As part of my job, I talk to Americans all across the country. I talk to coastal elites and to folks in "flyover country." To Democrats and Republicans. To socialists, to anarchists, to young Americans and older Americans.
One thing everyone agrees on: there's a darkness in our great country. A darkness that looms over us, hurting us and preventing us or people we care about from living their best lives.
Sometimes, the mere existence of that darkness feels like all that we can agree on. Because when we dig deeper, it turns out that everyone has a different explanation for what that darkness is and for what's causing it. I might think the darkness is the decline of rationality in science and lower levels of mental health of folks on the left, and blame the rise of Critical Race Theory. You might think the darkness has to do with the fact that a majority of Republicans refuse to recognize that Biden won the 2020 election and believe that January 6 was just a protest that got out of hand, and blame the rise of Trump.
I think we all see a different aspect of the darkness. It's like we all know that there's a problem, and then we filter that knowing through the prism of our own beliefs and our own experiences to get to our conclusion about what the darkness is and what's causing it. In my 20s, for instance, I was convinced that the darkness was caused by, and located with, government overreach. I was a libertarian, and I thought everyone in our great nation would be happier, healthier, and wealthier if we could shrink government down to the size that it could be drowned in a bathtub.
I think a lot of us spend our time trying to enroll other people into our vision of what the darkness is and of what's causing it. We see a darkness composed of XYZ and caused by ABC, and we try to rally our friends and family (as well as strangers online) into seeing XYZ and fighting against ABC.
To a certain extent, that's good. How else can we rally the support to combat ABC? If ABC really is causing problems, you could even argue that we have a moral imperative to expose the harm that ABC is causing.
But I think we can also take this desire to enroll other people into our perspective on the darkness too far. When we focus too much on doing this in our private lives, we can become zealots. We can leave people who disagree with us—even our loved ones—feeling like projects whom we're trying to convince to see things a certain way. We can focus more on straightening people out.than we do on building genuine relationships with them.
At the extremes, we can even get angry at people who don't share our particular vision of the darkness. We can lash out at friends and family who see things differently than we do. We can even cut them out of our lives (a decision that more and more Americans are, unfortunately, making). When we do that, we actually become a source of pain and discord in these folks' lives. We can accidentally expand the darkness, rather than shrinking it.
So trying to enroll people to see the darkness the way that we see it has limits and drawbacks. But there's another way to approach the darkness. And that is to listen..
When I practice listening to someone who has a different perspective than I do tell me about the darkness that they see, two powerful things happen.
First, I can get more insight about the darkness. A management consultant I used to read once said that, if you want to appear really smart in a meeting, wait for everyone else to speak before adding your $0.02. The reasoning was simple: by listening to everyone else, you can get the benefit of their perspective. Whatever you end up saying will then be wiser and more insightful than it would be if you spoke up first.
If I want to really understand the darkness that's looming over our great country, then I need to really listen to other people talk about it. The simple fact is that the darkness is too big for any one of us to fully grasp. It's more like we all have a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle, and we're trying to guess the picture that the puzzle makes. But if I listen to you talk about the darkness that you see, then I get the benefit of your perspective. It's like I made a copy of your piece of the jigsaw puzzle for myself. If I do that enough, then I might still not get the full shape of the darkness—but I'm a lot closer to understanding it than I would have been if I only had my own piece of the puzzle.
And understanding, of course, is the first step to fixing. We can't address a problem unless we can first diagnose it.
The second reason to listen to each other is deeper.
As a quote widely attributed to Stephen Covey goes, "The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged." The need to feel seen and understood is so powerful that Covey calls it "psychological air."
I think a lot of folks are lonely, and often don't feel seen or heard or listened to. That can be acutely painful. When we practice listening to our fellow human—not just "I'm going to scroll Facebook while you tell me about your life," but the kind of deep listening that leaves our interlocutor feeling seen and understood—we can often do immense good in their lives. We can give them the psychological air for which they may have been desperate.
That in itself can do a lot to push back the darkness—maybe not in the country as a whole, but certainly in one person. That one person might go on to push back the darkness in another person. And if enough of us do that, then maybe the darkness in our country as a whole will start to shrink.
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At 70 years of age and having been there, done that in many ways, i fully believe there is a light covering our great country. and in fact the planet. a light in every heart and home. and the more we are able to focus on that, believe and trust in that, the much better off we all shall be.