In my last post, I discussed my former addiction to arguing on the internet, and some of the ways I realized I had a problem. That was fourteen years or so ago. Since then, it’s been a constant struggle to avoid falling into my old patterns.
One especially challenging aspect is that obviously I can’t stay off the internet entirely, so I can’t avoid my triggers. And I do enjoy discussing things on the internet. But there isn’t always a clear dividing line between a discussion and an argument. So I have to remain ever vigilant about myself and my tendencies.
I have a close friend who is a wonderful person in real life, but also has an addiction to arguing on the internet, and has yet to recognize it. This is exacerbated by him having extremist heterodox opinions, so he vehemently disagrees with everyone about something. (I also have heterodox opinions and disagree with everyone about something, but I’m not so vehement or extremist about it.)
Also, he tends to argue in particularly obnoxious ways – even more than when I was in the throes of my addiction. This has alienated a lot of people, cost him friendships, and even most of the people who are still friends with him have blocked him on Facebook. I’ve tried to talk candidly with him about his addiction and style of argument, but haven’t been able to make him recognize he has a problem. He just insists other people are upset that he speaks the truth, he’s fighting the good fight, they’re trapped in their bubbles – all the excuses I used to make. Basically, his problems are other people’s fault, because they’re the ones who are wrong.
Recently, he posted something to Facebook that pushed my buttons. I keep this blog as a politics-free zone, so I’m not going to say what this particular thing was. Even though I should have known better, I got sucked into arguing with him. After a bit of back and forth, he pulled one of his favorite obnoxious arguing tricks, where he pretended like I said something completely different than what I had actually said, and wrote a lengthy response based on that. I wrote up an angry reply about how this is why people always get fed up with him, and he was pulling some Bugs Bunny nonsense in trying to trick me into arguing against myself.
But then I had a tiny voice in my head wondering if I should actually send that to him. This is one of the techniques I use to fight my internet-argument addiction: Whenever I hear that voice, instead of posting what I’ve written, I’ll e-mail it to myself so I can think about whether posting it is a good idea. And invariably, after a few minutes or a few hours, I’ll realize it’s not.
So instead of that long angry response, I just sent a much shorter response saying, “If you’re going to pretend I said totally different things than what I actually said so you can argue against that, you can continue this conversation with yourself.”
He replied with, “Oh, are you denying such and such?” And then I didn’t respond.
It takes two people to have an argument, and by simply not responding, I had ended it. I preserved our friendship, and we’re still able to continue exchanging pleasant and interesting Facebook comments on other posts.
His argument addiction is his problem, not my problem. I’d like to help him, but if he’s not interested in receiving help, I have to accept that.
But my argument addiction is my problem, and I need to remember not to fall back into it.
[…] That was a decade and a half ago. There was a recent incident that brought all this to mind, but this post is already pretty long, so I’m going to break it up into two parts. See part two. […]