The tragedy that happened in France today reminded me of a conversation I had with a guest at the theater several weeks ago. The guest, having just come out of Interstellar, told me he had a PhD in physics and complained about the scientific inaccuracies he saw in the film. I was happy to talk to him since genuinely interesting conversation with guests are both scarce and my favorite way of engaging with guests. I was literally doing my job by talking about Interstellar with this man. Score.

As the conversation went on, he asked me if I was in school. When I said that I was a recent graduate with a BA in philosophy, he smirked and said that he was not interested in people who have to kill each other by killing each other.

Uh-oh. I was now on very thin ice, skating between taking an insult I didn’t even understand and risking insulting a guest. But I went for it and asked what he meant.

He explained that he was talking about suicide bombers and other religious extremists.

As calmly and politely as I could, I said “those people are philosophers about as much as the people wanting to teach Bible in high school science classes are physicists.” He admitted that he “would not take that lightly.”

But as much as I was entertained by my own analogy, it was what I said next that I am more proud of.

“Moreover, if the only way you can win an argument is to kill your opponent, your argument is probably not that strong.”

Boom. The guest seemed impressed with that answer. I considered bringing up the death of Socrates as a moderately relevant event, but decided that the connection was not immediately clear and that I should return to the safer subject of oh-hey-that-was-an-interesting-movie.

Now that I am on my own time, let me expand on it (this is also your TL;DR):

If you have to kill your opponent to win an argument, you have already lost. You are a sore loser and it is absolutely tragic if you in fact do kill your opponent. But that doesn’t make you right; in fact your argument method suggests quite the opposite. How insecure do you have to be to have to silence a disagreeing voice in the most violent and final way possible? How weak does your argument have to be for you to not only be unable to argue your position with words, but also to be unable to tolerate the existence of a different one? If you have to kill your opponent to win an argument, you have lost at life.