Growing up, I watched my father and grandfather have many heated debates about mostly political issues, and those debates left a deep impression on me: Instead of understanding debates as an opportunity to exchange opinions and learn from each other, I become overly emotional , and all I want to hear is that I’m right.

“Discourse Vulnerability” is what German law professor Frauke Rostalski calls this unfortunate habit of mine. In her book “The Vulnerable Society”, she describes how we as a society become too sensitive and thus find it increasingly difficult to exchange ideas. Just talking about a certain topic can make us feel personally attacked. For example, if you are a gun owner, transgender, immigrant, or someone who works in the fracking industry, a debate about gun sales, biological sex, deportation, or non-fossil fuels can be perceived as a threat. Or sometimes just the sight of a specific speaker is all it needs to evoke negative feelings. If that speaker has said hurtful things before, you won’t listen to them again. And if people are convinced to be morally on the right side – if they have “woke up” — they are also unlikely to listen to other perspectives.

“Awakening” is a concept I came across in veganism. When people suddenly see the suffering of non-human animals in entertainment, media research, factory farming, milk and egg production, they feel as if they have “woke up”, and they don’t understand how other people can’t see the obvious. “Woke Up” people tend to forget the time BEFORE they saw what now seems so crystal clear to them. This concept of having “woke up” can easily be applied to other issues: pro-choice vs. pro-life, transgender vs. traditional families, mass immigration vs. mass deportation, the amount of money and weapons given to Ukraine, etc. When a person has “woke up”, their position becomes part of their identity, and those who raise critical issues are automatically labeled as “to be against me.”

According to the South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, people anxiously try to avoid suffering at all costs. For every pain there is a pill, and we have become terribly afraid of unpleasant challenges. Children grow up protected from all the negative experiences life throws their way. When I was a kid, losing a contest meant you actually lost it. Nowadays, even the kid who loses will win a prize. When I was a student, missing class three times meant getting kicked out of class, as one of my classmates had to learn. These days, professors are expected to accommodate students for missing class.

I’m the first to admit how much the mess of life bothers me. But life is messy, whether we rebel or not, and part of that mess is sometimes getting hurt and not always getting what we want. The answer to not seeing your favorite party win cannot be to claim fraud and respond with violence, or to cancel classes by putting your personal frustration over your responsibility to your students. Instead, the response to losing must be resilience.

Resilience is the critical skill we need to successfully deal with the messiness of life. When things don’t go our way, we either learn and grow from it and become better equipped for future challenges, or we become depressed, bitter and resentful, which leads to more anger and division. In fact, our society now seems to be so afraid of “can’t-get-what-I-want” that we don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. If you’re not with me, you must be against me. — Is that really what we want our children to learn?

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings who base their decisions on reason rather than emotion. However, what really guides us is not reason but our values, and these values ​​are absolutely tied to our emotions. Hand on heart, dear readers: Why did you vote the way you did? Because you wanted to see your values ​​protected: what is important to you according to your worldview. And you are happy that your party won because you now see your values ​​protected, and you are upset that you lost because the winning party does not share your values.

The more vulnerable we are, as Rostalski observes, the more laws we want to protect our values: whether it’s gun rights, traditional family rights, transgender rights, or abortion rights. But protecting one group’s values ​​naturally comes with restrictions on the other group. If there were stricter gun laws, the anti-gun group would feel more protected at the expense of those who freely want to choose which gun/weapons to buy. Or excluding books about transgender people or traditional families from libraries means limiting free expression and teaching children about different family models.

We need to learn to talk to each other again. A different opinion is not a personal attack but just a different way of looking at the same thing. Because things are never just black and white, we absolutely need discourse. Discourse – hearing different perspectives and exchanging ideas – is at the heart of the democratic spirit. To understand that others also have fears and values ​​that they want to see protected, and that we hear these other fears and values ​​— isn’t that what being human is all about? Diversity can never exist when you only listen to those who agree with my values. Diversity means respecting variation and compromising – which means leaving room for other perspectives and ideas.

Daniela Ribitsch teaches German at Lycoming College.