I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times

by Monica Guzmán

False stories soar because good people relate to something in them that’s true: a fear or value or concern that’s going unheard, unexplored, and unacknowledged. Every time? Yes, every time! Why do we ignore that?

We see people by talking with them, not just about them, and mining the boundary between our diverging perspectives for fresh angles on truth.

how we sink, over time, into a hole where our attitudes are reinforced instead of challenged, particularly about what those other people think.

sorting, othering, and siloing are steering us away from reality.

If you think of human interaction like our house party, with friends and strangers bumping into each other and either bonding or not, sorting is what happens at hour three, when everyone’s found their favorite group and hasn’t moved for at least twenty minutes. Conversations are flowing, drinks are emptying, and each group starts to build its own voice and culture. The clowns in the kitchen are trading jokes. The thinkers in the living room are onto their third brainy debate.

Sorting makes us happier, less bothered, more content, and more linked.

Staying in their home states kept them closer to their constituents, which was noble in its own right and very handy both for fundraising and for fending off every ambitious legislator’s worst nightmare—a primary challenge from a homegrown candidate who might seem more “in touch.” But it greatly reduced the chance to build personal relationships with their colleagues in the opposition—

That’s what happens when you’re surrounded by people who share your gut instincts: You end up sharing your blind spots, too. And when the whole group has the same blind spots? You’ll amp up each other’s ignorance and make bad decisions even more spectacularly together than each of you would have apart.

And when we stop colliding with people who disagree, even in casual ways, we miss opportunities to see a different angle on something,

What’s underrepresented in your communities will be underrepresented in your life and overrepresented in your imagination.

On the things that matter most to you, the things that draw the boundary for you between good and bad, you don’t want to be challenged.

When you shove away the hostile, you push away the curious. The people who were learning from you, from whom you might have learned something yourself.

Othering goes too far when it tricks us into shrinking our world instead of expanding it.