-arms. Decades of these calls to reject everything shows how false their promise to rethink solutions truly is. Judges may check-in to vote to reject capitalism then go out for a cigarette, sponsored by state capitalism. Even granting the critique, a near-term plan to prevent war allows the alternative's mindset shift to be possible: "Critical theory of international relations must concede that technical and practical orientations to foreign policy are inescapable […] [E]mancipation will not make significant progress if international order is in decline" (Linklater, 1990). If the alternative can overcome the other policies perpetuating the system, doing both works better by seeing steps in the right directions to avoid blame for war. Even if mindsets cause war, pointing that out is not enough to reverse the cause, so one cannot simply “reject” it; instead, wars precludes mindset movements (Mertus, 1999). Overdetermination shows that no single "root cause" exists, and causal reductionism is the logical fallacy of thinking that isolating a root is somehow a solution to reverse that cause (Won, 2014). Flaws of human nature and future events make all harms inevitable, yet people still find it persuasive that doing one thing is justified despite the broader concern. People do not act on logic flow as an absolute conclusion, but interpret specifics via common values. In Star Wars, the villain Anakin says, “If you're not with me, then you're my enemy” — to which a true Jedi counter-critiques:
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“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” – Obi Wan Kenobi (Star Wars: Episode III, 2005, 1:21:45)
