The Argument Was Scheduled Before You Were Born

I used to argue with people the way some men fight over parking spaces — furious, certain, and completely unable to explain why it mattered. Then I started watching debates instead of joining them, and a quieter question moved in: why does the other person believe what they believe? Not rhetorically. Literally. Trace it back. The opinion they are defending so aggressively tonight was assembled, without their consent, from a specific zip code, a specific set of parents, the particular church or absence of one, the teacher who shamed them in fourth grade, the friend group that made them feel safe at sixteen, the stranger at the gas station corner who maybe was the first adult to speak to them with respect. Go back further. The neurology they were handed at conception. None of that was chosen. The person across the table from you is, in one honest reading, a cumulative output — a long equation whose variables were loaded before they had language for preference. Which raises the problem that quietly dismantles the whole enterprise of argument: if the position they hold was determined by forces they never selected, and your position was equally constructed by forces you never selected, then what exactly is the argument for? Two weather systems colliding and demanding the other apologize for its barometric pressure. The determinist answer, followed to its logical end, is that meaning dissolves entirely — that your conviction, your change of mind, your persuasive moment, your silence, were all locked in since the first second of the universe's expansion. A screenplay written before the actors were born. I find I can't fully escape that vertigo. But I also can't live inside it, because the moment you accept total determinism as an operating principle rather than a philosophical exercise, agency becomes theater and every choice becomes costume. The tension, I think, is the only honest place to stand: aware enough of causality to approach the other person with something resembling mercy, resistant enough to it to still show up and mean what you say.