Yesterday, I was discussing the government's pilot plan to shut commercial businesses by 9pm in Islamabad and replicating the model in other cities of Pakistan – a venture to save energy for the summer season. The discussion turned into a debate between supporters and critics of this policy. Whichever group was on the right, what bothered me enough was their self-righteous attitude. Each one of us tends to do that in routine discussions.
To move forward with discussions or find solutions, rule number one is to "listen to others". I see this everywhere. Quite frequently, I see this on the television where representatives of political parties or organizations try to assert themselves and their opinions forcefully. One cannot ever get to solutions with such an attitude – this probably is why we have not reached to enough solutions as yet.
More than listening to the other person's contrasting opinions, participants focus on winning the show by proving the other person wrong. During my debate on shutter-down timings, the supporters were talking, and their opponents were not listening to them but preparing for a biting comeback. Hence, the dialogue was not really a dialogue, but a quest to prove the opponents wrong, and by all means. Had they listened to the other group's argument, they would not be so angry about the new policy. It would have at least made them feel better.
The first rule of a dialogue is to listen to the other person. When people listen to us, they are valuing our opinion and expecting the same from us. However, most of us take this positive attitude as the other party's weakness and involuntarily, push them to not complete their point, and interrupt them as they speak.
Rule number two for debates: never hit on personal grounds. The moment one enters personal boundaries of a discussant – while deviating from the given topic – it does not just give a clear signal of debating ethics being violated but also shows the tendency of bearing weak arguments that need "protection with deviation technique", to save oneself from the embarrassment of lacking in logical arguments. We all remember how a female minister (Firdous Ashiq Awan) disgraced herself by attacking another female politician (Kashmala Tariq) on a talk show. Well, the minister lost in her constituency in the next general elections, too.
Rule number three: keep your cool. The bitter truth is, if you lost your temper while conveying your idea or defying in your opinion the wrong idea, your argument was probably toothless from the beginning – you just proved it so. You lost your temper because you were hopeless in being able to convince them. In short, you proved your failure.
Debates, dialogues, and discussions are fruitful interactions to learn from each other but generally these interactions are looked down at as a wastage of time and energy. The phrase "no discussion on politics or religion" often graces the pages of fraternity brochures. There has been a reduction in entertaining focus groups or circles, solely of fear of discussions ending up in scuffles. Hence, it’s best for everybody’s intellectual growth if we all observe the etiquettes of dialogue and share our knowledge and experience with each other without breaching behavioral limits.