Do We Really Listen?

     For the past five years I have volunteered at a “listening centre” where people can call (or come) to talk about whatever is on their mind. We receive calls from people suffering from domestic problems, mental health difficulties, problems of addiction, loneliness, joblessness, in a state of panic or depression. The list is long and the calls are many. We spend hundreds of hours every year just listening. Our training is along the lines developed by Carl Rogers’ “active listening.” Active listening means paying attention to the person who is speaking, welcoming their presence and their story, without judgement or advice, counsel or orientation, respecting that they will, as they speak, eventually find the path they need to follow. We thank them at the end for speaking without offering them advice or orientation. We say very little except to encourage them to speak. Often, at the end of a session, the person who called or visited will conclude by saying that they feel much better and will express gratitude for the attentive welcome they have received.
     One of the important features of active listening is that one has to draw close to someone in order to hear them. We have to “displace” ourselves and move into the place of the other. Unless there is some sort of proximity (not physical necessarily), there is no possibility of listening.
     For me, all this connects with my interest in liberation theology, which begins by listening to what people are living, to what is happening in society. Without a listening ear, somewhere, we become non-persons, alone and disconnected. Our joys and our sufferings are unheard. We serve only to move the machinery of the economy; apart from that, we might as well be non-existent.  Far too often, this is the experience of the 99% who spend their days either working themselves to death for a pittance that barely provides for their basic needs, or perhaps not even that, or who are literally set aside entirely and live off hand-outs, unknown and unheard by those who have more than enough.    
     One of the interesting dynamics of the “occupy” movement is to attempt to listen to everyone’s opinion and to learn from it. First of all, it is pretty much impossible to participate in the movement without being physically present at their activities. To participate, we have to “displace” and on many levels.
     In an assembly, even one person can block a decision if it does against his or her profound values. The person presenting a proposition will have to go back and re-work it. Dialogue is essential. When a proposition is complex, the assembly divides into smaller groups for discussion. There is usually a “talking stick” that is passed around to give every person a chance to have their say without having to fight to get into the conversation. People are listened to carefully; their intervention is appreciated and pondered. Nothing serious will go far if there is no consensus.
     Try sometime, during a day, to watch how often you are more energized about sharing your point of view or your feeling than about listening to that of others. Watch how often people’s point of view or feelings go unacknowledged in conversations or how people are cut off because someone has something they consider more important to say. We are not a society that goes out of its way to listen, especially to those who are not “significant” or who do not have ready access to contexts where they can share easily.
     It is not hard to make a leap to the larger scale. More than half of the world’s population lives in conditions that do not allow their voice and their needs to be heard by those who have cornered the means to live in excessive comfort. While the press, radio and television blare out their messages twenty-four hours of every day, the message they send is geared basically to encourage us to become nameless, mindless consumers of things we really do not need or even want. In between, there are some rather half-hearted attempts at informing. Mark Twain is quoted as saying that if you do not read the newspaper, you are uninformed; But, if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. The media are not there to listen or even to inform. They are there to orient – to consumption of commercial products. Today, it is their principal reason for existence.
     The internet and the social media were invented to provide a medium so that everyone could have a voice – that is, if you could afford a computer or an iPod.  The commercial interests have done everything possible to turn them into a space for encouraging more spending on commercial goods. To some extent they have succeeded, though it remains an extremely significant means of communication between people. As a result, billions of dollars are now being invested in surveillance of this dangerous phenomenon of people communicating with one another.
     All this, it seems to me, reveals the disjunction between the way our economic structures work and what ordinary people really want and hope for. We are faced with fundamental options about how to live our lives.