What We Can Learn From Each Other

The most valuable skill anyone can learn is how to listen. The world, and especially the internet, is full of people more than happy to tell you what's exactly on their minds. Most of them, of course, have no idea what they are talking about. This includes me. The trick then is to figure out who does know what they are talking about. And you can only do that by listening.

But listening is not enough. More often than not, people believe what they are told not because it's necessarily true but because it's what they want to hear. Or because it's all that they hear - they live in a bubble and any views that don't match the herd's gets stomped down, and people are afraid to say what they really think. Either way, you have to keep in mind that everything you hear is being filtered through your own biases or the biases of the people around you.

When we are absolutely certain that we are right about an issue, it's very tempting to ignore the ignorant. However, I think that under the right circumstances, we can learn a lot even from people who know nothing - as long as they are at least sincere. (If people are deliberately lying or misleading people, that's another story.)

For instance, when I was growing up I was fairly conservative. As I've gotten older, I've become decidedly more liberal and progressive socially and politically. Yet my youth was a very valuable time because I now know precisely why my earlier beliefs were wrong. It's my experience, and this is just anecdotal, that people who have not undergone a similar transformation are ignorant about those who hold ignorant beliefs. Those who think they know better are quick to castigate and deride the ignorant in a very similar manner to the way that the ignorant castigate and deride the groups of people that they don't understand.

But I'm a broken record. I can tell people that they need to talk to each other and understand each other until... well, just insert any cliched metaphor here that means a very long time. People are convinced they're right. So they don't need to listen to those that are wrong. In fact, it would be wrong to listen to those that are wrong because we don't need them contaminating the world with that nonsense and they have no right to our time and we don't actually want to fix the problem anyway. We're just trying to improve our social standing, and people are just going to people which means doing what's best for themselves and then rationalizing and moralizing their behavior no matter what it is. That's evolution for you.

That's a bit cynical, but it's what we're up against. And I don't think it's hopeless. It's a question of raising awareness of how and why people do what they do, say what they say, and think what they think. Observe people. Watch them. Listen to them. You'll find out that we're all just alike.