'You must be an accomplished debater', many people told me, considering that I have a strong logic in daily persuasion, as well as a passion for philosophical truth. I followed their advices and thought debate to be a suitable stage for me. But when I attended the school debate, my doubt aroused. I was uncomfortable with staying with a position not of my own, and simply didn't find much to say. I was not allowed to be persuaded and admit the opposite view, because otherwise it would have been called a discussion rather than a debate. In everyday life, I am convincing because I truly believe in my idea and can thus tell where the mistakes of the contradicting one come from. The debate, however, was not such a case. So, unsurprisingly, I lose.

As I was sitting in the auditorium and watching later debates, a series of thoughts hovered in my mind: for each debate issue, there must be an objective true side, regardless of our awareness of it; otherwise what would we be debating for? If the two sides of a debate are opposite, one of them can not be correct. Yet, usually we are hard to discover which side is wrong, and both demonstrate substantiated reasons. The entanglement of teacher judges deciding the final winner was the evidence.

Later, I found this paradox could be explained in many ways, either the existence of sophistry, or the mess appearing when we apply perfect logic to the issues of real world, where there do not even exist such mathematical foundations as axioms on which we base our reasoning. But what I discovered was that daily issues can have profound natures that we fail to see. Many people can't have noticed the nature of a debate as a sheer performance rather than a place searching for truth. Had they noticed so, they wouldn't have advised me attend that debate.