Why do we hate listening?
... and is that why liberalism is losing elections everywhere?
Once every few years, I read something on the internet that blows my mind and resets my worldview. The last such thing that I read was in early 2023 — a Time cover story that felt like a personal admonition. The world is full of overtalkers, the story declared, and men in particular are “champions of overtalking—and talking over”: “We bulldoze. We hog the floor. We mansplain, manterrupt, and deliver manalogues.”
But overtalking, the writer said, is not just bad manners — it’s also grossly dangerous: “Once, when I put my foot in my mouth at work, I lost my job and the promise of millions of dollars. Worse, my lack of conversational impulse control led to a separation from my wife, and nearly cost me my marriage.”
And apparently, this is a problem for pretty much most of us: “Did you know there are more than 2 million podcasts, which have produced 48 million episodes? Or that more than 3,000 TEDx events take place every year, with up to 20 wannabe Malcolm Gladwells participating in each one? Or that Americans sit through more than a billion meetings a year? We’re tweeting for the sake of tweeting, talking for the sake of talking.”
Personally, I relate, and that by itself is a twisted story. Growing up, I was the shy, quiet kid who rarely spoke in class. All the personality tests I’ve ever taken have repeatedly branded me an ‘introvert’. I still hate going to large gatherings — parties, weddings, concerts, what have you. It took me a long time and a lot of effort to come out of my shell and start talking.
And yet, once I started talking, I did often feel like I wanted to keep talking. It’s easy to talk, pontificate and rant. We go our entire lives thinking and seeing interesting things that we want to unleash on the outside world. All that any of us needs is an audience.
Listening, on the other hand, is so hard. It feels like getting hit on the head with a hammer. The longer that someone makes you listen to them, the more your head aches.
Part of the problem is perhaps a lack of trust. People routinely tell you things that make you want to tear your hair out. They’re going to tell you things you disagree with. They might give you advice that you never asked for. They might rattle out a bunch of facts that break your heart. There’s just so many risks to contend with as a listener. It’s just so much easier to cut them off early by launching a barrage of words at them first — a sort of preemptive verbal missile attack, if you will.
Shortly after reading the Time story, I immigrated to the United States. Having landed in a new country with a new culture (well, not entirely new), I decided I might as well try and listen a bit more and speak a bit less.
The experiment was eye-opening. In a matter of months, I learnt so many things that blew my understanding of America out of the water.
For instance, did you know that hamburgers don’t have any ham in them? (Why are they called that then?)
Or that a sizable sect of Christians in the American South are so conservative that they don’t send their kids to school? (But the West is supposed to be so progressive!)
Or that African-Americans make up less than 15% of the population of the United States? (Why did I always feel like they are so many more?)
That’s when something struck me: Listening is the trait of the ultimate student. Nobody ever learns anything by talking. In fact, if anything, talking probably helps reinforce one’s own false beliefs. Even if you’re not entirely sure about something, the act of simply talking about it helps create a sense of certainty in your head. When you say the same thing to multiple people over and over again, you become condemned to believe that it is true. (Wasn’t that what the Nazis also said?)
Nearly two years into my experience as an immigrant, I’m now seeing America’s liberals wringing their hands over a devastating election defeat. I’m starting to think that a lack of listening might be to blame for this too.
A decade ago, the electoral victory of a hate-mongering, politically incorrect, anti-establishment candidate might have been a shocker. Now, that candidate is so likely to win that I would call them the ‘establishment’. Most of us have gotten used to these results by now — in Turkey, India, Israel, Hungary, France, and even the wokest country of them all, Sweden. And yet, each time it happens, the liberal elite in those countries reacts with shock and surprise.
In some ways, us liberals react to these defeats by working through the five stages of grief: First, there is shock and denial that an intolerable candidate or party has been elected. Then, there is anger at half the country for having turned on the nation’s highest ideals. Then, there is a detachment from the realities of the world, a disavowal of what has happened (“not my President!”).
But then, sadly, there we end, until the next defeat rolls along.
In fact, this is where we ought to get cooking. Like all great Shakespearean plays, the fourth Act of the grief cycle is perhaps the most important: dialogue and bargaining.
The thing I’ve now come to realize about democratic elections is that they are never really a permanent commentary on our times, our countries, or even our countrymen. Voters change their minds all the time. Plenty of folks who once voted liberal now vote conservative. There are also many who vote liberal in one election and conservative in another. Trump has bagged a bunch of votes from folks who previously went for Biden. Biden bagged a bunch of votes in 2020 from those who went with Trump in 2016. I’ve also met folks who voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024 but will still swear that Obama was the best president.
Many of my liberal friends have a hard time reckoning with this. We’ve built a worldview for ourselves that is deeply black-and-white in nature. How is it possible that people who believe in democracy would vote for a guy who proudly presided over a siege on Congress? Surely, they must not believe in democracy anymore?
But in fact, peoples, societies and nations are far more complex than that. The reason we aren’t able to win them over is because we are far too convinced that we have found the right answers for everything. We know that society would be far more peaceful if only it functioned a certain way. We know that the economy would be more prosperous if only it were governed by a certain set of policies. We simply know that some laws are objectively better than others.
I don’t mean to litigate some of these assertions. For all intents and purposes, I’ve now made an entire career out of arguing for or against a set of policies with a similar air of certainty and confidence.
But the problem is that today’s politics is no longer about which set of policies is objectively better than the other. It’s increasingly about how people feel about them. Can people be made to feel better about the right set of policies? Experience shows that they can. That is the challenge of politics and advocacy. But in order to be successful in that effort, all of us need to be more willing to listen to things that make us squirm. In fact, the secret to successful grassroots advocacy may well lie in talking less and listening more.
Admittedly, this is not easy to do. In new-age conservative politics, leaders routinely bait their opponents with ear-shattering language or outright violence — whether in the form of an insurrection, or through tacit approval of lynch mobs, or even the declaration of a ‘holy war’.
For all practical purposes, this may well be deliberate. Conservative politics is increasingly designed to create the illusion of a black-and-white world — to bait liberals into believing that all conservative voters must necessarily be immoral, racist, socially treacherous demons.
But liberals must overcome this urge and listen to the fears, insecurities, and even prejudices of conservative voters. Quite simply, just listen rather than canceling them out. Perhaps the wisest thing that Joe Biden said in his entire presidency was this statement after Trump’s win: “You can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.”
And there ends my manalogue. I shall now dutifully listen to all of you in the comments section below.