Great essay. As the author explains, we need to get people to have rational discourse when they disagree with each other on important social and political issue

Great essay. As the author explains, we need to get people to have rational discourse when they disagree with each other on important social and political issues. I used to do workshops on this that worked fairly well. I used a simple method, namely mutual active listening. Two people who are on opposite sides of an issue agree that one will talk for a while, say five minutes, and the other will only listen and say back to them what they think they are saying. Then they exchange roles and the previous talker becomes the new listener, and vice-versa, for five minutes, and then switch again, and so on until each person feels like he or she has expressed their main ideas and been accurately understood. This process doesn't lead to total agreement, but invariably it produces a lot more agreement than the two parties had before they started out, and also friendlier, more respectful relations. So mutual active listening works, but the question is how you get people to agree to do it. I think the best sell is that most people, I think, feel misunderstood and misrepresented by people on the opposite side of various issues. I would tell them that the people on the opposite side also feel misunderstood and misrepresented by them, and the only way each side can come to feel accurately understood is if they both agree to do mutual listening with each other. I haven't tried this yet, but I think it would motivate a lot of people to try mutual active listening.