The dinosaur of conversation

When was the last time you engaged in a deep intelligent and meaningful discussion. Not an argument but an enquiry and not for the purpose of arriving at an answer or solution, but just for the satisfaction of learning and inquiry.

It's not easy and most often it ends in disagreement, an argument or a fight.

That's because an inquiry plays by different rules, uses a different logic and comes to a different end.

Most conversations work with the rule of exclusion. This point is wrong, that area of study is wrong (and I can prove it), I don't like your opinion, so therefore I'm going to resist and exclude it. The logic of exclusion works to to suppress everything you don't like or doesn't support your ideoligical word-view.

What's left is invariably narrow, twisted and ideologically self-serving.

A more interesting conversion, one that can get a whole lot deeper a whole lot faster, works on the principal, and through the logic of, inclusion. Let the conversation itself become a mechanism for exploring the relative merits of differing perspectives, regardless.

The first is easier [which is why it's the more common], but not much is learned. The second is infinitely more demanding [which is why it's as rare as chicken teeth], but offers the potential for connection, learning and expansion.

Exclusion is violent and slow, inclusion non-violent and fast, and in the quest for results -- process matters.

In a world, at the leading edge, that's changing as fast as our, the former is the dinosaur of learning methodologies.