Communicants

[Mole]

There's two things.

The first is persuasion or communication.

And the second is to find out the state of mind of the person you want to persuade or communicate with.

This is not as easy as it might seem. As you can't rely on the person to tell you their state of mind, as they probably don't know. And this is complicated by the fact you probably don't know your own state of mind.

So the only thing to do is to jump in and see what happens. And then watch and see what it reveals about your frame of mind and mine.

And as much as I hate to say it, MBTI can be useful in this. Particularly taking an oppositional view of MBTI as it creates a splash like two protons colliding in the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva in Switzerland. And just as the splash products in Geneva tell us about sub-atomic particles, the splash products of opposing MBTI tell us about our relative states of mind.

However once we establish our relative states of mind, what are we going to communicate?

We can't determine what to communicate by debate as debate is simply a sterile defence mechanism used by men to maintain their dominance and power.

And we can't determine what to communicate by gossiping about a person who isn't present and unable to defend themselves, as this is simply a defence mechanism used by women to maintain conformity and control.

So how can we determine what to communicate?

And isn't this even the wrong question?

Perhaps we should be asking, how can we communicate?

How can we become communicants?

 

[onemoretime]

Umm, just because both are used that way from time to time doesn't mean that those are inherent purposes. I'd hesitate to qualify it in such gender-specific terms, as well.

Is the question about what we need to improve in interpersonal communication, or is it whether communication between individuals is altogether as important as you're proposing?