Tag: views

Labelling others as ignorant

Posted on by philipdodson

The danger of labelling is obvious. It’s subjective and depends at which end of the telescope you are looking down.

The most ignorant thing could be to not listen to others and their views no matter how different they are to yours.

Failure to listen leads to not understanding, only hearing one part of the story leads to not understanding, and not understanding is indeed ignorance.

Ignorance comes from ignoring all aspects, all views and only listening to ours or the views of others within our echo chambers.

We could choose to open our minds and listen, often we choose not to as we fear to be wrong, so much easier to label people who believe different things to us as being ignorant.

It removes our accountability to understand different.

Working together, could that be better?

Posted on by philipdodson


This is something that the human race has been doing since its very existence.

Yet, amazingly, we seem to taken a turn backwards rather than getting better. 

The key missing ingredient is our lack of skills in listening. No surprise given that it’s not on the school curriculum. There are no listening lessons. 

Listening with the only purpose of understanding the other person would dramatically improve working together. 

Many times we listen for a gap for when we can speak, jumping in at the first pause. 

Often we kind of listen at the same time as we are formulating our response and that’s while the other person is still speaking.

At times we do not listen at all. We have evaluated in advance, without hearing a word, what the other person is saying will be of no worth.

Imagine the change to work if we just listened, as in with our ears and not our mouth. Evaluating after the person has spoken, using questions to further clarify the other person’s views.