The Full Story

Daniel Levitin’s work, A Field Guide To Lies, is clarifying here because it exposes a modern superstition: that facts automatically save us, they don’t. Numbers can mislead.Charts can persuade while distorting what’s measured. Statistics can be framed to defend a story over revealing truth. A claim without denominators, base rates, source quality, and causal understanding isn’t “evidence”, it’s a costume, putting lipstick on a pig. And when a conversation begins with a costume of facts, it becomes a contest over whose costume looks the best. We mistake being informed for being wise, and we confuse information with meaning. The result isn’t collective intelligence, it’s sophisticated misunderstanding, we talk past one another with increasing confidence.

But even perfect facts wouldn’t solve what’s happening, because another engine is running underneath: denial. In Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial, the point is not that people don’t know what’s happening. It’s that people and institutions can “know” and “not know” at the same time. Denial is not simply ignorance; it’s a structured response to what feels too implicating, too costly, too morally demanding to face. It protects identity, comfort and privilege, preserving a social order. It allows suffering to be acknowledged without being addressed, recognized without responsibility, continued without consequence. This is why we can speak about harm endlessly and still live as if nothing is required of us. We can name pain while keeping it at a safe distance, out of sight, out of mind! We can turn reality into content and call its consumption “awareness.”

And then there is the third engine, the one that makes the whole thing feel so charged: desire. Luke Burgis’s, Wanting, sharpens the uncomfortable truth that much of what we think we want is not born in us like a private revelation. Desire is mimetic: we borrow it, we catch it, we imitate what others seem to want, and then we defend it as if it were our deepest conviction. This goes beyond products or status, it’s about outrage, enemies, belonging, and moral positions. The algorithms don’t merely feed us information; they feed our desires, our cravings, our fears, and our performative nature to remain inside the tribe. In that environment, conversation becomes rivalry disguised as principles. We aren’t just seeking truth; we’re signaling allegiance, we’re competing for symbolic positions. We want what our side wants, because wanting together is how the tribe stays together.

Taken together, distortion, denial, mimetic desire, you can finally see why our loudest conversations don’t lead anywhere. We’re arguing at the wrong level. We’re scratching the surface while refusing the deeper questions that actually change systems: 

What are we assuming?

What are we protecting?

What do we truly want?

What responsibility becomes visible if denial drops?

Which desires are ours, and which are borrowed from the crowd?

What kind of future are we trying to build together?

This is what “The Conversations We Need To STOP Having” really means. Not “stop talking about difficult topics.” It means stop having conversations that function as avoidance. Stop having conversations that allow denial to remain intact by arguing at the surface. Stop regurgitating media sound bites as if they are factual. Stop treating speed as a virtue. Stop using debate to perform identity. Stop turning information into a weapon by calling it truth.

One of the most common misframes is the conversation that begins with events and ends with positions. It looks like this: “Here’s what happened. Here’s who did it. Here’s why they’re wrong.” The whole thing is structured as prosecution, defense, and punishment. But if we’re honest, many of these conversations lack curiosity, and aren’t trying to understand. They’re trying to protect righteousness: “I am the kind of person who stands on the right side.” It’s a form of identity protection wearing a mask of analysis. Cohen would say this is exactly where denial becomes sophisticated: we can be loudly concerned while remaining safely unimplicated. Burgis would add: we can be loudly concerned because it’s what our tribe is concerned about, and that concern becomes a form of belonging. Levitin would remind us that concern built on shaky ground is easily manipulated.

Another misframe is the conversation that mistakes outrage for virtue. Outrage can be a signal that something matters, but it can also become a commodity: a way to feel alive, aligned, and morally awake! Without curiosity we skip doing the slower work of sense-making, healing and contribution. From a mimetic perspective, outrage is contagious. It spreads because it’s socially rewarded. It creates a common enemy, a script, and a shared identity in minutes. But outrage rarely clarifies goals, rarely surfaces assumptions, rarely asks what are the system incentives. Without curiosity it doesn’t ask what would actually help. It becomes a ritual that keeps the group bonded while leaving the underlying reality unchanged.

What happens, the misframe that treats information as a substitute for relationship. We argue from a distance. We speak in abstractions. We cite and post and “troll” without ever asking: Who is being talked about as an object? Who is not in the room? Who is being treated as invisible, reduced to a symbol? In these conversations, people become categories and categories create separation. It’s not dialogue; it’s drama, performance as a kind of refuge. Real relationships require vulnerability. It requires listening to understand, not just to respond, being open to being changed by what you hear. It requires the possibility that you might be wrong, or that the frame itself is wrong. In the mediascape, being changed looks like losing, in real life, being changed is how we evolve.

So what are the deeper conversations we need to be having instead?

We need conversations rooted in intention. Not the intention to persuade, but the intention to understand and to connect. “Why are we talking about this?” is not a soft question. It’s the keystone question. If the honest answer is “to vent,” okay, then don’t pretend it’s problem-solving. If the honest answer is “to prove I’m right,” okay, then don’t pretend it’s dialogue. But if the honest answer is “to figure out what we can do together,” everything changes. The conversation stops being a battlefield and becomes a design session. It stops being identity theater and becomes co-creating a future. Just to be clear, it’s okay to have different intentions, knowing this is useful, we can stop the conversation!

We need conversations that surface assumptions before they surface conclusions. Most arguments are downstream of hidden premises: about human nature, fairness, responsibility, success, safety, what’s possible, what’s “realistic,” who can be trusted, what counts as evidence. When those assumptions stay hidden, the conversation becomes a war of outputs. When we bring them into the light, a new kind of honesty becomes possible. We can examine the premises instead of merely defending a position. We can ask, with Levitin’s discipline, “Compared to what?” or “What’s the measure?” We can ask, with Cohen’s clarity, “What would it mean if this were true?” We can ask, with Burgis’s humility, “Is this desire really mine, or is it borrowed from what’s modeled around me?”

We need conversations that name goals, not just grievances. Grievance is often the first signal that something is wrong. Having grievance without a goal becomes a loop: a self-sealing system of complaint and counter-complaint. If we want movement, we have to ask: What are we trying to create? What would “better” look like in lived terms; less fear in the body, more stability in daily life, more trust within the community, fewer people living on the edge, more capacity to respond to harm without turning it into spectacle? The point of conversation is not to display sophistication, it’s to coordinate reality.

We need conversations that reveal denial rather than protect it. This is delicate, because denial is a form of self-protection, not malice. Cohen shows that denial helps people manage unbearable knowledge. That means the move is not “gotcha.” It’s gentleness with rigor. It’s asking curious questions without accusation: What does acknowledging this require of us? Where are we implicated? What would responsibility look like at an individual, organizational and human scale? What part of this feels too big to hold, and how do we make it holdable? Denial loosens, not when it is shamed, not when it is blamed, but when truth becomes digestable, when it can be carried into an action step without destroying the people who have to carry it.

We also need conversations that disentangle desire from imitation and rivalry. Burgis’s insight is bracing: a lot of what we call conviction is actually contagious wanting. That doesn’t mean our beliefs are fake, it means we have to become more discerning about how the desire was formed. In practice, this looks like learning to notice the mimetic cues: the rush of belonging when we echo the group, the thrill of dunking on an opponent, the subtle status hit of being seen as “right.” It requires us to ask: Am I seeking truth, or seeking applause? Am I in inquiry, or in rivalry? Am I responding to reality, or performing for attention? When desire is clarified, conversations become less adversarial and more creative. We stop needing an enemy to feel alive.

We need conversations that restore sense-making in a polluted information environment. Levitin’s habits become civic medicine here. Before repeating a claim, we can ask: What is the base rate? Compared to what? What is missing from this framing? Who produced this and why? Who benefits from this perspective? What would disconfirm it? Is this correlation being sold as causation? What does this statistic actually mean in the context of real life? Here is the deeper question, one that integrates all three lenses: Is this trying to make me feel something specific, afraid, superior, outraged, so that I will want something specific: a scapegoat, a purchase, a posture, a tribe? Sense-making isn’t consuming more information. It’s learning how to orient emotionally, psychologically, intellectually and creatively inside complexity.

One of the hidden biases in the current system is that speed is treated like virtue. The faster you react, the less harm produced. The more instantly you can produce a position, the more relevant you appear. But speed hides nuance. It eliminates reflection. It makes listening look like weakness. And it rewards the very conditions under which denial thrives: surface acknowledgment without implication, data without context, desire without discernment. We have built a culture where performance is mistaken for participation.

A healthier conversational culture would treat conversation as collective authorship. Not a trial, not a battlefield, not a marketplace of opinions. A place where we can ask, together, the questions that actually change a system: What are we optimizing for? What are we rewarding? What are we ignoring because it’s inconvenient? What pain is being normalized? What collateral damage is acceptable? What trade-offs are we pretending don’t exist? What would it look like to be honest enough to revise our assumptions?

And yes, this is personal. Because the smallest unit of public conversation is our individual nervous systems. When people are flooded, threatened, exhausted, or ashamed, they don’t become better reasoners. They become better defenders, susceptible to distorted framing. They become more mimetic, grasping for belonging and certainty. They become more likely to choose safety over truth, slipping into denial. So part of “better conversation” is building the capacity to tolerate discomfort: the discomfort of ambiguity, the discomfort of not winning, the discomfort of implication and most important, having the courage to stay in the conversation long enough for something real to emerge.

So here is the invitation, it sounds simple, and it’s harder than it looks.

The next time you feel yourself being pulled into the old loop, a game of fact tennis, recognize when you’re on two different courts. Pause, not to become passive, to allow curiosity to rise. Ask: What are we really talking about? What do we actually want? What assumptions are we protecting? What would it mean if this were true? Compared to what? Who benefits from this framing? What is this trying to make me feel, want, or defend? What responsibility becomes visible if denial drops? What would the next step look like that a human could actually take?

These questions have the potential to do something profound. They shift conversation from reaction to intention, from information to meaning, from identity protection to shared authorship, from separation to connection, from rivalry to reality. They move us from the surface of “what happened” to the deeper territory of “what are we here to create together?”

It is that shift, choosing to have conversations based on what we want to build, rather than what the mediascape is feeding us.It is not a small thing, it is our shared contribution. It is how we reclaim agency and we stop outsourcing our minds and morals to the loudest outrage. It is how we begin again, to talk like people who believe a future is still possible, and who are willing to be changed by the work of creating it.

We step away from dystopia, not into some imagined utopia but as Charles Eisenstein says, “The More Beautiful World Our Heart Knows Is Possible,” what we are calling hopetopia!