The Antidebate 

The afternoon of December 15th will feature The Antidebate, which is an experimental social praxis devised by Perspectiva. We are seeking to create a form of embodied and collaborative inquiry that includes multiple ways of knowing, generating and holding creative tension, and not seeking common ground, but seeking deeper appreciation and respect through shared experience. On the afternoon of December 15th, with the Christmas context as a part of the setting rather than part of the plot, you are warmly invited to participate in deepening our understanding of Peace.

We are making use of the tool Pol.is to gain deeper insight into the hidden meaning of statements through the wisdom of crowds. We kindly ask you to participate.

If you are attending on December 15th, follow the link to start the collaborative inquiry into the statement: 'If Peace is the Way, we will always have Violence'

You are invited to stay for the evening event and party which is free for antidebate participants.

The Recording of a Previous Antidebate held at The Realisation festival this summer

Why the Antidebate?
If the aim of debate is to protect and strengthen the epistemic commons required for peace, democracy and societal harmony to be possible, it is time to acknowledge that debates increasingly undermine that aim, because they rarely elicit or promote shared insight and understanding, and serve to reinforce and amplify the cultural and technological generator functions of the problem.

Various forms of slow empathetic discourse have their rightful place, but in our current historical context, where the smartphone is the new axis mundi, filter bubbles prevail and attention is easily hijacked, there appears to be little chance that dialogue alone will help reduce polarisation or significantly influence collective sensemaking.

The ‘anti’ feature of the antidebate is not about being against powerful speech, or competition, or intellectual entertainment, or disagreement. Rather, it’s against the compounding of polarisation, overvaluing speed as a feature of thought and speech, sophistry of all kinds, unreasonable certainty, and an over-emphasis on the kind of partial truth that might win the moment and play to the crowd, while disregarding ‘the whole truth’ that tends to be orphaned by the debate format, rather than its touchstone.

With your help, we seek to design, try out, refine and propagate an inspiring form of epistemic praxis grounded in intellectual humility and playful social experimentation to create a form of collective inquiry better suited to personal and societal needs in the 21st century.