It was not long ago that I was tasked with killing Batman.

“The House would kill Batman. Infoslide: You are a street gang leader in Gotham and have found Batman injured and defenseless in an alley.” It was the Debating Premier League, another competition, another motion, another binary. I spoke in favor. And over the course of the round, I constructed what I believed was a coherent, well-reasoned case for the execution of a fictional vigilante. My opponents constructed an equally coherent case against it. The adjudicators deliberated. A winner was declared.

I still do not know if killing Batman is a wise choice.

In over three years of debating, that motion came closest to capturing the absurdity at the heart of what competitive debating has become. Not because the motion was frivolous, though it was, but because the structure surrounding it revealed something true: that we had built an elaborate institution for the performance of thinking, and called it thinking itself.

Institutions today have a word for what they do to debating. They call it a format. British Parliamentary. Asian Parliamentary. World Schools. Each format comes with its own rituals, its own vocabulary, its own hierarchy of adjudicators who have themselves been trained in the same system and who reward, with uncanny consistency, the students who have best learned to replicate it. The binary is foundational and non-negotiable. You speak for the motion or against it. The nuance, the ambivalence, the genuine uncertainty that characterizes any honest engagement with a complex question, these are not assets in the competitive debating room. They are liabilities. You do not win rounds by saying “this is complicated.” You win rounds by appearing to have resolved the complication before anyone else noticed it existed.

Consider the motions themselves. “The House would abandon the search for Universal Moral Truths,” from Voxpop 2025. On the surface this looks like philosophy. It has the vocabulary of philosophy: moral, universal, truth. But examine it honestly and what you find is not a philosophical question but a rhetorical trap. The motion mistakes confusion for complexity. It disguises intellectual retreat as wisdom. To abandon the search for universal moral truths is not a position; it is a surrender dressed in academic clothing. And yet in the competitive debating room, the team that argues for abandonment with the most confidence, the most rhetorical fluency, the most precisely timed rebuttals, will likely win. The content is secondary. The performance is everything.

This is the central corruption. Competitive debating does not reward those who think most carefully. It rewards those who perform thinking most convincingly. And because the two are not the same thing, and because institutions have spent decades perfecting the metrics for one while claiming to measure the other, an entire generation of articulate young people has been trained to mistake fluency for depth, speed for rigor, and confidence for knowledge.

I want to be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying that competitive debating produces bad thinkers. Some of the sharpest minds I have encountered were formed in those rooms, and the discipline of constructing an argument under pressure, of listening to an opponent and responding in real time, of organizing thought into communicable structure, these are genuine skills and they are worth having. What I am saying is that the institution has outgrown its purpose. It has become self-referential. It trains students for debating rather than for thought, and it does so under the pretence that the two are identical.

The real debates, the ones that have actually changed the way I understand the world, have never happened in a competition room.

They happen at three in the morning, on a call with a friend, having just watched American Psycho for the first time. “It’s a terrible film because it glorifies violence.” “No, that’s the point, it’s satire.” “Though meant as satirical exaggeration, the violence becomes so graphic that it distracts from the film’s deeper ideas.” “It is actually used on purpose to highlight the moral emptiness the film is criticizing.” Back and forth, for two hours, neither of us performing for anyone, neither of us constrained by a motion or a format or the knowledge that an adjudicator is scoring our extensions. And at the end of it, we arrive not at a winner but at something better: two people who understand something more clearly than they did before. “I don’t like this film, but it was an important milestone for the history of cinema.” “I like this film, and it was an important milestone for the history of cinema.” We disagreed and we agreed and the disagreement did not need to be resolved for the conversation to have been real and valuable. That is what intellectual discourse actually looks like. It is pluralistic. It is patient. It does not end with a score.

The competitive debating room cannot produce that outcome because it is structurally designed against it. When the result of a conversation is predetermined to be a binary verdict, the conversation is not really a conversation at all. It is a trial, and everyone in the room knows that the verdict depends less on the truth of the matter than on the performance of the advocates.

And yet I do not regret debating. Not for a moment.

Because debating taught me the most important lesson I have received outside a classroom: that language is not merely a tool for communication. It is the architecture of thought itself. Wittgenstein understood this with frightening clarity. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I encountered that line as a teenager and it rearranged something in me. I had grown up fascinated by languages. I spoke four. I believed, in the uncomplicated way that children believe things, that the more languages I knew, the more of the world I would be able to understand. More vocabulary meant more world.

But debating forced a more uncomfortable confrontation with language. It showed me not only what language could do but what it could not. In the competition room I watched people use words with extraordinary precision and still fail to communicate anything true. I watched language deployed as armor, as distraction, as sleight of hand. And I began to understand that language, for all its power, is a finite instrument trying to map an infinite territory. When you turn it toward human emotion, toward grief or desire or shame or love, it begins to buckle. The words exist but they do not fit. We say “I am sad” and the sentence is technically accurate and almost entirely useless as a description of what is
actually happening inside us.

This is not a failure of language. It is a feature of human experience. There are things inside us that predate language, that exist below the level at which words can reach. And this gap, between what we feel and what we can say, is not a problem to be solved. It is the central fact of being human.

Realizing both the power and the limits of language led me naturally to Psychology. Not because Psychology resolves the gap, it does not, but because it is the most honest discipline I have found for studying it. Psychology is the attempt to understand what language struggles to fully capture: the mechanisms beneath behavior, the architecture of the unconscious, the way memory distorts and desire blinds and fear masquerades as reason. It is, in a sense, the study of everything that competitive debating tries to pretend does not exist. The irrational. The ambivalent. The irreducibly complex.

The competitive debating room taught me to perform certainty. Psychology taught me to respect uncertainty. I know which lesson has served me better.