Imlisanen Jamir
Open the comments under a Facebook post about a Nagaland road or a ministerial statement and within a few replies the discussion has stopped being about the road or the statement. Someone quotes half a sentence from the post, someone else brings up a grievance from another decade, and a third person asks why the other side said nothing about an unrelated matter in 2013. The replies collect hundreds of likes and settle nothing.
Plato had a name for this kind of arguing. In the Euthydemus he describes two brothers who travel from city to city offering to defeat anyone on any subject, and who prove to a young man that he cannot learn anything. Socrates sits through the performance like a man watching a conjuring trick done badly. The Greeks called the method eristic, from eris, meaning strife, and the brothers wanted to win the exchange while showing little interest in what was true.
Their descendants now work for free and at all hours. Nobody in these threads appears to have changed an opinion, which suggests that changing opinions was never the purpose. Platforms earn their revenue from attention, and anger is a cheaper source of attention than reasoning. The feed therefore lifts the combative remark and lets the careful one sink without trace.
Plato’s quarrel with the sophists rested on the belief that a conversation has a subject which both speakers are obliged to serve. The person who loses an argument comes away with something the winner lacks, which is the removal of an error. Socrates says as much in the Gorgias, where he declares himself happier to be refuted than to refute. A modern comment section would take that for a joke or a sign of poor engagement. Where losing means public humiliation, the sensible response is to escalate, change the subject or accuse the other party of bad faith. Each of these pays better than admitting that someone else had a point.
The habit has left the screen, and politicians in our region have found that a rehearsed retort travels further than a policy paper. An audit report is easier to survive once the public discussion of it has become a contest between supporters and opponents, each able to quote the other side’s worst post. Newsrooms, this one included, feel the same temptation whenever a headline is written for the click and the reader’s understanding is left to look after itself.
Plato would have recognised the format immediately. The one detail likely to surprise him is the audience, which pays the brothers nothing and still turns up every evening.
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