THW prefer a short and successful life over a mundane healthy life

PROPOSITION

Prime Minister

Mr.Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, members of the house -

When Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist, was detained inside Auschwitz during the Holocaust, he observed his fellow prisoners to find out what kind of people survived until the end. His observations are shocking. Because it wasn’t the strongest people who had survived until the end, it wasn’t the smartest people nor the most knowledgeable or well-skilled. Frankl noticed, that the common factor behind the survivors was that they had a clear purpose to life. They had a reason as to why they had to live, some goal they had to fulfil and therefore could not die before meeting that goal.

Ladies and gentlemen, we on the government team prefer a life that is meaningful and worthy of living. Therefore we prefer a life of success, even if it means we have to trade off some health or longevity, although society usually tells us these should be top priorities in life. These are the costs we are willing to pay if it means we can escape the mundane life of a livestock that mindlessly goes about his daily life without achieving anything.

Let’s make some explicit definitions. We mean success, by an individual fulfilling his purpose in life; this is going to be different person by person, for people like Elon Musk, this will be transforming the way people live through innovations and science; for Warren Buffet it will be studying about the nature of human interaction and then earning a huge amount of money from it. For Martin Luther King, it was restoring equality in an oppressive society.

Secondly, Short or Healthy are relative concepts and not so important, as we want to debate about whether generally these aspects can be sacrificed. But at the same time we should not go to extremes, obviously we think with our average life expectancy almost going up to a hundred years for millennials, short successful life of dying when you are in your 30’s is a fair characterization.

Lastly, we define mundane life as a repeated boring life, but the additional caveat is that it also has to be an unsuccessful life in order for this debate to work. Because otherwise the opposition can simply hijack the debate and then say “oh we want to defend a healthy and long life that is mundane but also successful”. We want to avoid this, and plus we think it is fair to say that most people that lead a mundane life are bored because they feel that their life and work is meaningless and purposeless anyways.

 

Let’s move onto the arguments.

Firstly, we will prove that a life with a clear purpose is a life worth living. Secondly, we will tell you how health can’t be prioritized over success of the said purpose. Lastly, we’ll tell you why we want to reject the social norms of mundaneness and health in favor of personally defined success.

Argument 1: First argument, is why purpose of life is a prerequisite of a worthy life

In the modern society, we are moving constantly away from religious realm and into the zones of secularity. The scary aspect of this departure from God is that it’s much more difficult to find out why we need to live in the first place. It’s all too easy to fall into nihilism, or the belief that there is no meaning in life or anything. This is because scientifically and objectively speaking, we are really insignificant. I could die right now and of course some people might be sad for a while but people will move on because everyone dies some time, and there are 70 billion people like you and me.

Therefore sadly, life isn’t meaningful by default. If you go through the same routine over and over again, with no thought on the prospect of the future, no thought on what kind of goals you are moving towards, then your life is unmemorable and null.

Let’s take a very simplified example here. We don’t usually remember what we had for lunch even when only a few days have passed, if we eat it at the school cafeteria. Why? Because the food is not given by my choice, and the reason why we have lunch is because we have to go through this routine that wasn’t part of my deliberation. The school tells me I have to eat it so I do. Then there is really no difference at all if I didn’t have that lunch, it was a meaningless meal that nobody remembers and cares about.

But when we have lunch plans with somebody to discuss some urgent matter with them, or to celebrate their birthday or whatever, we do remember, even after months and quite possibly years. Why? Because I planned and purposefully had that lunch, and that lunch made a difference in my life, in terms of relationship with that person.

In this sense, it is now necessary and crucial that we find the value of life from actively searching for meaning. Here we want to point out two things. Firstly, whatever it is, to have lived a successful life would mean that this person necessarily had some kind of a purpose or a goal that he deliberately moved towards. Secondly, since it’s a success, his success probably left a mark in this world that is unique.

Why is this? A mundane life goes about the same routine over and over again, not out of free will and purposeful deliberation, but because you were passively pushed into this job that you don’t care about, into this family you have to take care of because that’s what’s expected of a good father or a mother, then your life is really meaningless. This purpose finding is something that really differentiates humans from the rest of the animals. Sure we can just live by earning money and eating and sleeping the way you are expected to. But then what’s the difference between your life, and the life of an animal in a farm? In order to transcend bare survival and actually live as humans, we have to imbue meaning into our life. Subjectively, you are the only person who can imbue your life with meaning, so if you give up, then you have no subjective meaning.

Secondly, on a principle level, health and longevity should not be prioritized over success.

Ladies and gentlemen, we would argue on side government that health is also an important value in society. It is not our burden in this debate to prove that health is entirely unimportant. But what we are willing to argue is that health should not be prioritized over the concept of success. Why? Because health is merely a means to achieve the end.

In all it’s forms, individuals have a purpose of that life. Having a strong physical capacity, being able to live long enough, simply function as a means to an end for individuals to achieve their independent goals.

Sure when we’re unhealthy then it’s painful and it feels pretty bad, but the converse doesn’t hold. A healthy person doesn’t constantly and always appreciate the fact that he is healthy and regards this as an amazing condition, because we look at a healthy state to be a default state rather than something that is amazing and unique. Moreover, since these people lead mundane lives and health was just given to them, chances are they won’t fully appreciate their health anyways.

Of course it would be nice to have both long and successful life, but as the motion states, if we have to sacrifice one, we should pick the success because success is the end and health is simply the means to that end. It makes no sense to sacrifice the ends for the means, because without the ends of success, then there is no point in the means of healthy long life. They lose the significance.

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Deputy Prime Minister

Our last argument is on how why we should actively reject social norms of how we should live.

Mr./Madame speaker, despite the fact that everyone is unique, the society constantly expects us to perform certain tasks just to fit in and be mundane. For example, mundane norms like entering college, get a sustainable job, get married before mid-thirties - are not truly representative of how each individual wants their life to fold out.  It’s actually just something that people do passively because everyone else is doing it. Following this passively makes your life stereotypical and boring, and therefore we believe most of mundane lives come about in this form. This is bad for two reasons.

Firstly, mundaneness often comes in a form that is not suitable to the individuals following the mundane norms. Getting a car, getting higher education, a house, a job, these things take massive amount of effort. The amount of effort that could’ve gone towards searching out what actually makes me motivated and investing efforts into it. It’s already famous that many of the famous well-achieved persons like Bill Gates are college dropouts. Same thing with many sports stars that don’t go to high school. You have to reject the mundane requests from society, because they are not a matching solution to your individual capacity and ideals, but if you keep conforming to the mundane requests, you will never be able to explore who you are and what you can do.

Secondly, living a mundane life also includes not challenging the current social constructs and views, and not going out of one’s way to actually question its legitimacy. Because during Japanese colonialist period, shutting up about freedom and independency would be the mundane healthy way to sustain your life.

But there were people like 유관순 who challenged these ideas because they had a strong goal in life. Was her life full of pain? Yes sure. But what truly makes humans humane is the choice that we can deliberately make, to have a purpose in life that is worthy of pain, worthy of sacrificing the comforts of living like a livestock. And these humane aspects ultimately move our society forward.

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OPPOSITION

Leader of Opposition

Mr./Madame Speaker, on side opposition, we are sick and tired of being  brainwashed, with this weird, unrealistic social trend that are obsessed with success being fed through the media. The image of being rich, having high social status, making a change in the world; these are being made by commercial interests in movies, dramas, advertisements, and then are forced down our throats. We reject this notion. We think that rather, appreciation of small everyday events and sharing this feeling with your families and friends are what happiness is all about. And to this end, a healthy mundane life is the better alternative.(45초)

Argument 1: Success in itself doesn’t bring about happiness

We’re going to chronologically explain and analyze properly where happiness actually comes from. Firstly, before the actual event of success, you will have to go through much pain and sacrifice in order to achieve your goal, whatever it may be. Why is that? It’s because when people define an achievement as success, it has to be difficult to achieve. For example, graduating high school here in Korea wouldn’t be called success, because it’s not difficult and education is pretty accessible. But in many developing countries, high school diploma would be very much a success.

We perceive success by looking at how much pain went into it. So it’s going to be very difficult and painful to reach success, especially to the extent where you are actively giving up health and longevity as the condition given in the motion.

Then the important question is,  where do people actually get happiness?

We think that actual happiness that comes from success, comes about AFTER the event of success, when you can APPRECIATE the result of your work.

It could be in a very materialistic form, like spending a lot of money that you’ve earned, or feeling good as people recognize you in public. But what we want to focus on rather, is the action of cherishing the past memories and experiences, and sharing them with others. Let’s take the example of marriage ceremony.

For example, the actual event of marriage would take a lot of effort and stress, in planning out the logistics, budget, who we invite, what we wear. And the day of marriage may be really hectic, because we really really don’t want to mess it up. But why do people really obsess over the marriage ceremony anyways? It’s because you have that special experience that you can share, talk about and cherish with your soulmate for the rest of your life. That’s why we try to be successful. That’s why government team’s burden of defending a short successful life is especially difficult. You die when you can finally enjoy what you have achieved.

Let’s take an actual realistic example of the motion. Heath Ledger went through great deal of pain to achieve his success in the role of the Joker in the Dark Knight. He was actively trading off his health and life, overdosing on drugs and mentally breaking down to fit in the role. Then as he finished his masterpiece he died from overdose. We don’t want this life. You just spent so much time toiling away for success then you die in vain, unable to actually cherish what you have achieved.

Argument 2: Characterization of a mundane healthy life and prove why it will bring about much happiness.

We think that the core characteristic of a mundane life is that it is very much stereotypical, and average. We do what we expect people to normally do. Get a job, get married, go on family vacations, maybe a picnic on Sundays, and etcetera. That’s why it’s mundane, because it’s all expected.  We want to ask why these narratives should be considered as bad? Because we think it’s actually very positive.

Let’s compare this life with a life under government team. We want to say here, that human beings cannot and do not perceive happiness in a mechanically weighted fashion. In other words, a 100 million dollars doesn’t make you a hundred thousand times happier than a thousand dollars. It’s because we only perceive complex events happening to us by translating it to simple emotions that we can feel. Like for example, we would translate winning the presidential election as emotions that come from getting recognition from society, winning a competition, or feeling high hopes in the potentials that you can achieve. In this sense, there is no significant difference in amount of happiness between the success of government team(상대방 지목) and steady streams of happy moments under opposition team.

But there is a significant difference between government and opposition in following ways.

Firstly, the amount of happy moments you can have is severely limited under government. This is because, as I’ve told you, your life leading up to success will necessarily make you give up things like friends. Things like vacations. Things like even marriage if you look at very successful role models. So you have limited number of these happy instances.

Secondly, you have limited capacity in appreciating and cherishing what you have achieved. This is because you have sacrificed health and longevity that allows you to do this after you’ve achieved success, as mentioned in the previous argument. You need to be healthy and alive to look back on these events which are in themselves very fleeting to properly cherish them.

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Deputy Leader of Opposition

Argument 3: Our third argument is why mundane healthy life allows individuals to better find their self-worth and identity in this world. 

We think that individuals can only define themselves within the context of the given society. The assumption that people find self-identity and goals and values is invalid and unrealistic. Therefore, when people try to answer questions like who they are, and what they should do, they look to the social norms and societal narratives of what a certain member of that society should do.

In this sense, having a strong tie to a society that you identify yourself with is very important in order to answer such questions, and not to fall into nihilistic(무의미) self-doubt. That’s why mundane life is so good. You can much more easily identify yourself with the society you belong to, because you are living the life that is stereotypical to that society. You are doing what a person living in that society ought to be doing.

Not to mention, social narratives that come from books, media, or even news and politics all focus on the mainstream target audiences which are people leading a mundane, average life. The society constantly provides discourses on what mundane average people’s concerns are and what we should be doing about it, and mundane people can really empathize with such stories.

The proposition team however, is in a sense, a social minority. You are very far from stereotypes of a Korean youth, for example, and you will have no social narratives that you can empathize and join in with. This is especially so if you achieved your success at a young age, which is very rare in most cases. Your life leading up to the success is also quite different from your peers. All through your life, you are a stranger in your own community, and your concerns, needs and wants are not heard at all. You are detached and spiraling out from society and you are likely to fall into nihilism, or the belief that everything is empty and meaningless, which is what happens for many young successful people.