26-01-2021
In communication, agreement or disagreement is of the secondary importance. What is of the primary importance is understanding. Agreement or disagreement without understanding is meaningless.
As the sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann formulated, the basic unit of society is not the humans but communication, and communication is the system that consists of utterance, information, and understanding. Therefore, it is not the individuals that communicate but it is communication, and only communication, that communicates.
Where there is no understanding, there is no communication. Where there is no communication, because communication is the basic unit of society, society breaks down. And this is exactly what is happening in our so-called Information Age with advanced communication technologies and tools.
Truth is organic with reality and so is communication. Understanding is possible when communication (and the participants) is aligned with truth, because understanding is understanding of the truth of the information which utterance contains.
Therefore, when the utterance is a lie and the information false, understanding is not possible, and hence communication does not exist. You can only believe or not believe a lie but you cannot understand a lie—a statement which is false and contains no truth. If you can understand anything when lying is involved, it is that you understand the truth that the utterance is a lie and the information is false.
Most people only project their own preconceptions onto a statement or an individual. They do not and cannot observe or understand the statement or the individual. As G. I. Gurdjieff observed, Objective Consciousness is rare, which is the consciousness that observes without projection and understands without preconception.
What is it that makes understanding possible? An important question to ask for the future of humanity.