The will to understand, not refute, creates mental de-escalation

Evidence

Whether you tell an honestly interested listener what you think you found out yesterday about covert CIA operations, or you tell it to an ideological opponent who asks rhetorical questions and shakes his head with a smile, there is an enormous difference. The interest of the former is infectious and opens up ways to discover one’s own contradictions without judgment. The skepticism of the latter mobilizes defense impulses. Only through the will to understand – not the will to refute – can mental de-escalation be created. Whoever wants to evoke critical thinking must dispense with the habitus of the educator, because education reveals not only the presence of an agenda, i.e. exactly what conspiracy theorists suspect everywhere – but also the same unconditional will to know and to be right, which one criticizes in the counterpart. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 441

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the founder of motivational interviewing’s point transmitted in Deep Listening about judgment-free attention; also parallels the listening discipline in the silence book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that the educator’s habitus reproduces exactly the will-to-be-right it criticizes is a genuinely counterintuitive, dense observation about epistemic humility trading with persuasion.