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.