The Need for Conversation in the Age of Rage

Off (centre) and Williams discussed their books on Friday

On Friday I went to a stimulating discussion at Granville Island as part of the Vancouver Writers Fest about the political and social divide, how disinformation is driving us as a society apart and how we can try to bridge the gap again. The answer? By talking to each other again.

Entitled "Listening in the age of rage", two authors, Carol Off and Ian Williams tackle this very timely topic in their books, At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an age of rage, and What I Mean to Say respectively. 

Off analyses six words

Off was the host of the CBC Radio current affairs show As It Happens and in her over 25,000 interviews, she began noticing, towards the end of her time there, that the people she interviewed, used words as weapons, something that wasn't so prevalent before. So she began examining six words: democracy, freedom, truth, woke, choice and taxes.

She gives the example of freedom and it was during the freedom convoy protests in January 2022 that the protesters kept using the word "freedom". Off says the protesters wanted freedom from society, freedom to do whatever they wanted, the freedom not to care for anyone else.

Meanwhile Williams is a Giller Prize-winning author and professor who has observed how there are two polar opposites, but most of us in the middle are too timid to speak for fear of being cancelled, but he says we need to listen to others and also stand our ground otherwise the middle will be lost and it will be even harder to find any kind of commonality.

He also talked about as a professor, he is expected to "care" more for his students than before. However, he is constrained by university protocols that he should care, but not get too involved, but at least show some empathy.

Off jumped in and said she guest lectured some students about her book and was annoyed that the students believe everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that these opinions are all valued. She said she lost it, and ranted then did that mean that Vladimir Putin's opinion that Ukraine should be annexed should be valued and talked about other dictators. She had a point. It was going too far.

Williams encourages active listening

In addition, she said these dictators do not appeal to rationality, but emotion. When all rationality is gone, all people have left is emotion, and used Donald Trump's silly statement that in Springfield, Ohio, the Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs. The media went there to check, and no, they were not eating people's pets, but it was Trump appealing to people's base emotions of feeling these immigrants were taking away jobs and invading the country.

This analysis helped the audience have a better understanding of how and why people think this way, but perhaps still not quite comprehend how people can even have this kind of bizarre thinking, but this is how dictators can control people, by appealing to their emotions not their rationality.

In the end Off and Williams encourage people to try to stop this by actively listening to the other side to try to understand where they come from and to question them about where they got their information from, to see how credible it is, or to show rationally that their argument has no basis.

An audience member asked about being part of the left, but there are disagreements within the left that he was not doing enough and pouring guilt on him. Williams suggested that he stop thinking this way, that he had done what he could do, or that he has other ways of promoting his point of view otherwise it gets too exhausting to defend yourself when you should be banding together to fight against the right.

The discussion was a lot to take in but it made people in the room realise we are all in this together and we each need to do our part to bridge the gap. So start listening and analysing what words really mean these days!