Or: Why Schopenhauer Would Have Warned Us About Certain People
There are books that help us understand people.
And there are books that leave us wondering whether some people might be best avoided altogether.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s The Art of Being Right undoubtedly belongs to the second category.
At first glance, the book appears to be a manual for successful argumentation. Schopenhauer presents thirty-eight stratagems that allow a person to win an argument even when the stronger case belongs to someone else.
You can exaggerate your opponent’s position.
You can quietly redefine words.
You can abandon the subject and attack the person.
You can open side fronts.
You can appeal to authority when your own thoughts prove insufficient.
You can confuse, distract, provoke, and insult.
In short:
You can do almost anything except honestly search for the truth.
The remarkable thing about the book is not that these tricks work.
The remarkable thing is how familiar they feel.
Because Schopenhauer is not describing some rare species of manipulator.
He is describing human beings.
Or at least those aspects of human nature that we prefer not to discover in ourselves.
Most readers approach these stratagems as tools.
That is understandable.
Who would not like to know how manipulation works?
Who would not like to recognize when someone is trying to outmaneuver them rhetorically?
Yet the longer one reads, the more the nature of the book changes.
The toolbox becomes a mirror.
And that is where the discomfort begins.
Because suddenly one no longer recognizes merely political opponents.
One recognizes colleagues.
Relatives.
Commentators.
Parties.
Television panels.
Influencers.
And occasionally, rather unfortunately, oneself.
What makes the book so fascinating is that Schopenhauer produced a remarkably accurate description of social media almost two centuries before the internet existed.
Consider the stratagem of exaggeration.
Someone says:
„We should discuss the problems in our education system.“
The response comes immediately:
„Oh, so you want to abolish schools altogether.“
The opponent never said any such thing.
Yet now he finds himself defending a position he never held.
Welcome to the age of the straw man.
Or consider the shifting of definitions.
A word initially means A.
Later it means B.
Eventually it means everything and nothing at all.
Two people then spend hours passionately arguing about the same term without noticing that they are discussing entirely different things.
Welcome to contemporary politics.
Even more elegant is the personal attack.
As long as arguments remain the subject of discussion, there is always the risk that someone else’s arguments may be better.
So the question changes.
Instead of asking:
„Is this true?“
we ask:
„Who said it?“
And suddenly the debate is no longer about evidence but about motives, origins, character traits, voting habits, social background, or hairstyle.
A remarkably effective method.
Particularly when the arguments have run out.
All of Schopenhauer’s stratagems share one characteristic.
They do not serve the search for truth.
They serve self-defense.
The book is therefore less a theory of reasoning than a theory of vanity.
The real enemy in Schopenhauer’s examples is rarely falsehood.
The real enemy is the possibility of being wrong.
And that is where the book becomes political.
Ideologies do not thrive on truth.
They thrive on certainty.
Anyone who already possesses all answers no longer needs questions.
Anyone who is already right no longer needs evidence.
Anyone who already owns the truth no longer requires arguments.
That is why ideological discourse so often resembles Schopenhauer’s catalog.
Terms are redefined.
Opponents are caricatured.
Critics are morally discredited.
Complexity is simplified.
Doubt becomes suspicious.
The goal is not understanding reality.
The goal is being right.
The danger does not end with ideologies.
It concerns every democratic society.
Democracy depends on disagreement.
It depends on competing views.
It even depends on conflict.
But it does not depend on people being right.
It depends on people being capable of correcting mistakes.
Science works that way.
Courts work that way.
Parliaments are supposed to work that way.
Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights rests upon that principle.
It does not claim infallibility.
Rather, it attempts to establish rules that protect human beings from the consequences of human error.
This is why the ability to be wrong is not a weakness.
It is a democratic virtue.
Those who are never wrong eventually become dangerous.
For infallibility is a quality usually associated with gods.
Or fanatics.
And history suggests that the distinction is sometimes difficult to maintain.
A friend of mine has a particularly interesting interpretation of Schopenhauer’s book.
He does not read The Art of Being Right as a guide to winning arguments.
For him, the entire work ends with a far simpler question:
Why would one maintain relationships with people for whom such techniques are necessary in the first place?
That question may cut closer to the heart of the matter than all thirty-eight stratagems combined.
Because every functioning relationship—whether friendship, love, science, or democracy—rests upon an unspoken assumption:
That truth matters more than vanity.
Once that assumption disappears, the stratagems begin.
Once the stratagems begin, conversation ends.
And once conversation ends, all that remains is the struggle over who gets to claim victory.
Schopenhauer would probably have called this human nature.
Perhaps he was right.
That may also explain why his little book still feels so modern.
Not because it teaches us how to defeat others.
But because it reveals how easily we defeat ourselves.
The greatest threat to truth is often not the deliberate liar.
The liar usually knows what he is doing.
The greater threat is the person who has become incapable of imagining that he might be mistaken.
Such people rarely seek truth.
They seek confirmation.
And once an entire society begins rewarding certainty more than curiosity, being right becomes more important than being correct.
At that point, Schopenhauer’s catalog ceases to be a collection of debating tricks.
It becomes a warning label.
For democracies.
For ideologies.
For institutions.
And perhaps most of all, for ourselves.
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