How Can People Communicate When Their Ideologies Are Vastly Different?

How can people communicate when their ideologies are vastly different?

English101

Communication can be difficult when two or more parties have different ideas. To make it easier to communicate we should respect each other’s argument and different ideologies. You don’t always have to agree with another person, but to be able to have a serious discussion you need to respect the other person’s opinion. In Plato’s The Allegory of The Cave, the trapped prisoners didn’t believe what their friend saw when he visited the outside world. When the freed prisoner tried to explain what he experienced his former friends thought he was crazy; “men would say of him that up he went and he came without his eyes” (Plato 4). This way of communicating is not sustainable. The prisoners exercise preconventional morality, they are calculating, self-centered and childrenlike. The society would not function if you considered every person who has a different opinion crazy and foolish.

The society needs people with new and different ideas to develop and grow. In Representation and The Media Stuart Hall says “he wasn’t sure who discovered water, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t the fish. In other words, when we are immersed in something surrounded by it the way we are by images from the media, we may come to accept them as just part of the real and natural world. We just swim through them, unthinkingly absorbing them as fish in water. What cultural studies would like us to do is step out of the water in a sense and look at it, see how it shapes our existence, and even critically examine the content of the water” (3). This quote emphasizes how impartment it is to communicate our different thoughts and ideas to get a chance to create a better society. The society needs individuals to step outside the water, to improve the way we think and our way of living. Their perspectives need to be limitless to open new door and possibilities. When these individuals communicate with the rest of the people they need to have well prepared arguments so the people can relate and understand their ideas.

Both the prisoners in the cave and the fish swimming represent the people in our society, who don’t communicate. They live their life without reflecting over their surroundings. Communication between these people and the individuals who interrogate their surroundings can be difficult. The way they see reality is vastly different which makes it hard to communicate. To solve this problem they need to find a common ground and debate their different arguments from a shared point. When there’s a lack of common ground and understanding of the other individuals idea, it might lead to arguments about something else other than the idea that was discussed in the first place. It might lead to an argument about something personal or another idea far from the first topic.

Language is a very important part of the way we communicate; “the question of communication and language completes the circle of representation” (Hall 10). Knowledge of languages is the base ingredient when people debate their different ideas and opinions. Communication without understanding what the other person says is pointless. Therefore knowledge in languages is unavoidable. Slang and dialects can make it more difficult to communicate at certain times. An idea can get lost when you translate it from one language to another. I have experienced difficulties to communicate in my second language English. When I translate something from Swedish to English, the main idea I want to convey can get lost in the translation.