At the Common Ground Fair this year, I went to a session called “Power of People vs. Power of Money.” I was expecting a lecture-style talk. Instead, about twenty of us pulled our chairs into a rough circle while a facilitator asked us to speak from experience.
A little stage setting. The Common Ground Fair feels like a county fair and Woodstock had a baby. Solar-powered food trucks sit next to tie-dye vendors. Kids roam free past booths selling organic chai tea and hand-forged garden tools. There’s live music drifting from multiple stages, people sitting in circles under trees sharing actual conversations, and that unmistakable vibe of folks who’d chosen to spend their weekend celebrating sustainability, community, and hope.
It was the kind of place where love isn’t just talked about but actively practiced.
Within minutes of the first prompt in our conversation on people and power, our circle did something I’ve seen happen countless times before. We slid from the topic at hand into arguing about something else. In this case, socialism.
Someone asked the question: “How can we have discussions about socialism when so many people view it as bad? In the U.S., socialism and communism are viewed as the same thing.”
It instantly went where most “intellectual” spaces go. Straight to the facts. Someone mentioned public schools as an example of socialism. Another voice added Medicare. A third brought up Nordic countries. “They pay more in taxes but look at their outcomes.”
Soon we were trading examples: Singapore, ballot initiatives, tax policy mechanics. The tone wasn’t hostile, just confident. I could feel the space settling into a familiar groove of explaining the right way to think about things.
I listened for a while, feeling that old pull to line up my own facts. Then I raised my hand.
“I just think it’s really challenging to have these conversations because if someone believes something very, very strongly, you can’t change their mind,” I said. “You just can’t. And if you try, they dig in their heels, and they’re going to only believe it even more strongly. And this is what it comes down to, and it’s on both sides. I find that leading with curiosity and actually understanding is a good first step. Because oftentimes there’s some deeper beliefs and values behind that. If we can understand that we can start to say, ‘Oh, I believe the same thing.’ And then you can actually talk about the issues versus saying you’re wrong. Right now, we’re all just shouting at each other.”
The looks I got were telling. Some polite nods. A few puzzled expressions. One or two that seemed almost annoyed. The very next comment pivoted straight back to more examples, more models, more ways to explain things better.
It was as if everyone took a breath, glanced at curiosity, then returned to their preferred mode: correction.
That moment stuck with me long after we’d moved on to other topics. Not the policy discussion itself, but the reflex underneath it. Here was a space that positioned itself around love, community, and openness. Yet when politics surfaced, even among people who largely agreed with each other, the default was still facts first. Explanation over exploration.
I felt it in myself too. When someone said something that rubbed me wrong, my jaw tightened. I leaned forward. The rebuttal was forming before they’d finished speaking. That’s not listening. That’s preparing to win.
Walking the fair afterward, I kept thinking about how quickly we’d moved from “people vs. money” to “how do we convince them.” Even in a circle that wanted to talk about collective power, we’d defaulted to strategies of individual persuasion. Even among allies, the instinct was to deploy better arguments rather than discover shared ground.
It made me wonder: If curiosity feels unsafe even here, in a space explicitly built around care and connection, where does it feel safe? And what does that tell us about the conversations we’re not having? The ones that might actually bridge the divides we say we want to heal.
My point is not to make the circle or the people in it into villains. I met genuine, thoughtful folks who care deeply about justice and community. But the experience reminded me that love-language is easier than love-practice, especially when our deepest convictions feel under threat.
Maybe that’s where the real work lives. Not in perfecting our arguments, but in getting curious about why curiosity itself feels so dangerous.
If you’ve felt that pull between wanting to convince and wanting to understand, I’d be curious to hear about it. I think that sometimes the most important shifts happen not when we’re right, but when we’re brave enough to be genuinely interested in what we might be missing.
Enjoyed this one…. and this feeling that most of us have that we want to be right, with a well-polished argument based on facts - doesn’t seem to move the needle. Time to find common ground through curiosity!