> A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. > > Douglas Adams
I wonder if this is an example of No Spitting? Probably not. Humour can get you a long way. Or is it that in this quote, fools are being praised? Let's take it that way, and dive into that reading in the spirit of deep listening.
But first, I feel a voice of judgement within the humour of Adams, that speaks more clearly to active listening. Both are implicit in the failures of comunication between fools, where deep listening is good politics (the politics of peace), and active listening is the understanding of the other with an abundance of humility in its radical sense.
When we worship fools - an essential part of radical humility - we never underestimate the practiced inability to understand the other. This "ingenuity" to missunderstand, requires the super-powers of the babelfish to break down. In the real world, should we find the energy, we can project peace (deep listening), or practice humility (active listening). No one will allow us to do both.
Let's look more closely at deep listening and active listening. The first is to love and be loved, the second is to translate the strangeness and some time horror of the other and to repeatedly fail. It's a red pill, blue pill choice - where the red pill might well be a fraud. Or if not a fraud, be a transgression of privacy, or if not a transgression, at least a judgement - which is antethetical to peace.
It is no wonder that fools resist such attempts to communicate - they have no desire to be designed by anyone. Language translators are banned in online games, and split brains are natures prefered design choice.
# See
> The corpus callosum is not a bridge, but a means of standing apart. > > Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009)