The internet is very good at exploiting people's need to always be right. We could say that social media is a matchin game of people dying on the stupidest hills, arguing with people they don't know about and getting surprisingly angry from those interactions.
But what is at the root of this need to be right? Why would a man 1 focus on "winning" arguments over his wife even over trivial matters? Let me try to brainstorm and come with some sort of satisfying conclusion.
The first thing I notice about chronic arguers is that they live under structures of power which do not give them much control over their lives. This isn't a very big claim to make, since the vast, vast majority of people in our times are losers in a system which increasingly favors the top 1%, and even the 1% of the 1%. Lacking agency in their own life, it makes sense to me that they would turn to surrogates for control, such as video games, watching sports, micro-managing others, and winning arguments.
Thus we could say that when people do not have agency in their own life, they retreat to having the "correct" opinions and trying to convince others of those. As Luke Smith writes here, Politics matters most to slaves, because their existence is founded upon the obedience of a system they cannot control much about, besides through the nominal act of voting which does very little in the face of companies seeking profits, and the technological system expanding its reach wide and deep.
The second is that our world is incredibly complex, far beyond what anyone could understand, and as such disagreements are inevitable. I do not think disagreements are inherently problematic, but because we live in a monocultural world, one where we either subsume to the assumptions and structures of the one interconnected system we live in, or find ourselves outside of it all, we are pushed towards thinking about who is "right", as opposed to the different tradeoffs of different worldviews and lifestyles.
As such, people are forced to live with one another, even with radically diverging views, because as Jacques Ellul noted in The Technological Society, technique, which is at the root of our system, ends up reaching in all domains of life, and subsumes choice in favor of integration and increasing efficiency 2. It is undeniable that people living in less technologically complex times had disagreements, it's difficult to imagine otherwise after all, but because their lives weren't modulated by an all-encompassing system, these disagreements were within reach. Contrast the disagreements within a small tribe, or within a village, to those of an entire city or country. In the former case, concessions and exceptions and flexibility are possible, whereas in the latter, a rigid legal and political system arises so as to create unambiguous treatments of various situations, no matter the context, which inevitably leads to unfairness, abuse, and a class of people who are in a position to take advantage of such a system. 3
The third is that of course, platform dynamics reinforce controversy and polarization, because they are very good at capturing attention and driving traffic to a website. The largest sites for social media explicitly optimize for user retention, but do not care about the quality of the interaction or whether the lives of the users are improved from their time spent there. After all, user retention is both easy to measure and profitable, whereas quality of life is vague and makes you lose at short-term power games.
Deeper than platform dynamics however is the mimetic reality that controversy is very good at spreading itself. 4 One person feels attacked by another's points or tones, then starts misrepresenting the other's views, which leads to a spiral of bad faith communication, then other people see this mess because social media is public, they start taking sides and debate, often taking ideas completely outside of the initial context, and this keeps spiralling out of control with more and more dehumanization. Controversy spreads well because it is a form of narrow awareness, which makes you blind to the pattern and focus on antagonizing the other person. This form of narrow awareness tends to also be good at winning finite adversarial games, such as developing technology and whatnot, but I'm getting ahead of myself, it's a whole can of worms to unpack.
The fourth aspect I notice about the constant need to be right is that schooling is imbued with this idea that it is not okay to be wrong or simply ignorant about subjects. In the real world, it is very valuable to know that you do not know, such that you do not take reckless decisions and can ask someone else or do more research on your own. During the lessons, you are not asked to ponder about questions you are interested in and then see how you can make sense of that, by yourself or through external resources—what real learning consists of. Instead, there is a curriculum which everyone must follow, and which contains the right(TM) answers, which must be recited during tests and exams.
Perhaps the most worrying consequence of schooling is not just that people learn very little, and do not really know how to learn, it's that they start associating knowledge and understanding as personal values. Which is to say, failing a test is not just an indication of what you didn't understand and can do better, no, it's a failure, which makes you a failure! Instead of viewing tests as landmarks in the process of learning, they are viewed as the goalposts, the ends in themselves. This unsurprisingly leads a lot of people to game the tests, as Goodhart's Law states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", because they do not care about the process of learning.
It also leads to people developing a very fragile ego with regards to what they know, because their sense of worth is fused with it. They become defensive—notice how you have to defend your thesis in university, and how defensive people get in debates?—because they went through many long years of schooling which attacked their sense of safety and worth, and punished them for not knowing, instead of helping people get better at learning.
On a more basic level, there is a momentum to the whole game of arguing. Once someone has an opinion, which they are compelled to do in our interconnected world 5, they feel the need to defend it again and again, even if they realize along the way that they are wrong. This tendency to double down on flimsy opinions happens individually and especially collectively.
As far as I can tell, there aren't many situations in our lives which reward honesty and apologizing. By and large, we live in a pretty immature world, one of posturing and defending, one where people constantly feel the need to justify and see themselves as being good. This is probably one of the many reasons why personal relationships are such trainwrecks: people who are functional in society learn obedience and how to play power games, but not how to love, and people who are less functional are burdened with money problems and everything which is downstream of those.
I would say that there are two sides to the dynamic of constantly needing to be right: on one hand the ego which feels the need to exert its agency in whatever way it can find, and build an armor of justifications to defend itself. And on the other hand, the system, which forces everyone to live under it and "play nice".
Because human beings are so wildly different and desire freedom from all those demands, people go from a workplace which demands constant obedience and compromise, and swing all the way back to self-absorption and self-assertion in their personal lives, hence the need to always be right about everything.
The people who do not engage in that game are either incredibly deficient, in the sense that they let others around them decide for them, and as such do not lead their own lives. Or they are the few who are driven by purpose, by something bigger than just their self, the ones we end up calling geniuses. Only they know that the Truth will always find its way, even if it is buried under a heap of bullshit, distraction and power games, which is why they do not hold onto the need to convince others around them.
Defend the Truth they will, and must of course, but they know that opinions are very brittle things in the face of important matters, such as Love and Death. What is a mere opinion about Death worth? Nothing. This is why people constantly share their opinions with one another, so that they do not have to look at their own death.
1 It's pretty much always men
2 I would add that this efficiency is narrow, in the sense that a car is more efficient at solving the narrow problem of getting to point A to point B, but it also creates the larger social problem of making things further away from regular people, which is why in our times, people spend a lot of time in commutes, arguably more than our ancestors from the Middle Ages or Antiquity.
3 The middle class certainly has a lot more wealth and social connections than the lower class, enough so that they do not have to worry on a daily basis about having enough money to get by, but they do not really have the means (and desire, the middle class is the most socialized) to bypass the constraints of the system so as to favor themselves. The most powerful companies can, even through legal means, avoid taxes (evasion is the illegal one) and hire lawyers to navigate complex bureaucracies, while smaller businesses simply cannot. This is one of the many ways in which a suffocating bureaucracy ends up concentrating wealth even more amongst the rich.
4 See Sort by Controversial by Scott Alexander for instance
5 Ever heard someone say: "No I don't have an opinion actually"? I tend to do this but I am a contrarian after all, and I must say, it's quite relieving to not care about things.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Maturity Narrowawareness Truth Unfolding Conflict Justification Essayworthy
2025-09-01