On questions of legitimacy and listening

Why people do not listen to others ? And what actually does it mean to listen to someone ? To pay attention, to absorb information transmitted, to prepare counter-arguments, to look into the eyes of your counterpart, or is there something else ? I guess as a minimum you would expect to find spurs of your words, ideas and thoughts in the deeds and conversation of a person you had a conversation before. When there are not a singly trace of your ideas, - it means your words just had shaken the air and had not left even a minor impact on a person. He just did not listen. Full stop.

Recently I am encountering so many situations when people do not listen to what I am saying. This happens over extensive period of time, leaving a dire desire to stop talking with these people in the first place. One-way intellectul traffic is good only in autocracy. In other situations it leads to hypocracy, when people do not walk the talk or talk in vain in the talking house.

It is inreadibly easy to build a circle of artifical learning environment based on appearance of coherence, leadership and understanding while in fact it is a false void, autocarcy where all the activities are driven by ego and not by the spirit of collective effort. And the worst, this hypocric attitude of dealing with people is extremely contegious, - it is very easy to catch up as deeply inside us we are all inclined to dominate, as human beings, sitting on the top of the food pyramid. Only hard-won intellectual effort enables us to give up desire to seed power around us, to dominate the environment we are in and truly LISTEN to others, not just make appearance of listening.

Illegitimacy of professionals

Fascinating how important legitimacy is – there are so many pseudo- specialists in anything around, - people that have just talked about things and never realized not a single project from A to Z, projects that have dealt with real people, real lives. Talking house is all over the place [and not only in the area of CSR]. So many people that are not interested in other people’s well-being but in own success, career and pushing the boundaries to own happiness no matter what.
I have learned for myself that before you praise anyone, you need to ask people who worked with the person under consideration, and people who supposedly benefited from this person’s work. And the last source of trust would be media – with journalists hungry for lavish receptions and easy articles and who do not care about the topics themselves.
And to finish on legitimacy – it also comes from the ability of a person to embrace areas of human activities other than his/her own – there are so many specialists in such specific narrow areas but totally useless in anything that lays outside their area of comfort. Being specialist is excellent but to ignore developments in other, often efficiency-enhancing, areas of human activity is at par with ignorance and even certain arrogance. And it definitely becomes a fertile ground for hypocrisy.
There are certain individuals who are willing to accept own illegitimacy, commanding humbleness. Such people generally are open to people, willing listeners and accept opinion of others. And this makes them great partners for intellectually-charged conversation.
But unfortunately there is such a minority of truly legitimate people that sometimes I wonder if so called “developed world” is not in fact an “imagined world with faked identities”, a cluster of brands covering the true stories of life how it is?