Seeing people as people and not as the assumptions about their identities that society branded into our child brains is exhausting. No wonder we sit down after we say hello.
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We need to adore difference so that we can all finally, in fact, be the same in the only sense that matters: as human beings. And what magnificence that sameness is.
So how about we walk across the road and listen? And soon ask to be listened to, too. And promise never to interrupt. Only to learn. And eventually to respect?
And then, who knows?
To love?
We do need to accept that the power of persuasion at its worst lies in its design to interrupt. It is supposed to interrupt us, our independent, cogent, thinking selves. And it does.
If I become interested in your view, I will have to adopt your values, and so I will stop being me; I will be an inferior person.
We, therefore, become afraid to hear the other person’s thoughts because to consider them would be, we feel, to betray our deepest selves. So we make sure that no idea can develop in either of us that does not fit our certainty of who we are and who they are. We stop them. We interrupt.
Posts are not real connections. They are airings. They can be delightful, and they keep each other in mind; but they do not allow us truly to be present. And so they do not allow us to think with each other.