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.