A Matter of Opinion - A Rant Book

D:R || Respectful Discussion [Book Guidelines]

~ why are you here? ~

"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."
-- Stephen Covey

Answer me this one question: why are you here?

Some will have come to teach. To see if there is any place in which they can interject their hard begotten truths. They read through these chapters and constantly analyze them while asking themselves the question "where can I refute? Where can I correct?"

Some will have come looking for drama. Drama is addictive, and sitting back in their seat with a bag of popcorn while there's a comment section breakdown can be a tempting activity.

Some will have come merely out of curiosity. They look for engaging mental stimuli, something to make them think. To make them question themselves and strengthen their own opinions by encountering the new and diverse reasonings of others.

So which one are you? Which one am I?

Chances are, whilst some fall point blank into a single category, the majority of us are a complex mix of the three. I myself am plenty guilty of engaging in the first two, I willingly admit. We all are. It is my intention, however, that only the third kind will be encouraged here.

~ hearing vs listening ~

Listening is a practice that seems to be falling out of style the more time passes. We use it interchangeably with the word "hearing", but they aren't even close to the same thing.

Definition #1*

hear
/hir/
verb
perceive with the ear the sound made by (someone or something).
"behind her she could hear men's voices"

Basically, we can gather that "hearing" is the physical act of perceiving sounds. You "hear" someone's words, you gather the surface meaning of them. You "hear" them. But do you listen?

Definition #2*

listen
/ˈlis(ə)n/
verb
give one's attention to a sound.
"evidently he was not listening"

There is a distinct difference between the meanings of the two words. We've already parsed out "hearing", but "listening", as can be gathered from the definition, you are paying attention to a sound. You don't just perceive it, acknowledging its existence on a physical level. You put in the added effort of attempting to analyze the sound. In this case, the sound is someone's words, or more specifically, their written words. We can keep the definitions of listening and hearing even though, literally, there is no sound involved in this process, considering this is the internet and we're typing. That does not, however, invalidate the point:

Hearing is to acknowledge someone's words. You may pick up on the surface meaning of them, but listening is to consciously search the meaning of the words, intentionally picking up on more than what is on the surface. The difference is in the passive and the active.

* - definitions courtesy of Google.

~ the identity crisis ~

There's an issue that I notice in nearly every debate and discussion that I come across, and it aggravates me to no end.

We all do everything we do because there is something to get out of it. In the case of debate, the most common reason people seem to come is to heighten a sense of elitism, affirm to themselves their own "rightness" and the other person's "wrongness", and so on and so forth. All this seems to show through in the manner in which we speak to each other. There is no respect. There is a block, a cognitive and emotional barrier we subconsciously throw up. We can't seem to comprehend that the other person is as passionately convinced of their side as we are of ours. From their perspective, they're right, and we're wrong. We throw up the aforementioned barriers because this forces us to confront the very real question: "what if, thinking in objective hypotheticals, I am the wrong one?"