The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 300

Built to Disagree 

ANDREW’S POV: 

Oliver made the foundational argument. Rules exist to protect everyone equally. Feelings are individual and variable. What I feel is not the same as what you feel and if we each act on our own feelings without the framework of shared rules we end up in conflict, not community. He gave examples. He was good. He sat down. 

Then the first speaker for the negative stood up. 

It was not Amelia. She was their closing speaker, which was the most important position, the one that had to pull everything together and leave the last impression on the judges. The negative’s first speaker was a girl named Priya from the year above who was very confident and who opened by asking the room a question. 

“Can anyone tell me,” she said, “what it feels like to be treated fairly?” 

She paused and let the room sit with it. 

“You can feel it,” she said. “You know it in your body when you have been treated fairly and you know it in your body when you have not. And that feeling, that sense of justice or injustice, is what every rule we have ever written was trying to protect. Rules did not create fairness. The feeling of fairness created rules.” 

I noted this argument. It was a version of what I had anticipated. I had my rebuttal ready. 

The debate moved through its structure. Speakers alternated. Arguments were built and countered. I listened carefully to everything the negative said and I tracked which points had landed well with the judges by watching their faces and their note-taking. Dad had taught me this without meaning to, I had watched him do it in enough settings to understand that the people evaluating you were giving you information about how you were doing if you paid attention to them. 

Good. 

“But here is what is also true,” I said. “The people who burned books also felt very strongly about what they were doing. The people who built systems of slavery felt that those systems were correct. The people who have done the worst things in history have done them while feeling completely certain that they were right.” I looked at the Judges “Feelings tell us that something matters. They do not tell us whether we are correct. Rules, when they are good rules, impose a standard that applies regardless of what any individual feels at any particular moment. They protect the person who is not popular. They protect the person whose feelings are not the same as everyone else’s. They protect the minority from the majority’s feelings.” 

The room was quiet. 

“The negative team’s strongest example is that people have broken unjust rules because they felt those rules were wrong. And they are right: But what replaced those unjust rules? Better rules and not the absence of rules or just feelings but better rules. Because the lesson of history is not that rules failed. The lesson is that bad rules must be reformed into good ones. And the way we know when a rule needs reforming is when it fails to protect the feeling/ it was built to honour. That is not feelings mattering more than rules. That is the two working together. With rules as the structure and feelings as the check on that structure. And if you have to choose one as the foundation, you choose the structure, because without structure the check has nothing to push against.”