This
whole thing started a couple of months back.
It was a peaceful Saturday morning, and I was
enjoying breakfast back home. I was just
finishing a cup of freshly made orange juice
when my eye caught a bottle next to the
kitchen sink. Its label read "Olive
Oil", but there was
something peculiar about it. The liquid
inside did not have that greenish colour olive
oil is supposed to have; it
was white. "Something has to be wrong
with this bottle of olive
oil; olive
oil is never white!",
I thought to myself. After pondering on that
phrase for a while, I triumphantly concluded;
"Well, someone has obviously placed this
olive oil
inside the wrong bottle!". At the time,
I was perfectly satisfied with my
explanation, and went on to finish my
breakfast.
A
couple of minutes later, I felt so
embarrassed at the sheer stupidity of my
thoughts. Well, as you might have guessed,
the liquid was obviously not olive
oil! Someone had placed
something other than olive
oil (evidently
something white), inside the olive
oil's bottle. But that
single most simplistic thought hadn't even
crossed my mind up to that point. This was
because the label said "Olive
Oil", and there's no
way someone will ever challenge the
credibility of a label.
As
we grow up, our minds learn to trust labels.
This happens because it is in our nature in
life to simplify our mental operations as
much as we can. In order to be able to cope
with the overflow of external stimuli that
are constantly being received, our minds
subconsciously accept labels as pre-processed
information. That way, we don't have to worry
about finding what something is, we just look
at its label and save ourselves the thinking.
Ok,
now let's apply all this in debating and see
what we get. If I get up there to give my
speech, and label the things I'm saying, the
judges will understand what I'm saying and
write it down in their piece of paper. This
will happen because they'll trust my labels
as they represent information in its purest
form and will save them from thinking. Yeah
well :) That's the lame way of looking at it.
Let's have a better look... These judges will
trust my labels so blindly, that I can use
this to my advantage. If I label something as
an argument, they'll think it's an argument,
even if it's nothing but meaningless talk. If
I tell them that "This is my
sociological argument, which clearly refutes
the social problems presented by the opposite
side", and then go about mumbling,
they'll think I'm bringing up a sociological
argument which rebuts the argument
presented... --you get the point!
...Similarly (whips, read
this!), if I bring up a great
new argument, and explicitly tell everyone
it's an example, I'll be able to sneak it
into the debate without anyone noticing it's
actually a new argument.
Hmm...
this is starting to get really interesting
isn't it? The possibilities are endless.
Labelling in itself is a very powerful tool,
which can work wonders in the hands of a sly
debater. Think of things like "What the
opposite side needs to show to win this round
is {blah, blah, ... an impossible label} and
unless they do that, they lose this
round" ...or maybe label them so as to
equate them with something evil; "What
they're proposing ladies and gentlemen is the
equivalent of a dictatorship". Now you
see the potential of labelling, it's
constrained solely by your imagination. Have
fun and use it wisely.
