How to Prevent High-Conflict Infallibility Battles

In the transition from arguments to mindless black-and-white battles that go nowhere, there's a trigger point that’s easily missed. The transition occurs when the argument shifts from doubting each other’s interpretations to character assassination, not just “You’re wrong about this,” but “You’re wrong about everything.”

It can happen inadvertently, an eyebrow raised, jaw dropped, or an impulsive blurted, “You think that?! You don’t know anything!” The subtext is, “You’re wrong about everything, which proves I’m right about everything.”

The transition to a high-conflict infallibility battle can also happen deliberately.

Trolls seek mindless black-and-white battles. They have mindless formulas for cultivating and winning them, which can become a satisfying addiction, especially for those who would rather not bother debating substance. It’s just fun to win. In her book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How to Get Out, Amanda Ripley argues that no one likes these battles. I don’t think that’s quite true. Trolls love them. She as much as concedes the point when talking about "conflict entrepreneurs."

Whether provoked intentionally or unintentionally, we’ll tend to respond to such attacks in kind, thereby perpetuating the notion that a debate is winner takes all, loser loses all. Once triggered, we get robotically defensive. We tend to rev out compulsively in what I call “infallibility battles,” a more descriptive term than “high conflict.” The subtext of such battles is “One of us is right about everything, and the other is wrong about everything. This will decide it once and for all.”

The other night, I found myself getting defensive about a trait that in a more neutral state of mind I would have embraced as part of my nature. I felt ashamed in some vague way. I was triggered into defensiveness.

Many people say character assassination is wrong and then misinterpret that as the point of the “ad hominem fallacy.” Not only is that sloppy, but it’s also extremely dangerous. There are characters that earn assassination. We have to warn others about psychopaths.

The point of the ad hominem fallacy is that character assassination doesn’t prove an assertion false. If a psychopath says it’s raining, it doesn’t prove that it’s not raining. Bad character has no bearing on what’s true.

The ad hominem fallacy doesn’t address the merits of character assassination, and while it’s logically true, it’s not completely true for all practical purposes. For example, if you’re dealing with an inveterate gaslighter, you should doubt whether what they’re saying is true. A flawed character can have implications for what’s true. Still, there are strategic reasons to avoid character assassination. For one, they tend to provoke infallibility battles.

Some people argue that we should prohibit character assassination for moral reasons. It’s un-compassionate. Everyone is just human, doing the best they can. We should see the positive in everyone. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

I’m for universal compassion but not for universal charity. I want to understand people and imagine being in their situation, even remembering when I have been in their situation, but I can’t, don’t, and won’t pledge to accommodate everyone. My heart bleeds for the disadvantaged everywhere, but I don’t sign a vow of poverty to accommodate them.

My psychoproctology research has me focused on cultivating compassion for flawed characters. I’m trying to understand them. But if someone’s clearly got character flaws, I will character assassinate, even if it seems uncharitable.

We’re all like that, whether we admit it or not. I know avowed pacifists who claim that they oppose all character assassination—no name-calling ever. But if you ask them whether Hitler was a monster, they say yes. That’s character assassination.

Trolls engage in rampant character assassination. Anyone who disagrees with them is not just mistaken, but of bad character and therefore wrong about everything. That’s a textbook example of the ad hominem fallacy, which makes it ironic how many trolls have accused me of the ad hominem fallacy to prove that I’m wrong about everything.

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I think it’s very important that we all avoid the state I got into the other night. We must do our part to minimize infallibility battles by not getting knee-jerk defensive when attacked by robotic character-assassinating trolls. When I was in that state, I lost my moral compass. How? By taking my character assassinating attacker too seriously, finding them more credible in that heated moment than I should have—by letting them establish the moral frame when the evidence was solid that they don’t care about morality as anything other than a way to character assassinate me, their rival.

How to stop feeding the trolls.

I remember the first time I was more grounded in one of those situations. It was quite a revelation. My partner dressed me down for close to an hour. She had caught me doing something I was and she wasn’t OK with me doing.

For the first time I can remember, I didn’t feel a need to defend my standards in the face of someone establishing the moral frame. She could wallpaper the entire house with reasons why I was of bad character, and I would have sat there listening calmly. I felt no urge to respond, other than to make it clear that I heard her. I didn’t feel the need to persuade her of anything.

Then I noticed that it wasn’t really about persuading her of anything. I realized that I get defensive to prove to myself that I could. A few months back, I finally got to that point in my "psychoproctology" practice to disappoint trolls on Twitter. I felt grounded. I had nothing to prove to them and no need to prove to myself that I could defend myself.

Not needing to prove to yourself that you can defend yourself is a crucial skill to cultivate if we’re going to minimize infallibility battles and disappoint robotic character-assassinating trolls. Disappointing them is the least we can do to impose consequences for trolling.