Say No to debate

I used to think of diplomatic people as fake. I used to think you have to say what you think about the topic regardless of who are you speaking. In this process, I have hurt a lot of people. Though I was logically very articulated, I was making a huge mistake of “Making people feel bad about themselves ” .My goal was always to understand the topic better and deeper, was never to win the debate, but I ended up making people feel bad and angry. The problem was I never gave emphasize on why they are saying what they are saying.

For example- if a person whose father was killed by a Pakistani army in a civil war will have a strong believe that Pakistani are bad people. With that person if I argue saying “ just because one person killed your father doesn’t mean that all Pakistani are bad ”, he will immediately get angry and start attacking me with all sorts of absurd reasons. On top of that, he would never listen to my opinion no matter how logical it is. In this situation, although I am logically right but saying it directly to him is wrong. I have made these kinds of mistakes countless times. A people believe is shaped largely by his own past, his society, his family and a lot of other influences. If I was that person whose father was killed by Pakistani troops I would have done the same thing.

Now I think that during any argument we should always respect the other person putting ourselves in their shoes and having genuine empathy for their story. However, I still think we should always bring our ideas forward but in a most polite way. This is especially important while managing a relationship with our parents, relatives, friends, co-workers, and people we care about. In the same example, we can speak to that person in this way: “ I am very sorry about what happened to your father. I can’t imagine how tough it was for you. Since I didn’t face a situation like yours I don’t have any right to advise you. But just think about thousands of other people who were killed in the same war, a lot of them were Pakistanis as well. A lot of that Pakistani army may have children just like you and me and those children may be thinking the same thing that we are thinking, ’All Indians are bad people’. If you and I were born in Pakistan we would have the same hatred towards India. ”

In this way even if we won’t be able to change his mind completely but maybe he will have a slightly different perspective about Pakistani people. I think this approach works way better than the first one. I got inspired to think about this while listening to Raghuram Rajan, an economist. Seeing him speak so humbly about his critics made me realized how wrong was my approach

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