14. Rejection With No Institutional Agent Puts Purity Over PersuasionCopy Anchor Link

    1. Rejection without an institutional referent leaves in place the very mindsets it condemns. If the negative advocates changing how people think, then the permutation makes that change far more likely to succeed by speaking the language of institutional power to persuade via specific approaches and by refining a proposal that accounts for concerns via crowdsourced outlines. Calls to rethink fall on deaf ears when policymakers "are not listening for new ideas, but instead are looking for those approaches that support their preconceptions. […] [E]mpirical evidence suggests that once in government, policy-makers do not change their implicit theories about the world" (Smith, 1997, p. 512). Bronner captures the defect of rejection without an institutional substitute: "Ideas of political emancipation will necessarily remain abstract without an institutional referent. […] [W]ithout a willingness to envision ideas in action, political theory loses its ability to fashion meaningful distinctions between institutions or to formulate the complex struggles facing the exploited" (Bronner, 1999, pp. 302–303). Telling corrupt people to reject their mindset leaves those mindsets in place by choking the space for comparing detailed solutions in context: "The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement [...] urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved perhaps even unrecognized only to fester more ominously into the future. And such problems [...] cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context" (Boggs, 1997). It results in pessimism as activists are co-opted by their fear of co-option, and the only conclusion is totalizing rejection (Lobel, 2007).

![][image15]Copy Anchor Link

Figure 16: Rejection without an institutional referent results in the trap of pseudo-activity.

2. Participation in debate will shrink as students move on in college because it is only rewarding to contribute to groups interested in a common purpose, not tactics to exclude. It only gets people interested in debate if they can find others as passionate on an issue. Telling readers to reject common mindsets is like wishing the ignorant to reject ignorance. Imagine telling someone who is debating whether to take a headache pill that the deeper issue is biopolitics then to reframe the choice as between the mindset of those groups of sentences. The critic can always find deeper sentences than the topic literature that seem more meaningful to the judge, then claim the only impact to count is which speech impacts us. The judge cannot be forced to choose which mindset impacts us with better educational value, as that leads to subjective gerrymandering. Debaters should not be “personally accountable” for in-round mindsets, that makes the definition of a debate impossible because we cannot outline controversial prejudiced opposition that affirmatives would need to overcome to filter out which quotes and arguments are most useful. Lincoln-Douglas debate over slavery would need the outline of pro-slavery win on a fair balance, but it would be unthinkable in modern debate judging because “reject racism” would win. Obviously, in-round critical impacts on our mindset values feels a more relevant education value impact than obscure policy details. But those two types of impacts cannot be weighed across each other, like “reject considering how to help the secular world, and read the Bible and Marxism instead.” The problem with the dichotomy is we persuade others and form values only by applying to the context of an issue.

   3. Even if mindsets are mutually-exclusive in theory, in practice that means creating a "greater whole than the sum of its parts" to unite society better by adding a third element to resolve the tension of that exclusivity, which is the starting point for their movement. Pluralist society allows defending many justifications for advocacies, even if self-contradictory: "Antiwar generals, corporation executives fostering workers' control and top politicians promoting local self-reliance play a useful role in efforts for social change, especially to the extent that they work with social movements and refuse to play all the 'rules of the game'" (Martin, 1990). "With very rare exceptions, the right things are done for the wrong reasons. It is futile to demand that" our leaders or activists "do the right thing for the right reason"; instead, "the organizer should know and accept that the right reason is only introduced as a moral rationalization after the right end has been achieved" and in order to persuade state opposition one "should search for and use the wrong reasons to achieve the right goals" (Alinsky, 1971, p. 66). Synergy of “practical utopianism [...] would enable us to once again instill human society with purpose, rejuvenating human culture around a coherent, yet pluralistic, framework of ideals" (Bisk, 2002). The case convinces minds one-at-a-time that society should change in some way, but that same literature field often advocates movements, business, and global engagement. The affirmative retains the ability to support the others in a general sense by advocating a solution unrelated to the plan, without claiming benefits as what to vote on. The permutation does not “co-opt” using the movement as it simply shows the public can see the two causes as unrelated.