There are times when it's useful to yell, useful to insult, even useful to fight. If your philosophy is "never express anger" or "never offend anyone" or "never cause any harm," then that might possibly work for you, but it is not a complete philosophy that can or should be followed by everyone.
Peacekeeping interventions can include real fighting. Maybe it's *usually* true that "the best defense is not to offend," but sometimes that is not enough, and at such a moment either you need to defend yourself actively or someone else needs to step in for you.
Most people are not particularly trained to win at debate or physical combat. I think the normal approach is to be confidently assertive, avoid unnecessary confontation or offense, and then use emotional (or eventually social and legal) warfare if trust is broken enough. That's what I observe a lot.
Normal people do try to debate, but they aren't good at it. Especially where logic and evidence and uncertainty enter the picture, people tend to fall off a cliff; instead of working with hypotheses and evidence, they just get opinionated, repetitive, defensive, emotional, etc. So because they aren't very good at the logical/evidentiary/epistemological/dialectic game of debate, they'll stick to just sharing or venting, and if they feel that's failing, they'll then fall into yelling, insulting (mocking, ridiculing, etc), or, eventually, if it goes that far, threatening (legally, etc) or physically fighting.
Yet people aren't really trained to fight physically (or legally or logically), so they have more than one reason not to want to go there. The threat/risk of harsh eventualities, though, works under the surface to make people more emotional.
To put it another way - the fact I'm pretty sure I could knock most people out if we got into a fight, I believe, has a tendency to keep me calmer in a debate. I do not want to have to knock you out. Really, I do not. And I am not physically threatened by your anger, etc. At least... I think those are somewhat true statements, and probably more than for many other people.
I believe that if we follow a good debate process, one or both of us will arrive at the right answer, or a better answer than before; I trust that system and that process. Meanwhile, I have the experience to say that I would probably win in a physical fight with most people. So that's another kind of trust. These are two threats many people feel that I mostly do not feel. Logical debate is not threatening to me. Physical fighting is not that threatening, in some sense, either (in the relative sense that I have experience from martial arts).
So... I stick to the debate process as much as the other person is willing and I have time and energy for. Where discussions turn into fights (heated arguments, I mean), usually the other person is getting too emotional and reactive. They've decided that ad hominem attacks are appropriate; they're going after my character, trying to make me feel bad. I might have sounded condescending, impatient, or annoyed about something, and it's understandable that this might upset them, but then they will tend to go into this escalation. They'll start attacking and insulting me, even though I actually did not do that - they just didn't like my tone. Sometimes I'm the first person to "use tone," sometimes the other person. But that should not lead to an escalation. It's only human that we sometimes get emotional. That shouldn't be generalized too much or too readily into an insult that calls for emotional retaliation.
One core skill of good debate is filtering out tone, more or less - you monitor it as a clue, say, as to whether someone might be biased, unwilling to change their mind right now, passionate, or maybe just not ready to continue talking about this. An unpleasant tone is a good reason to step away from a conversation, when it makes you uncomfortable. It is not a good reason to attack someone. Not at all. That's the mistake so many people make.
Just avoiding that one mistake would prevent many heated arguments.
I guess I'm just trying to point out some very common misapprehensions people make in discussions, arguments, and other conflict.
Sometimes anger and fighting *are* necessary, but actually, I do not think most people get this right (ie, the when and how). I think people misuse yelling, threats, emotionality, and physical force. Those all have their place. And as I'm trying to indicate, I have quite a bit of training and practice as to where that place might be. It is not that I'm so accepting of people and so compassionate, etc, because I cannot fight. I am very capable of fighting verbally or physically. But most of the time when people want to shift into fighting like that, it is not called for.
They feel it is, and they are getting carried away so they also think it is, but it is not. The escalation is not called for.
My confidence that I could win in a fight, oddly enough - knowing that I could really hurt someone - seems to make me even less interested in hurting them emotionally. Hurting someone emotionally is a power play. It's often an expression of insecurity - I feel threatened by you, am not sure I could really beat you - so I am going to hurt you, emotionally, to let us both know that I am not just a pushover.
That's how people use emotional hurt. And sometimes it is even called for. Most of the time, though, I believe it is not, and people are enacting a kind of insecurity.
