How Debate Shaped My Worldview
By: Washington Zhao
Tags: Passion, Self-awareness, Speech And Debate, Competition, Reflections

I was always shy towards others, afraid of confrontation and hesitant to speak out about my thoughts. So in sophomore year when my parents made me join a Speech and Debate team in my area, I was petrified of even going to a single practice session.

Over the next 2 years, I went from a debater who stared at a computer screen and stuttered while furiously reading off a pre-written script, to improvising rebuttals on the fly and providing thoughtful analysis on complicated issues, all while stuttering just a bit less.

And at the end of my debate years, I captained both my high school’s debate team and my private debate academy and qualified to the two most prestigious tournaments in the debate scene — the 2018 Tournament of Champions (top 5% of debaters nationwide) and National Speech and Debate Association Nationals.

Hey, that’s me! (In the back taking notes) Photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash

For someone who wasn’t that dedicated towards schoolwork, debate was much more than an extracurricular activity to me. Preparing for debates became more enjoyable than my daily homework, as I organized trip after trip to a local college’s classrooms to meet up with my teammates to prepare. Many weeks of my senior year summer consisted of back-to-back sleepovers where the only break from research was to grab bubble tea or Noodles and Company.

Over the span of my time in the activity, I put together hundred page research briefs on a variety of controversial subjects, volunteered in DC Urban Debate League tournaments as a judge, and even once got a picture with one of the best debaters in the nation.

My partner and I debated over 10 different topics ripped from newspaper headlines, from the efficacy of a carbon tax to the ramifications of the US’s H-1B visa program.

But perhaps my favorite topic of all, was: Resolved: Deployment of anti-missile systems are in South Korea’s best interest. Actually, I really liked talking about the capital gains tax too…and the Cuban embargo…but that’s for another day.

Although on face, the topic seems pretty pro-favored — who wouldn’t appreciate more protection when your neighbor in the north doesn’t seem so level headed? — debates on the subject quickly became very heated, with plenty of valid points for both sides. Yet as tournaments on the topic continued, certain arguments solidified as the ones most commonly ran by teams around the nation. For the Pro side specifically, the side arguing for deploying missile defenses to South Korea, the perceived “best” argument at the time was that a war with North Korea was not only likely, but imminent.

So, since debaters want to win — the best way to win the argument was to find research, a lot of it, showing why a war was coming.

Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), a Lockheed Martin Missile Defense System deployed to South Korea

Fifield of the Washington Post explains the threat is higher than ever, as both the US and NK are making substantial and specific threats to strike the other if perceived necessary. In this brinkmanship, the potential for miscalculation is high and the likely reaction is escalatory. Christian Shepherd writes in 2017 that the recent UN sanctions would slash North Korea’s annual export revenue by over 33%…Lektzian of Texas A&M quantifies, finding that sanctions make the probability of military conflict a total of 17% higher. Easley of the Foreign Policy explains that THAAD has become a wedge issue between the U.S. and South Korea. This is detrimental as Choe Sang Hun of the New York Times explains that the U.S. protective umbrella is more important than ever with North Korea’s aggressive posture. Auslin of the Atlantic corroborates without the U.S., nothing stops a North Korean attack, leading Zhang to find that in this scenario, there is a 70% to 80% chance of a North Korean attack.

70 to 80% chance of a North Korean attack? Reflecting on that now is horrifying, yet at the time these pieces of evidence that we found (despite probably not being as true as we’d like them to be) were our holy gospel, as our loads of evidence propelled us to a semifinal showing at a regional tournament on the topic.

What I didn’t realize then was that my time spent in this fantasy world that every debate round created desensitized me and my teammates from the very real problems we were arguing about.

In debate, there are links, which concern how the side you are debating for results in a certain scenario, and there are impacts, which are the results of such a scenario and why such results are good or bad. The biggest impact used in the North Korean debate was lives (lost), but many other important ones generally include poverty (livelihood), economical consequences, moral consequences (is utilitarianism always truth?) etc.

In an effort to maximize success, many people tend to focus on the biggest impacts of the topic in question. Does abolishing the capital gains tax increase US outward FDI to developing nations? Global poverty is abolished, huzzah vote for us! Will India’s IT economy collapse if we don’t increase our H-1B visa cap? God save us!

Now, don’t get me wrong, thinking about these potential impacts, even if unlikely to occur in the real world, broadened my worldview and helped me develop in-depth knowledge of specific issues. That’s the beauty of speech and debate: every single round goes a different way and allows for the ability to go in-depth on many specific pros and cons of policy change that may not be so apparent on the surface.

But this train of thought in the debate world glorifies harmful ways of thinking that can spillover into our real lives without us realizing it. More often than not, policy change in the real world doesn’t create catastrophic effects by themselves but the small impacts may be the most important to look at. Even more importantly, the excitement that my teammates and I were guilty of showing when finding evidence showing the threat of a Korean War illustrates how desensitized we were to the everyday fear present in the conflict-ridden peninsula.