Arguing Is a ConstructiveSkill: Building Your Blueprint

Our public conversations are in crisis. Every disagreement becomes a source of division and pain. But the deeper problem is quieter: millions of people have withdrawn entirely, convinced that disagreement is pointless, painful, and not worth their time. What we've lost, argues two-time world debate champion Bo Seo, is the belief that arguing can be constructive—and worse, we've stopped treating it as a skill worth learning. "We no longer view argument as a skill and as something to be worked at," Seo explains. "Rather, we see it as something we jump into out of instinct or defensiveness."

This is not a small problem for democracy. Good arguments, Seo contends, are what democracies aspire to be at their best: conversations between people who disagree, sometimes over irreconcilable things, who work to find areas of agreement and reach better solutions together. The tradition goes back to ancient Athens, where the ability to persuade and debate was considered a requirement of citizenship. It lived on in the coffee houses of London, where ordinary citizens would gather and debate as though they were parliamentarians. The American founders understood this too, establishing debate clubs in colleges and viewing the spirit of debate as central to their project. Yet somewhere along the way, we've allowed those skills to atrophy.

The Farmer-Malcolm X Debates: Three Lessons in Public Disagreement

One of the most instructive examples of serious, high-stakes public debate comes from the series of encounters between civil rights leader James Farmer and Malcolm X. These men disagreed fundamentally—on the nature of racial liberation, on the appropriate response to racism, on what Black freedom should look like. Yet they were "not shy about voicing their disagreements in really candid, strong, forthroated ways in the view of the public," knowing the other would respond respectfully and that through candid conversation they might "get somewhere they couldn't on their own."

Seo extracts three lessons from these debates. The first is training. Farmer studied under Melvin Tolson, one of the greatest debate coaches ever (later immortalized by Denzel Washington in the film The Great Debaters). Malcolm X found his voice through a debate program in prison, where inmates could debate against local colleges and schools. Both men arrived at their public confrontations with years of practice behind them. "In order for us to be able to host the kinds of public debates again that enlarges our understanding of what's possible, we have to start training and we have to start training our young people," Seo says.

The second lesson is format. In the Farmer-Malcolm X debates, speakers were given substantial time to present their arguments—not the one-to-two-minute segments punctuated by interruptions we've grown accustomed to. They had long stretches to develop their thoughts, knowing that once they finished, the other person would speak, and they would get another turn. This structure forced speakers to "sit back and listen knowing that their chance was not now, it was coming later." The architecture of the conversation itself shaped the quality of what happened inside it.

The third lesson is relationship. Behind the scenes of these famous public encounters, Farmer and Malcolm X were building a relationship beyond the disagreement itself. They visited each other's homes, introduced their families, spent time together outside the debate. This relational foundation made them freer within the formal debate space. "You can be more candid there. You can be fullthroated," Seo explains. "You can come at the other person honestly, but you know there's a relationship that you can fall back on."

How a Language Barrier Became a Teacher's Gift

Seo's own path to debating emerged from vulnerability. In the third grade, he moved from South Korea to Australia without speaking English. "The hardest part of crossing language lines of cultural lines was adjusting to real life conversation," he recalls, where people change subjects mid-sentence, where facial expressions don't match words, where the unpredictability compounds in disagreements when passions run high. His response was to become agreeable, to keep his thoughts to himself.

Then came a turning point: his fifth-grade teacher offered one promise—"in debate when one person speaks no one else does." For a boy constantly interrupted and spun out of conversation, this sounded like salvation. He joined the debate team. What he discovered, growing up on the margins, visibly out of place, struggling with language, was that he had learned to listen deeply. He had learned to read a room, to take its temperature before speaking. What began as a liability became equipment.

This reframing is crucial to Seo's entire philosophy of argument. Listening, he argues, is not passive. It's an active skill of "considering what the opposition could have said to further their argument, to improve their argument." It means stepping into the shoes of someone who disagrees with you, understanding not just their words but the logic beneath them. Through his childhood of displacement—moving countries, navigating cultural difference—Seo developed what he calls the ability to "see all the different sides of a place." This gift of perspective, born from outsider status, became the foundation of his later mastery of debate.

The RISA Framework: Picking Battles Worth Having

Not every disagreement deserves to become an argument. One of Seo's most practical contributions is the RISA framework, a four-question test for whether a fight is worth having. The letters stand for a framework Seo presents as a way to assess whether you should enter into a formal disagreement at all.

The first principle is relationship. Before engaging in serious argument, ask: Is there a relationship here beyond the disagreement itself? Without this foundation, arguments become brittle. The second is understanding whether the disagreement is real rather than an imagined slight or a misunderstanding. Many conflicts we assume are fundamental are actually based on miscommunication. The third considers whether you have alignment on basic values—enough common ground that productive conversation is possible. And the fourth is about being selective: you need to choose which disagreements are worth your energy and focus.

The RISA framework prevents what Seo calls the slide into "unruly conflict"—the kind where a single disagreement metastasizes into an all-encompassing dispute about every slight and grievance between two people. By starting with alignment and being intentional about which battles you fight, you create what Seo calls a "wriggle room" through which something like humility can enter.

Why We Fight Worst With the Ones We Love

There is something that happens in arguments with the people closest to us. The stakes feel higher. The hurt runs deeper. Seo identifies three dynamics that make intimate disagreements so fraught.

The first is defensiveness—a desire to shield oneself from hurt, to protect oneself from revealing too much vulnerability. The second is the urge to dominate, to prove oneself superior to the other person. And the third is that intimate partners and family members "know us best," so their criticism lands with particular force. They have ammunition.

"The combination of all of those things means that we end up focusing on the things that bring us apart rather than the things that we have in common," Seo says. Yet here is the paradox: you cannot genuinely connect with someone if your whole posture is defensive, protecting yourself from being known. And you cannot connect if your desire is to dominate or to prove your superiority. The very strategies we use to protect ourselves in intimate arguments are the ones that guarantee disconnection.

The Four Bad-Faith Arguers and How to Identify Them

Not everyone arguing in bad faith is the same. Seo identifies four archetypal bad-faith personas, each with a signature move.

First is the Dodger—someone who simply refuses to engage with your actual point. They change the subject, redirect the conversation, avoid taking a stance. Second is the Twister, whose signature move is to misrepresent what you've said. If you make a nuanced claim, the Twister will caricature it, collapsing complexity into something easier to attack.

Third is the Wrangler—someone whose aim is to turn the debate into a brawl, to dominate through aggression and bluster rather than argument. They use trash talk, name-calling, and performative confidence to shift the conversation from the substance of what's being discussed into a battle of wills. Seo notes that one way to handle wranglers is to "try and bring the conversation back into the mold of a debate," but there are instances where you may need to exit the conversation entirely. The power of bullies lies in their willingness to stay in the fight; the antidote is sometimes to refuse to play.

Fourth is the Liar—someone who makes false claims and doesn't care if they're exposed. But Seo notes that many lies are more sophisticated than outright falsehoods. They're selective truths presented without context, or claims about communities ("this group is lower than the population average") that replace nuance with a single statistic. The liar's move is to use rhetoric not to illuminate but to obscure.

Rhetoric as Tool and Weapon: The Schopenhauer Problem

Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th-century philosopher, was fascinated by rhetoric—but not in a flattering way. He documented what he called the "dark arts of arguing," the rhetorical tricks people use to win arguments regardless of truth. This troubled him. Was this all rhetoric was—manipulation? Was this all people were capable of?

Seo doesn't dismiss Schopenhauer's concerns. Many abuses of rhetoric occur when the claims being made are designed to deceive rather than illuminate. But Seo argues for a different possibility: rhetoric can also be a tool for clarity and persuasion in service of truth. The key is transparency about how you came to believe what you believe. "By explaining how we went through that process ourselves," Seo says, "people may not always know very much about the kinds of broad-ranging contributions" that support your view, but they can follow your reasoning.

The question, then, is structural. If we want people to value honesty and clarity in conversation, we need to set up systems that reward those things. Anonymous commenting, algorithm-driven social media feeds that amplify outrage, debate formats that discourage nuance—these structures incentivize bad faith. Conversely, formats that require speakers to identify themselves, that reward depth over virality, that give space for genuine exchange, create conditions where better arguing can happen.

The Nixon-Khrushchev Standoff: Composure Under Pressure

One of the most instructive moments in Seo's teaching involves a Cold War standoff between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev—a moment when the stakes could not have been higher. In the face of genuine tension and the possibility of escalation, one of the two men made a move that defused the situation. The move was levity. A joke. Something that "reset and took some of the heat out of what would otherwise have been people talking past each other."

This is not trivial. Under extreme pressure, when egos are engaged and power is at stake, the ability to introduce a moment of lightness, to step back from the edge of confrontation, is a form of mastery. It requires what Seo calls a kind of breath—a pause before you respond, a moment of composure before you escalate. "In the last moments before a debater goes on stage, they know to take a breath," Seo observes. This isn't empathy in and of itself, but it "creates a wriggle room through which something like humility" can enter.

Why Silence Isn't Always the Answer

There is a temptation, in the face of bad-faith arguing, to simply withdraw. To stay silent. To refuse to engage. And sometimes, silence is the right move—particularly when engaging would give a bad-faith actor a platform they don't deserve, or when you're dealing with someone whose sole aim is to provoke and dominate.

But silence has a cost. It can signal assent. It can allow misinformation to stand unchallenged. And it can reinforce the sense that honest disagreement is impossible, that the public square is too toxic for good-faith people to enter. Seo's argument is not that we should argue about everything with everyone. Rather, it's that we should be intentional and skilled about when we do argue, who we argue with, and how we structure those arguments.

The alternative to bad faith is not silence. It's the restoration of argument as a craft, as a skill that can be trained and developed. It's the recognition that democracy itself depends on our ability to disagree well—to listen across difference, to hold firm to our convictions while remaining open to the possibility that we might be wrong, to seek common ground without erasing genuine disagreement.

Where to go from here

If you're interested in developing your own arguing skills, Seo's book Good Arguments provides both the philosophy and practical frameworks. The RISA test offers a way to evaluate which disagreements are worth your time and energy. Learning to identify bad-faith personas—the Dodger, Twister, Wrangler, and Liar—gives you tools to recognize manipulation and respond effectively. And perhaps most importantly, returning to the foundational lessons of the Farmer-Malcolm X debates reminds us that serious public disagreement, conducted with training, appropriate format, and underlying relationship, can be not divisive but genuinely enlarging—expanding what we thought was possible.