Are You Arguing or Just Defending Your Ego?
Why arguments sometimes become personal.
We can all agree that we have been in arguments with our loved ones where, after 15 minutes, we suddenly realise: What were we even discussing? How is this point relevant to our conversation? And how did I become the one who was wrong in this whole situation?
Somehow, a perfectly reasonable disagreement turns into something entirely different.
Not long ago, I had one such argument with my father.
First of all, in a typical Indian household, one does not argue with elders, let alone one’s father. But somehow, during one of those famous father’s speeches, I found myself doing exactly that.
The subject was simple: Why had I turned down a rather good marriage proposal?
For a good 15–20 minutes, I was lectured about the importance of marriage, society, stability, and the ideal age to have children. Of course, the last part was never stated directly, but you get what I mean.
“Marriage is what gives you stability.”
As if I was very unstable at that moment. (Of course, I kept that thought to myself.)
“Society will respect and accept you.”
As if I was some unwanted element of society.
“The sooner you get married, the better your chances of having children at the right age.”
Well… there he might have had a point.
But then I decided to interject, thinking, rather optimistically, that we were having a fruitful conversation.
I told him that I hadn’t spent days and nights studying only to get married and settle down. I wanted to explore life, meet new people, and experience things before taking that step.
And then I brought up something from his own life.
“Didn’t you marry in your early thirties? And didn’t you have a child at the age of 50?”
There it was. I had exposed what I thought was a rather obvious contradiction. How could he advise me against something he had done himself?
For a moment, I felt as if a weight had been lifted off my chest.
That moment lasted approximately two seconds.
“Is that the way you talk to your father?”
And just like that, the discussion changed direction.
What started as a disagreement about marriage became a discussion about my personality, my respect for elders, my past decisions, and somehow, even my marks in the second semester of engineering.
Yes, my engineering marks.
Apparently, a child who did not perform particularly well in college was not qualified enough to question his father’s advice on marriage.
What a shift!
I should also mention that my father is a psychologist. So he might know a thing or two about human emotions. And who better to experiment on than your own children?
Just kidding. Or am I?
But once the argument was over, I began wondering what had actually happened.
Was my father expecting agreement rather than a response? Did I hurt his ego by bringing up his own choices? Did he feel that I was questioning his character rather than his advice?
Or was I doing something similar myself?
After all, my intention was not simply to argue that marrying later could work. I wanted to point out that he was being hypocritical. I was questioning the consistency of his advice by bringing up his own decisions.
And perhaps that was where the conversation started becoming personal.
Instead of discussing whether marrying early was necessarily better, we had begun discussing each other’s credibility.
His past decisions were now part of my argument. My academic performance had become part of his.
Neither of those things, by itself, answered the original question: Was I wrong to turn down the marriage proposal?
This made me curious about something bigger.
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Why do we sometimes stop examining an argument and start examining the person making it? Why does someone’s character, history, or personal choices suddenly become more important than the point they are trying to make?
While exploring this question, I came across a logical fallacy called Ad Hominem — a form of reasoning in which someone’s personal characteristics or circumstances are used to undermine their argument instead of addressing its merits.
A wise person, I believe, is someone who knows when to stop, analyse his or her thoughts, and then respond. An unwise person, on the other hand, is often more interested in winning the argument, mostly to satisfy his or her own ego.
And when we run out of reasonable arguments, what do we do?
Sometimes, instead of questioning the argument, we start questioning the other person’s intellect, credibility, or character. As if lowering someone’s intelligence automatically makes whatever they are saying stupid.
But does it?
Imagine Elon Musk giving you excellent business advice back in 2008, when Tesla and SpaceX were struggling financially and facing the possibility of failure.
Would you have taken his advice?
In hindsight, you might say yes. But imagine being there in 2008, without knowing what the future held. You could easily have responded, “If you’re so good at giving business advice, why are your own companies failing?”
It’s a tempting response, isn’t it?
But does the fact that his companies were struggling necessarily make his advice wrong? His business record might give you a reason to examine his advice more carefully, but it doesn’t automatically invalidate the reasoning behind it.
And that brings us to another interesting question:
Why do people become defensive when their beliefs are challenged?
One possible explanation lies in confirmation bias, our tendency to favour information that supports what we already believe. We may find it easier to question the person presenting an uncomfortable argument than to reconsider our own position.
Interestingly, we may not even realise when we are doing this.
Research on the bias blind spot[1] suggests that people often recognize biases more readily in others than in themselves. In other words, we may be quite good at identifying flaws in someone else’s reasoning while overlooking similar flaws in our own.
Now, reflecting on the anecdote about my father with which I started this article, I wonder whether his advice was entirely wrong.
Perhaps he had his reasons for encouraging me to marry early. Perhaps he was trying to help me avoid mistakes he believed he had made himself.
And what did I do?
In my own search for an argument, I questioned his credibility by pointing out his hypocrisy. But wasn’t that also a personal attack?
Instead of explaining why I disagreed with his advice, I brought up his own marriage and questioned the consistency of his position.
I could simply have said, “I understand your concerns, but I disagree, and here are my reasons.”
Yet I chose another route.
And that is where I realized that I, too, might have fallen into the trap of Ad Hominem, more specifically, the tu quoque fallacy, where we attempt to dismiss an argument by pointing out that the person making it has not followed their own advice.
Of course, that doesn’t mean my father was necessarily right either. His advice and my response needed to be evaluated on their own merits.
So, can we recognize when we are moving away from the argument and towards attacking the person?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But there is one thing I have started practising.
Whenever I know that I am about to enter an argument, or that one is almost inevitable, I remind myself of one simple possibility:
I could be wrong.
That’s it. These words. Although getting yourself to genuinely accept them takes practice.
And trust me, this is where the battle is ‘won’.
Not against the person standing opposite you, but against your own ego.
At least, that is what has helped me.
But attacking the person is only one way to escape an argument. What if, instead of attacking you, someone twists your words into something you never meant in the first place?
Well, that is another interesting fallacy called Straw Man.
And we’ll explore that next.
