In a second article on the theme of "learning to listen", Dr David Cliff explores that being heard in society is often about getting past the filters created by societal and organisational priorities.
Last month I talked about the value of silence. How, in those spaces we can establish ourselves, reflect and reconnect with who we are. As important is the ability to listen, is the ability to not just hear the words, but what is really being said. Communication happens at multiple levels and virtually all human communication is nuanced, subtle and complexly coded. Listening, therefore, is a paramount matter of importance and is also a skill that requires honing over the years. When our propensity to promote ourselves in a commercial world is to transmit just that bit more than receiving, we often lose the ability to listen. We see it everywhere, people who believe they are listening to their customers, politicians who will tell you what their constituents think. This is a delusion. At best, it is a selective perception based on our own internal biases and how we would like the world to be, as we ultimately see it, rather than seeing the world as it is through the experiences, narratives and sharing of others.
Listening happens so little these days. We are encouraged to transmit. We now have ‘influencers’ who transmit constantly using media that can be very much a one-way street. They often market and promote themselves without understanding the lived experience of ordinary folk. It then becomes unsurprising that for many people customer services in the commercial world, for example, is very much a ritualised situation. In boardrooms, members will tell themselves in a classic group think way, just how the customer is responding based on their chosen, often automated service response rather than what the customer truly wants. Equally, in our politicians, we see greater disconnect now between those who are palpably members of the elite either by their education, culture, or sheer money at bank, advising and overseeing how most people should live, and asking them to “keep their nerve” in harsh financial times that have been at part crafted by the very people in power.
It’s small wonder that there is an undertow of anger and frustration that growing numbers believe they are no longer valued as citizens or consumers and that minority issues are given a greater audience. Indeed, it’s interesting to notice that as we lend increasing focus on ‘woke’ agendas of relatively small groups of the population we seem to focus less on more common issues of poverty, age, geographical inequality, health equality, and other factors that can affect anyone. Often those who do are accused of being ‘phobic’ rather than simply having a different perspective. Could it be that these ‘intersectional issues’, important though they are, allow us to have a debate within a confined resource envelope, where the business of actually correcting something like poverty, for example, would require far more resource, intensive structural changes that would require reform with the elite and others to pay more, and involve radical redistributive policies, that would be completely unpalatable to many.
Take another example, the ‘levelling up’ agenda of government. A sixty plus page document that has little more than tokenistic project management to correct truly historic imbalances. Talk about the Barnet formula, and the unfair distribution of resources, or something that’s more centralist in terms of structural failures within the fabric of our society, this then goes into the ‘too difficult box’, never to get the courageous address it needs. Pity, because truly radical thought in the past gave rise to the NHS, the welfare state and further back still, pensions.
The true danger when we don’t listen is that we squabble amongst ourselves about minority issues and forget the issues of the long-suffering majority in our communities. Let’s be sure we talk about the paucity of services for people with housing needs, rural communities, cancer, mental health issues, air pollution that shortens life for 40,000 each year. People with strokes and heart problems even now waiting long periods for an ambulance well away from ‘winter pressures’, only to find that their health conditions transported them somewhere else!
Commercially, we must learn to listen also. Increasingly ethics feature in the mindset of consumers. Research studies, very clearly show that ethical considerations account for over 60-80% of consumer choices these days. We see the proliferation of magazines, such as the Ethical Consumer, something that would never have found subscription amongst the populous only a few years ago.
Most importantly the climate agenda must be heard and responded to by all. Once again, just as we have seen principled central resignations recently, politicians are not listening to the climate agenda nearly as much as it now requires, and people can see the world is changing whilst the science of decades is being both proven and simultaneously sidestepped for short term interests. However, as much as one may disagree with their disruptive approaches, this is perhaps why we now see hitherto quiet people often senior citizens protesting for ‘Just Stop Oil’, using behaviour that, for their generation, would have once been an outrage. We also see this in the NHS industrial disputes when we pay doctors £14 per hour and the NHS is being asset stripped by other countries, who pay more, yet some in power are all for bankers’ bonuses forgetting what that culture of reward did back in 2008 for most folk.
Yes, we all must listen, particularly those in positions of power political and commercially, for if we don’t, history shows the often silent, quietest voices in our community, may yet turn into a roar of truth to power, with increasingly direct action in order to be heard. Above all, the climate agenda is rapidly becoming something that will no longer be tolerated by growing numbers hitherto reasonable, compliant, ordinary citizens and consumers.
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