Benquo

They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.

But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.

The antisemites have the right to play.

They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.

They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

End quote.

The depraved person does not perform accountability.

He plays with the forms of accountability to exhaust and humiliate the person who still takes them seriously.

He is not running a script that is trying to pass as a perspective, collapsing only under the kind of questioning we still call Socratic.

He is amusing himself at the expense of the questioner.

Cross-examination does not expose him because he was never trying to seem consistent.

He was trying to demonstrate that consistency is for suckers.

The Socratic method will not help him.

The Socratic method, if we can rightly call it that, was forged by the pressures confronted by a living mind in a city of the ashamed, people who still cared enough about accountability to fake it.

It has nothing to say to the depraved themselves, who have dispensed with the pretense, though in a transitional period might expose them to the judgment of the naive.

But the quality that preceded the method is something else.

What the oracle recognized in Socrates was not the ability to cross-examine.

It was something closer to what it recognized in Euripides.

A capacity to actually be present to what is happening, to see the person in front of you rather than the category they belong to, to respond to the situation rather than to your script about the situation.