19. The Rainbow Coalition is Debate's Prism to Enlighten Public Mindsets

1. The Perspective Synergy is this paper's lens that calls for a rainbow coalition formed when competing mindsets do not diametrically oppose each other but stand at angles to refract enlightenment on all society by seeing the intersections of individuals as shaped by a polyvocality of identities, situational contexts, fields of thought, and mindsets to appeal through. We have many perspectives to appeal to in society and we should not present them as having to decide who is ultimately right because that is just appealing to the judge's preferred “-isms.” Pluralism means a peaceful society of differing views, so to argue in a debate that pluralism is bad violates our debate's ontology. Pluralist society should protect against war so that individuals can choose which philosophy gives their life value. Power-tagging quotes that something dehumanizes life's quality to claim it outweighs war risk twists ethical authors to misappropriation that those lives were as good as dead anyway: “A minimally worthwhile life is one worth living […] The bar of a meaningful life is quite low.” (Belliotti, 2004). Macauley (1996) furthers that war harms “other forms of life, for which the extinction of humankind's ontological awareness would be far preferable to their own extinction in nuclear war!” Szacki (1995) explains projecting the correct value-to-life mindset on to society leads to the mentality of a dictator imprisoning the unethical, since this is “attainable only by a totalitarian enslavement of society in the name of some one conception,” but modern “society is characterized […] by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical and moral doctrines […] '[P]olitical decisions must be as far as possible independent of conceptions of the good life, or what gives value to life.'” “Patients must be given the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they think their lives are worth living or not. To ignore or overlook patients’ judgment in this matter is to violate their autonomy.” (Schwartz, 2002). Even if past governments reached the point of seeing some lives as of no value, that is all the more reason to construct social systems to reduce the harm of flaws of human nature. “All we have to win is the system is flawed, then it's try or die to reject capitalism” inculcates conspiracy logic that anything related to money, resources, or interstate competition taints any plan. Critics boycott themselves from applying theory to case specifics, which forecloses persuading groups to use their theory.

Figure 21: This prism diagram illustrates how pluralist society engages diverse views over single ideologies.

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 mindsets of those two speeches of sentences. We can not have critique debaters walking away with the wrong mindset then going to lunch where they may critique a friend that the plan to solve their hunger today is like rearranging the chairs on a sinking ship, and one must first defend the biopolitical health management system they're in: "Before you take one headache pill, first defend the Holocaust." 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 students have not formed their own dogmatic views and need to outline controversial prejudiced opposition that affirmatives would need to overcome to filter out which quotes are most useful. Lincoln-Douglas debate over slavery would need to have the outline of pro-slavery win on a fair balance, but it would be unthinkable in critique 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, as they are separate considerations that go to credibility. The problem with the dichotomy is we persuade others and form values only by applying to the context of an issue. The coalition logic above applies here too: rejection without an agent abandons the very allies who could carry it into practice. The critic teaches a prejudice that when one hears an issue related to economy or medicine, reject it so they do not walk away without problematizing biopolitical health management. But these critiques are already considered in relevant policies and we already knew the critical theory so it is the negative's burden to show what will go wrong in this specific case. When the critic forces an individual action to “defend the assumptions” of the larger associated mindset – that is similar to Stalin's punishment of dissidents for having Western views.