Is it just me, or have you also noticed that people don’t TALK to each other anymore? There’s little chit chat and virtually no dialogue at all. Instead, we live on the ends of a spectrum. It has ignoring other people completely on one end and violently in-your-face confrontations on the other.
Clearly, neither of those is communication. And I don’t think anybody really likes that we vacillate between ignoring and yelling at/about people. I mean, who really wants to be this kind of people? But with just a little thought, we might be able to come up with some reasons why. And then maybe we can start to address those reasons.
1. In our culture, we don’t disagree anymore. It’s not allowed. We aren’t allowed to have conversation where we put ideas on the table, talk about them, and walk away friends. No, someone has to WIN. In every conversation, someone has to dominate and someone has to be undone. There can’t be learning on both sides. There can’t be dialogue. And there certainly can’t be any kind of resolution.
In today’s world, I have to win and you have lose. Or you have to demolish me and I have to cower in shame and ignominy. Someone has to be SHUT DOWN (oh, how I hate all the clickbait vocabulary). And it’s really unfortunate, this stalemate of opinion. Because so many people on all sides of pretty much all issues have valuable things to add. And we can’t hear any of them because we’re too busy “demolishing” each other. Or accusing them of being horrible people because they don’t agree with us. That’s not communication.
Also…
2. We refuse to admit we even might be wrong. I purposely keep friends on my feeds and whatnot who live out past me on the various spectrums. I do it because I want to hear what the people who are farther left and farther right than me think. It gives me helpful perspective.
BUT, what I have realized recently, is that neither side (of most issues) will admit that they are even a little bit possibly not 100% absolutely right. They’re right. They’re not wrong. And then the “demolishing” begins again.
There’s no room, no grace, no chance for an open and honest hearing. I’m right. Period. And the thing is, probably one of those sides IS right. Or at least more right…because let’s be honest, we’re human and we have to live inside our own heads which makes it pretty much impossible to be 100% right about anything. But again, I digress…
The inability of Americans to communicate with each other, I think, can be greatly resolved by addressing those two things. Yes, there are other issues. Fair hearings are always hard to come by, for many, many reasons. But if we, individually and as groups, worked on those two issues–1) Letting people disagree with us without crushing them and 2) Leaving a tiny space for the possibility that we aren’t all-knowing about all things–I think we’d see an immediate and marked improvement on the culture-wide diatribes that are currently tearing us apart.
