What We Have Here Is Failure To Communicate

We can’t agree about whether or not a fetus is a baby. We can’t agree about whether or not a corporation is a person. And we can’t agree about what a woman is.  Feel however you want to feel about that, but understand that the human super power is cooperation, and if we can’t communicate, then we can’t cooperate. And if we can’t cooperate, then people die.

Reject that idea if you want to, but after an earthquake or a hurricane, how do we save lives? Does one person go in and rescue all of the survivors? No.

If we can’t communicate, then we can’t cooperate, and if we can cooperate, people die. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors could only get so far pointing and grunting, and that’s why they invented language in the first place. When you yell “Bear!” everyone knows that it’s time to flee or to fight. If the decision is to fight, then we need to fight, because one of us can’t get the job done. If we need to fight, then we all need to know that. If we can’t communicate, we can’t cooperate, and if we can’t cooperate, people die.

Don’t get me wrong. I know how satisfying it is to verbally “dunk” on someone who disagrees with you, and to be bathed in that sense of superiority. And I know how fleeting that sense of superiority is. Do you want to sacrifice your ability to cooperate with everyone for a sense of superiority that’s going to disappear in five minutes?

“It’s not everyone, just the people who are wrong.”

How many people do you know who agree with you about everything? If you only dunk on people who disagree with you, and only the people who disagree with you dunk on you, that’s everyone. You and your friends can’t even agree about where to go to lunch, so how are we going to bridge the gap to find consensus on meaningful decisions?

If we want to cooperate, we need to communicate, and our need to cooperate is built into our DNA. So we need to stop sacrificing our ability to cooperate and communicate for momentary victories on Twitter, because Twitter is not a real place.

If you didn’t know, now you know. Now that you know, what do you want to do about it? Will you sacrifice your conscience for your ego, or sacrifice your ego for your conscience?

Do you want to build community and cooperation around conscience and integrity? Do you want to build community and cooperation around the quest for the optimal expression of human talent? Do you want to live a life of meaning, fulfillment, and contribution?

Do you want to live in a world where we can agree to disagree sometimes because we’d rather focus on the fact that everyone is born with talent and the desire to unleash it, and we’d rather cooperate on the quest for the optimal expression of human talent? Do you want to build community around the quest to make today the day that everything goes right? I do too. So, we need to figure out how to communicate again.

When we can communicate, we can cooperate, and when we can cooperate, people thrive.