You're Not Stupid
And I'm not either.
Generally, when people disagree with you, they are not stupid. It just seems like it. And when we speak and act as if they were, communication breaks down.
Until we make it a habit of closely watching alternative current streams of information and interpretation (i.e. Fox and CNBC), we don’t see how rational “the other” is. They just have a different map of “outside” reality.
Perhaps we can judge the relative merits of such different current perspectives. (In my view one is much better than the other.) That, however, is not my point. Believing someone less well informed, or informed by suspect messaging, does not mean they are stupid.
Until we respect the intelligence of another person, we have little chance of finding the nature and extent of our potential agreements. And if we can’t do this, we are going to find it nearly impossible to work together for a common good.
I wrote and edited this a couple of days ago. I hope it does not sound too simplistic. I don’t want to add to the clutter of your social media day with another platitude. Yet I have, as you can see, sent it.
Sometimes it is the obvious that gets ignored. Most of us are “wired” to evaluate news as right or wrong and make quick judgements about the source. Our past survival required fast responses to threat and danger.
One of the first responses we learned as a child was “that’s stupid.” We are still that child. Democracy works when we can get inside another person’s thinking and see where the actual agreements are, and, more importantly, where potential agreements sit. Then we share experience. We don’t argue. We offer some part of the world that we have explored and thought about. We ask another to join us in interrogating our experiences. What did this mean? How well did I understand it? Does it fit any of your experiences? And so on, and on and on and on.