The Way of Conversational Rationality
At the core of our social interactions lies a restless spinning gear. This gear had a purpose back in the days of tribes and predators. Keep talking, exchange information, keep talking, propagate the gossip, keep talking, contribute to the never-ending update and readjustment of the group and the competing sexual rivalries. Someone argues, counter-argue. Someone says something, say another thing.
No need for pause. No need for silence. No need for the delicate pruning of possible meanings within your interlocutor’s mind. Even less so for their more subtle emotions. It was all so obvious.
You may be persuaded that your skill in conversations is refined and functional. You’re not a toddler; you can speak, after all. When people talk together, you have the clear impression of being able to follow along. You may, rarely, stumble upon an unknown word.
In reality, for your whole life, you’ve mostly been talking to ghosts. People whom you didn’t make sure to understand, people whose emotions you left aside as if they were white noise. You presumed those people knew things they completely ignored, and you all went along with it as if nothing had happened.
We’re actors in parallel corridors reciting our own lines on the cue of each other’s text. Lines from different plays.
In the ancestral environment, things were fairly simple. Everyone shared the same presumptions. Which things were relevant were always the exact same, mediated by obstacles in social or physical communication, you’d have been able to track.
But you still have this thrust to keep going, to bring more to the table. To deliver the message. To add details. You have more to say, therefore you should say more.
But this is completely vain. You should ask, turn by turn, if you have clearly understood. You should mention the relevant corpus and make sure everyone is on the same page. You didn’t actually get anything across if you can’t paint a mental picture of the emotions the others have gone through. Back-and-forth is the only form of exchange that allows contact with reality.
This gear has lost its purpose. It’s misaligned. You walk every day in a country of foreigners, sitting on towers of inferential steps you can’t even start to fathom. You should talk less and try to understand more. For otherwise, everything you said is either a matter of vibes or a matter of silence.
When the Dreyfus affair happened in France, one of the evidence brought forth had to do with graphology: an attempt at establishing the culprit of treachery on the basis of their writing. Bertillon developed a particularly refined theory on how the letters were ‘clumsy self-imitations’ of Dreyfus. No data, no discussion, no nothing. He went on to justify a completely fabricated accusation.
Thinking alone is a dangerous action. We have seen too many people infected with Bertillon’s zombie disease of developing ideas in their own corner without ever checking for their coherence. Greater even are those affected by Bertillon’s cold, forever caught in undetectable brainfog when discussing with anyone else.
We have reached an age where moving the conversation forward has become a dangerous move. We are pacing in conversational darkness.
Be the light. Be weightless. Try to reach for the confusing abyss of your conversation partners while bearing no force of your own.
Be clear, empathetic, and curious.