… and not to listen or solve anything. In the postmodern there is a notion that power is what fuels interactions and that the quest for its succulent fruit governs all action, that dialogue is not truly possible because there is no individual to enter the dialogue in the first place. You’re just a crossroads, cross section and a final product of social and economic influences with a sole goal to climb the ladder and accumulate power within your own group.

All things have oppositions. All things exist as dualities, so no matter where you stand on an issue there are those who hold the rope at a completely opposite end. The chances they are as radical as you perceive them are very slim, because only a miniscule percent of the population is extremely radical on any count. Most are quite reasonable fine people that just happen to disagree. The thing is that if the final straw was always power and ascension within those who agree with you, this would mean that this particular power struggle doesn’t even need the other side to speak (it only needs it to exist as a far removed idea) -because the fundamental reason for dialogue – for both to come out better and more knowledgeable and finely tuned to reality of things – is gone.

If you justify what you do only by the quest for power it’s very convenient indeed, because you get to yell. But this yelling makes no difference because if the other side follows your logic as well – it is not listening, busy fighting for power within its own hierarchy. It is a stale mate where you both tied your ends of the rope to a tree and went out for lunch believing that something will be solved. Nothing will change; it’s a homeostasis of nothing at all. This is what you witness in (most) political debates because the people debating are not individuals entering the debate with an aim to come to an agreement, but with an aim to scream louder than the other side and in turn be rewarded by a high position within the system of their own party. It is not a debate at all because debate includes reason and listening to the arguments, not just cosmetics, semantics plucking and demagoguery. You’re not watching a debate here but a show. As long as the suit, the venue of the meeting and having your picture taken while shaking the “opponents” hand matters more than what happens in the conversation that follows it will only be about the power and the trees will stand their ground… until some natural disaster wipes them both (and the rope that bound them) out of existence.

It cannot be only about the power. You don’t get to yell in order to be heard. You get to have a better argument, stop being a mouthpiece and start being a person