🧠 How To Change Minds When Debate is Dead

29 Oct, 2025

Debate was dead long before Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck.

There has never existed a genuine marketplace of ideas where Tabula Rasa rational actors approached a memetic battlefield ready to hear out all sides and come to the best argued conclusion. It was always a pretender to praxis.

If you're skeptical, I ask you recall the argument that shifted (significantly, in the way you desire in others) one of your current positions. In your heart of hearts do you believe you were reprogrammed by a perfectly strung together argument, promptly conceded and adopted the new position? No. You experienced an unpleasant encounter with a member of your own ingroup, or a new entertaining content sphere, or a new community, or something more profound. Your behaviours changed in some meaningful way and your belief system followed.

It is well enough studied I feel no need to cite it that people adopt the beliefs that are convenient to them. Maintaining beliefs that help them preserve their status, relationships and material wealth, as well as their personal psychostructural schema. Policy prescriptions large and small (take smoking bans for example) imposed on a disgruntled population frequently, indeed usually, find themselves more popular AFTER they have been undemocratically enacted on the populace. Troubling implications for democracy aside, we are confident that people change their beliefs after they change their behaviours and circumstances. This has far more troubling implications for online discourse.

The ultimate reality of the online debate sphere was to engage in contests of personality ultimately unrelated to the power of ideas. Over time it became less convenient for audiences to support losing personalities and more convenient to support winning ones. Ignorant, naive or selfish creators unwittingly engaged in this atmosphere, while cynical and pragmatic ones understood that the real prize was accumulating a fanbase that could then be gradually converted via the only real method of changing hearts and minds that scales cheaply - interpersonal relationships (or their nearest available simulacra - online community).

Since the importance of ideas/policies/political positions were unrelated to the actual game of status jousting - there was never a real need to remain fixed to a shared reality. To their uncharacteristically unfortunate detriment Liberals tend to maintain a position in shared "consensus reality" - the accumulation of "objective" positions backed by institutions like academia, government and expert opinion. The right-wing, and to a certain extent the far-left¹, do not suffer from these same constraints, and eventually the establishment defenders of liberalism were overwhelmed; unable to do anything but signal inwardly to their existing base in order to accumulate power while achieving no actual change in the world.

The savviest ideological² operators on both sides then changed tactics.

Rather than compete for the same small subset of terminally online viewers, you should instead turn your base into ideological warriors, capable of becoming force multipliers for your ideas. 10 000 viewers are utterly inconsequential - 10 000 culture warriors each speaking to the dozens of people they come into daily contact with is suddenly a serious movement. But we then arrive at one of the fundamental misunderstandings of the space - online debates between creators are nothing like persuasively convincing people in the real world. Worse still, the psychological makeup of the majority of these culture warriors, while useful, is uniquely distinct from the actual population one would want to influence in crucial ways.

The Autistic Mode

It is no coincidence that a huge number of the people who participate in these spaces are, if not literally autistic, operating in an extremely autistic mode (in the same sense one might be operating in a "schizophrenic" mode). I have been known to flippantly declare that "Autism is Evil" and while I maintain the bit, the more nuanced explanation is that the autistic mode of analysis both reinforces, and is highly compatible with, the worst excesses of our current cultural/social/economic systems. It is a rigid mode of thinking - emphasising categorisation, hierarchy and an objective root "factful" interpetation of any given event. In speaking to the many autistic people in this space, I find commonalities in their frustration that regular people "just don't get it" or "lack critical thinking skills". They are terribly frustrated that anyone can support a man like Donald Trump who not only lies, but self-contradicts in loud and obvious ways. They see truth and fact as inherently virtuous and any who oppose them as inherently subversive to a positive formation of society.

I believe the most important reason for this is that, in a world that is very difficult and unpleasant to navigate for the autistic or undersocialised - debate becomes a genuinely useful and productive mode of communicating with other people. It can get you far in your career (again generally only in ways that reinforce the worst elements of our current systems), it can help you overcome social anxieties and awkwardness, it can help you become more like "cool" media personalities and characters like Dr House, Ben Shapiro, Destiny and Elon Musk. Men with money, power, respect and women. Online debate is one of the few remaining modern routes to socialisation and a mode of analysis that follows rigid rules, hierarchies and categorisations.² Giving this up is painful, no one wants to regress to the point where they feel like an outcast again.

I sympathise, but this mode of analysis and communication has done irreparable harm to society.³ The Autistic Mode is a dehumanizing, atomising and spiky approach to worldview development that creates insurmountable incompatibilities with other people and communities - yielding an end stage of extreme individualism. It is no coincidence that hardline libertarians are the community who have most encouraged debate as the mode of communication between opposing ideologies - with the express purpose of exposing such incompatibilities that the only solution is to endorse the idea that "every man is a state". The internet, a culture initially built and dominated by libertarians with these ideals, was very much built around this worldview. Now that the internet is integrated into the average child's development, this influence is deeply ingrained offline as well.

Most people acknowledge that the increase in ADHD⁴ diagnosis is influenced by the modern cultural modes and productions that are clearly reshaping human development (e.g. children consuming highly dopaminergic short form video). It is less obviously observable that the same is occurring for autism, but it is. Rigid institutionalism, single-truth categorisation, fetishization of IQ over EQ and structural systems prioritising quantitative over qualitative understanding have trained a generation to lean into their autistic modes of navigating the world in order to become the specialised-laborers and alienated-consumers ideal for a complex economy pursuing infinite growth.⁵ These autistics are a highly valuable labour force because they prefer a rigid hierarchy to perform within (constructed by someone else though they are frequently blind to this), but once established they will execute with great force and consistency.

For the same reasons they are also lethally effective culture warriors.

Cultural Guerilla Warfare

We find ourselves, then, with a very particular hierarchy in this memetic space - there exists a pool of potential culture warriors that must themselves be won over in order to benefit from the force multiplier of their advocacy. Importantly, the way that these culture warriors are themselves won over is very different to how one should convince the general public. Online Debate is an "opt-in" system, an intellectual sport like chess - and many of the most successful people in the space are surrounded only by those who have opted into the conceits of this system. They are heavily encouraged both economically and socially to perform in this specific way even though they themselves are not always operating in the autistic mode - indeed the best are generally much more well-rounded than their viewers. Unfortunately as they develop their audiences, their feedback mechanisms become highly dependent on their performance relative to the metrics of this Online Debate Game. Initially (around the beginning of Trump's first term) this actually functioned fairly well - liberalism was the dominant cultural force, institutions were fairly well regarded and all ideologies essentially had to acquiesce in some respects to the liberal conceit that reality is accurately and singularly defined by institutions, experts and democratic governance.

Over time, both through the rise of the far-right in actual governance and continuous pressure around the weaknesses and contradictions of liberalism, the right was able to make crucial cultural gains and begin abandoning this consensus reality defined by liberal institutions. Thought-terminating memetics like "fake news" became sufficient to disregard the liberal frame and this left Online Debate in a precarious position - the right wing was well-versed in operating within the liberal frame in order to eke out small victories here and there, while liberals enjoyed the dominant narrative and establishment backing. When right wing culture began to surpass the liberal status quo we found ourselves in a situation where a highly optimised memetic predator hit critical mass and utterly overwhelmed the existing ecosystem. Now we have liberals who don't know how to operate in any frame other than their own (either totally blackpilled and disengaged, fighting the left over tougher targets or clinging to the delusion that liberal institutions are still dominant and will hold in the face of an authoritarian regime dismantling them) up against the right-wing forged in hostile territory - eager to exercise their newfound power.

Some of Liberalism's suppressive tactics have come back to haunt them here - deplatforming and forcing the right-wing into private, less visible places gave them the perfect substrate to experiment and develop more complex and effective memetic weapons within.⁶ By contrast, the more publicly accepted far-left often has its novel half-formed and naive cultural products immediately seized, magnified and crystallized by right wing media conglomerates. This forced leftists to either defend a half-finished (and often bad) idea, cede territory or ineffectually attempt to make the complicated, nuanced argument I'm making now to a lay audience in a hostile fast-paced environment. The far right benefitted from stealthily developing ideas and tactics in private, sallying out to make attacks into the open field⁷ and retreating to iterate out of view. A guerilla war America has lost in the past.

How to Lose Debates and Influence People

If you also believe that debates are ineffective in the modern day, perhaps for reasons other than those I outlined above⁸ then you may find the following useful. If you believe debates have a utility and merit today and that with rational discourse and the right argumentation you can win over the average American I will take my own advice, cease to attempt to convince you otherwise and wish you luck.

At a fundamental level, rationalisations follow feeling. Feelings are powerful and useful tools of pattern recognition, compressing vast amounts of incomprehensibly complex data into a format that is mostly correct, most of the time, for most people. Importantly, feelings are driven by incentives. This is intuitive, you encounter noxious stimuli and feel pain to motivate you to retreat from it. You feel hunger to motivate you to pursue food. You feel to compel you to act. Humans are (efficiently) lazy, and will avoid hard work (like changing their psychological structures) in efficient ways. I'd always argue this is a different form of rationality, but most people who advocate for rationalism tend to be dismissive of these "irrational" justifications.

Nevertheless, this is the reality you operate in - if you cannot provide someone an incentive structure to change their beliefs, they will not change their beliefs. The first lesson to take from this is to never make it difficult for someone to change their beliefs. This sounds obvious, and yet without fail debate bros fixate on winning and extracting a humiliating emotional and social cost from everyone they supposedly aim to convince. What's your goal? Are you here to change minds or are you here to win status? You can be honest with yourself, you don't have to tell anyone. Perhaps you wish to earn status now to change minds later? By accumulating power you get to incentivise people directly to change!⁹ Totally valid, but very frequently one is mistaken for the other.

In this framework, if your goal is to change a mind then your objective, in many ways, should be to lose the "debate." You must pay your opponent something in order to incentivise their change, and if most debaters want the win more than anything else, there are certainly ways to change someone's position while "losing". In fact, the best case scenario here would be for your opponent to gradually take ownership of your position until they claim it was theirs all along, especially to their own audience. I've used this technique frequently myself¹⁰ offering people with very strong incentives and drives exactly what they want out of me in exchange for achieving my stated goals.

There are others like Fuentes who'll create memes like "Your Body My Choice" to give white liberal women the precise enemy they crave reacting to in order to gain mainstream prominence. Or MAGA who gave democrats the exact "Deplorables" they wanted (so much so that democrats frequently funded the most extreme candidates on the other side supposedly to weaken their electoral odds) getting free media attention in spades. In the liberal frame these always look like losses, surely the massive backlash against Fuentes or horror at MAGA's worst excesses mean these were self-destructive? Yet they continue to win the electorate and greater mainstream power year by year. Fuentes is on his greatest "generational run" of media appearances from PBD to Red Scare to Tucker Carlson to date.

So once again - never make it difficult for someone to change their beliefs, or alternately - always offer someone an incentive for changing their beliefs. At a more advanced level - offer your opponents an incentive to make a mistake.

How to Read Minds

But how do we know their incentives genuinely? This is where we come to our second lesson - To understand someone's incentives you must genuinely understand them. Every moment you waste arguing over institutional definitions for phrases they're using like "Critical Race Theory" or the buzzword of the moment, is time that should be spent understanding what they mean by "Critical Race Theory". As the information environment has siloed into various echo chambers, so has language, and your definition is not more valuable or important than theirs (certainly not now that they are in power). So when they declare their unyielding support for the constitution and you bristle certain in the knowledge that they are "lying" - understand what they mean by it. What values do they feel are being represented by their constitution, what incentivises them to declare allegiance to it. For gods sake, know the actual answer to the question - "Why did they say that?"

Ask yourself the important questions about what they are trying to achieve, then formulate a plan of action to provide it for them in exchange for them changing their position. You'll be astonished how quickly their desire for status supercedes the desire for them to convince you of a position. If you're willing to look like an idiot and make them the hero for adopting your position, this is a fair exchange of emotional or social capital for cultural capital.¹¹

Never forget that there is a reason you are in this community, and it is probable that they are there for similar reasons - the things you most want and least want to give up are the same things they most want and least want to give up. Not only does this mean you have insights into their mindset but if you have the excess supply of these things (hopefully borne of your very stable, grass-touching lifestyle, happy homelife, successful career, hobbies and friends) then you will be able to trade these emotional/social/egoic concessions for them adopting pieces of your worldview.

Why should I?

You don't have to. If you have a comfortable position ingroup signalling to your community in exchange for local status gains amongst that group, have at it. If anything, the understanding that you are merely playing a status game is a huge advantage, you may very well have lost to these people and been disturbed and frustrated that you got your ass handed to you despite an adherence to the strict rigor of debate, rationality and logic. Status signalling is a natural function of socialisation and everyone does it. I'm doing it right now, it's basically impossible to avoid. Pretending to yourself that you aren't doing it will oftentimes make you worse at it.

If, however, you have a genuine ideological project - a genuine desire to change minds, change the world and make things better for people you care about, whether trans people, the poor or the white race - these are valuable tools to adopt that will make you more effective at doing so.

What's my incentive? I just want to help of course!¹¹

Footnotes