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.
Related Quotes
It reflects the experience we all have every day. We interrupt. And we are
interrupted. We may be inured to its ravaging because it is just the way life has become. But each time it happens, we wince. Often we rage. It registers.
Difference is often so deeply threatening we cannot bear to listen to it. Much less embrace it. We cannot bear to imagine that we might be wrong and they might be right and, heaven forbid, at least as good in every way as we are. Or better.
The culprit here is an unavoidable sequence of childhood. When people are brought up to fear difference, especially difference of thought, they are easier to control. And society adores control.
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.
To think afresh about an issue by listening with interest to an extreme opposing view feels, therefore, like risking personal annihilation. This assumption of ‘core difference’ is nothing less than the fear of ceasing to be.
We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to ‘share the stage’ equally.