The Affirmative team is asked to propose a plan of action to solve for an alleged significant harm with jurisdiction within the bounds of the resolution to achieve said change.
At a Glance
The Affirmative team is asked to answer the following basic questions:
- Do you affirm change is required through and within the boundaries of the resolution?
- Do you have jurisdiction to pass a plan of action?
- Do you have a problem within the status quo that needs to be addressed?
- Is the problem within the status quo significant enough to move the cogs of government to address, and is the proposal to move those cogs going to invoke significant enough change to secure a long term solution?
- Does the plan proposed solve the issues in the status quo and is there a professional in the relevant field that supports this?
In a sentence – The Affirmative team is asked to propose a plan of action to solve for an alleged significant harm with jurisdiction within the bounds of the resolution to achieve said change.
Understanding the Position of the Affirmative
I think we’re all familiar with the idea that the Affirmative team’s purpose is to “affirm the resolution” but not many of us stop and think about what that really means. There is the obvious, that the Affirmative team is to take the position that the resolution is correct and necessitates action from the relevant governing bodies. However, there is more to this concept than most realize.
To affirm the resolution requires the team to put themselves in to a specific mindset. Something that I think many of us simply overlook, myself included during my competing years, is the completeness of the resolution. The entirety of the resolution as a statement is what the team is being asked to affirm, every word…
This necessitates a “wholeness” mindset from the team that I think is lost once the season begins and everyone gets bogged down in the weeds looking into possible cases and arguments for the upcoming debate season. A wholeness mindset says, in essence, “the statement of the resolution is true, and we have the answer”. This mindset changes our understanding of the Affirmative purpose from “to affirm the resolution” to “the truth of the resolution necessitates action and we, as the Affirmative team, have the answer”. I think entering into any given season with this edited mindset gives a nice runway when thinking about putting a case together, something that I’ll discuss in a different post.
There are five key aspects to this wholeness mindset of the Affirmative that should be understood in order to put it into practice.
Q: Do you affirm change is required through and within the boundaries of the resolution?
This seems like a humorous question as, competitively speaking, the Affirmative team is given the answer – Yes. However, answering this question is a mental strategy when creating your case. If you and your partner agree with the change that your plan is making, you will argue it with more passion, looking for all evidence to prove your case solves the problem, you will speak and debate with the desire to change the nation for the better behind you instead of speaking and debating with the desire to win a round or tournament watering down your argumentation. You transition from creating a case that affirms the resolution to identifying a problem presented within the resolution that you agree needs to be resolved and writing a case to do so.
Q: Do you have jurisdiction to pass a plan of action?
I’ll discuss debate theory in more detail in a different article. What I want to accomplish here is getting the team into the mindset of a governing body when attacking an issue presenting itself in the status quo. Jurisdiction is the lynchpin of the wholeness mindset. Without jurisdiction action cannot be taken. Without jurisdiction change cannot be accomplished. Jurisdiction defines the teams ability to make a change. Jurisdiction is also the chains that bind us to the resolution. Without thinking about whether the team has the jurisdiction to make a change they cannot move forward.
Without the jurisdiction to make change it does not matter if there is a legitimate issue, or how significant that issue is, or if your idea to solve it is going to work, because you are attempting to act without authority. It would be like a tire shop owner walking across the street to the chicken place and telling the chefs how to make chicken properly. The tire shop owner may have correctly identified an issue, and that issue may be significant, and his solution to that problem may work, but unless the chicken place owner acts on it the tire shop owner can do nothing.
Q: Do you have a problem within the status quo that needs to be addressed?
This is fairly simple to understand, yet the depth of understanding seems to be oftentimes missed. There must be a problem presenting itself within the resolution in order to act on it. But, there is an important distinction to be made before proceeding – Is there a problem presenting itself within the resolution that you find is hurting people, maybe costing the governing body money, perhaps is costing the general populous money, or are you manufacturing an issue by tying mildly related problems into something that you can (in theory) present as a problem within the bounds of the resolution?
If you find yourself with the former, congratulations! You can proceed to the next mindset analysis. If you find yourself with the later, I have a message for you. Don’t do this. There are more than enough people and professionals that publicize more than the nations fair share of issues with all sorts of governing bodies that you do not need to manufacture another one. It is always preferred that you find an existing problem within the boundaries of the resolution than to find several small issues and stuff them into a cookie cutter that fits within the boundaries of the resolution.
Q: Is the problem within the status quo significant enough to move the cogs of government to address, and is the proposal to move those cogs going to invoke significant enough change to secure a long term solution?
Notice the verbiage of the question, its intentional. Let’s deal with the first section of the question first. I suggest the visual of an old clock to describe governing bodies because that is, oftentimes, how they work. They are rusty, and slow, and delicate, and it takes a lot of work to move them and once they’ve been moved it takes just as much work to move them back. As the Affirmative team, wanting to engage the clock (so to speak), it is imperative that we do our due diligence to ensure that the problem that we’ve identified is worth engaging those cogs. It needs to be affecting enough people, or items, to justify the action.
Then, you have the second portion of the question. It’s not enough to have a significant issue that you’re tackling as the Affirmative team, but you also must be able and wiling to make a significant change to resolve it. This particular understanding shows that cases fail in two ways – 1. A plan to act isn’t enough, and wouldn’t cause enough change to resolve the issue identified in its entirety (wholeness mindset); 2. The plan of action does too much and may or may not effect something that we don’t intend to (chains of the resolution). In order to have a good plan to attack the issue that you’ve identified in the status quo, you must identify the significance of the issue and come up with a plausible resolution that will resolve that issue in a significant way.
Q: Does the plan proposed solve the issues in the status quo and is there a professional in the relevant field that supports this?
If you’ve gotten this far into the construction of the wholeness mindset you’d obviously want to see it through to the end. So far, you’ve been given jurisdiction to change the status quo, you’ve identified a problem presenting itself within the status quo, and you’ve identified the significance of that issue. Now, you have the solution. More specifically, you have found the solution as it exists in the status quo, edited it, and are wanting to propose your version that will solve the problem. Now, the only thing left to do is build your Ethos, your credibility. You know a lot, but you are not the all knowing! Something that I think we miss during this step is understanding that we need to find other professionals that agree with our plan to confirm that it will solve.
This is the purpose of finding a mild solution “out in the wild” instead of writing one from scratch. The longer there has been a “real” solution to your issue on the books, the more professionals there will be to support your statement to say that it could work.
Conclusion
The answers to these questions, and, more importantly, the mindset behind each of them, is what brings the wholeness mindset of the resolution to life. Understanding everything above is what differentiates someone who knows how to debate from someone who debates what they know. The wholeness mindset of the resolution gives you a one up on the Affirmative because you go from debating something that’s been given to you to being the experts and utilizing the case to defend your beliefs.
Additionally, you can take this mindset and apply it completely to the real world. In fact, do it! Take an issue in the nation today and look for the proposed resolutions to it, apply the wholeness mindset to the plan and see whether you think that the proposal would work. I’d bet money that either the plan would work or you’d find something that causes it to fail the wholeness mindset and would maybe even cause more problems in the status quo. Try it out!
SALTSpeaks 