HEALY— A Philodemic Society debate went off the rails this past Thursday when a routine cufflink-related disagreement escalated into a large-scale brawl. Members of the club who witnessed the chaos said that the brawl damaged three hundred-year-old oil paintings, five handcrafted mahogany chairs, and a number of fragile egos.

“To be sure, The Philodemic Society prides itself on debating controversial subjects,” said Beckett Calloway (SFS ’18), “That being said, I often feel that some topics—a bold pocket square someone just started trying out, a new tasteful tie clip, a cufflink-bow tie coordination strategy—are just too risky to bring up. We don’t want anyone to get hurt, nor do we want any accidental ad hominem fallacies.”

As for what escalated the scuffle, sources within Philodemic told the Heckler that a pointed witticism about whether aesthetics really best engenders human virtue was to blame. However, they admitted that a wry quip about sartorial flourishing and institutional decline could also have been the spark that did it.

After the fighting had snowballed out of control, the society was unable to vote on the evening’s resolution. That evening, Philodemic was debating: “Resolved: Cultured society will not henceforth devolve back into a Hobbesian ‘State of Nature.’”