We have become slaves to the idea of sounding convincing

I have a real grudge against the Enlightenment. Sure, the scholars of the Enlightenment pushed Western society towards democracy, moved us into a theoretically more egalitarian future, but they also ruined everything for everyone forever. The Enlightenment convinced us all that reasoned debate was the only thing that mattered and look where that's got us?

It's not that they started the problem, but finding the start of the problem feels pointless. The problem started so far back that it's impossible to pinpoint; the problem starts with the first person to realise that controlling resources would give them power; the problem grows as people with wealth and power use that wealth and power to accrue more and more of both.

The problem is perhaps that once you have wealth and power you don't have much time to enjoy it before you realise that everyone around you wants to take it from you. You have to shore up your defences against the mewling crowds.

The patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism — all of these are systems of allowing the very rich to maintain control of where power is held.

There are many methods you can use to hold on to power and I'm sure I've complained about them all at one time or another, but the one I want to talk about today is this: pretending that you are such a special boy that you deserve all the wealth and power you have, and everyone else deserves to be down here in the dirt because we are not special boys.

From time immemorial the rich have established social rules that, by design, set them apart from the rabble. Each level of your stratified society then apes the one above them and those at the top change the rules to distinguish themselves once more.

When Mr Darcy and Caroline Bingley discuss their idea of a truly accomplished woman in Pride & Prejudice this is what they are doing. It would not do to align oneself with woman who doesn't have the skills the landed gentry have decided mark them out as more civilised than those poor souls who have to work for a living.

Or the tradition of a gentleman's duel, where slights to one's honour are defended to the death according to strictly observed rules. You have called me a liar, sir, and I'll see you at dawn, pistols drawn. These duels had reams of esoteric and inconsistent rules in order to keep them in the realm of the elite. To mark them out as gentlemanly affairs of honour, rather than the base animalistic fights of the lower classes.

When the death toll of the Napoleonic Wars elevated a whole raft of commoners to the gentry through military service, they eagerly adopted the practice – which then fell in popularity among those born into the peerage.

Higher education was also reserved for the upper classes, naturally. A gentleman went to Oxbridge or Cambridge and studied history and philosophy and whatnot. He learned all the things a gentleman was expected to know. Most importantly he learned to speak like a gentleman.

To argue like a gentleman.

Because gentlemen argue with reason. With logic.

The scholars of the Enlightenment debated their way to believing in a more equal society using a style of discussion restricted to those who had the money and the leisure time to learn it. And they established a system in which that method of debate became one of the most important signifiers of intelligence we have.

As higher education became, ostensibly, democratised, that idea remained. There's a lot to be said about the shift in higher education – the designation of elite schools to maintain some semblance of upper class superiority, the growing need for a degree in white collar work, the high costs. A university education used to be about becoming a generally well-rounded individual where now the only purpose is to build towards a secure career.

But the importance of knowing how to talk about things remains. The concept that the construction of your ideas is more important than the ideas themselves. You should be learning how to confront ideas you disagree with, you should be prizing open and honest debate.

If your goal is to bring society closer to some great truth about being alive, debate is extremely useful. Whether you're talking about the existence of the soul or the comparative merits of Rory Gilmore's bad boyfriends, debate can help you figure out where you actually stand. It can hone your ability to communicate your point of view clearly and persuasively.

Of course, any dimwit can argue about what they actually think.

Over the last couple of hundred years or so, however, society has started to valorise the act of debate itself. Sure, you can use it to seek after some universal truth, but that's really beside the point.

If, like me, you were good at English Lit, or if you saw the mediocre film The History Boys, you'll be familiar with this concept. You can argue anything you want! You just have to be able to justify it with the text.

History, literature, philosophy – these are all interpretive arts, and you can interpret everything in myriad ways. In theory, that's fine – if your spirit is strong and your heart is true, you can toss around all kinds of ideas, figure out what you believe in, and learn how to back it up.

For some, though, a strong spirit and a true heart are not markers of a learnéd man. A learnéd man knows the point of a debate is to find rhetorical tricks to one up one's opponent. A learnéd man doesn't care about truth he cares about the effective argument. A learnéd man goes home every night and rubs one out to the Socratic Method.

A learnéd man knows that something as base as belief is the sign of a weak mind. Belief makes people emotional. It gets in the way of clear, logical thinking. It blinds you to the rational arguments of those who disagree.

Most of all, belief makes people uncivilised. People take to the streets for their beliefs. They get rowdy, they throw out swear words, they throw fists. They cancel people, they refuse to mourn the deaths of those who oppose them.

Belief stops people from engaging in debate. It turns people away from the all-precious marketplace of ideas.

This system might have advanced the theory of social equality, but it limits our ability to actually achieve it. Prizing it as a technique leaves power in the hands of the moneyed, the educated. It makes it harder for those oppressed by the powerful to advocate for themselves.

We live now in a world where sounding right is valued above being right. Where people become famous for their ability to say nothing with big, fancy words. Where, in order to get ahead, you have to learn to speak in this pseudo academic parlance that hides your lack of substance.

This technique is beloved by the alt right.

A slate of people with truly abhorrent views have used civilised debate to establish themselves as pundits. They use neat haircuts, crisp suits, and big vocabularies to express deeply racist, misogynistic, and homophobic ideas and insist that if those ideas were weak then we, the horrified, would be able to brush them away with our rhetoric.

It's a grift. A PR move. It spreads their message further and makes it seem legitimate. Giving these people the respect of your attention affirms them and their regressive opinions as reasonable.

Every liberal who has indulged this idea of civilised debate from the right is a rube who has allowed themselves to be used for propaganda.

Not everything is up for debate. Some concepts are decided. Some concepts let you know immediately that a person's opinions should be dismissed out of hand.

That might seem rude, but it is not uncivil. Civility is not about the appearance manners. It's not about eloquence, or a nice suit.

No amount of good manners will make racism civil, just as no amount of uncouth behaviour will make calls for equality less righteous.

Fascists are our enemies, whether they're dropping pleasantries or racial slurs, and we have to fight them all. Those who claim we should engage with them in good faith, that we should be engage in dialogue are actively slowing our progress.

We need civility in substance, not in style. We need codes of honour not of conduct. We need to call a fucking nazi a fucking nazi. We need to shut them down at every turn, whatever their medium or mode of address.

The progressive movement, the democratic movement is at its core a battle to take wealth and power from a small group of elites and redistribute it more evenly among the people. We should be fighting to the teeth against anyone who seeks to prevent that. And respect for the semblance of civility is preventing it.