Project Vision 21

Recently, I had the privilege of coordinating a community project that lasted several weeks. During the final gathering, we opened a space for participants to share their opinions and experiences regarding the project. An older woman immediately began to speak and, for the next 20 minutes, recounted in detail the hardships and challenges of her life.

No one laughed or appeared uncomfortable. No one asked her to stop or to allow others to speak. The participants listened attentively, without interrupting or asking questions. The group simply allowed something unscripted to happen: someone, perhaps for the first time, shared important moments from her life that very few people probably knew about.

It took me weeks of reflection to understand that, at a liminal moment, as our gatherings were coming to an end, this woman found the temporary community we had created psychologically safe enough to share, spontaneously and whether consciously or not, such personal information. In telling her story, she also discovered it for herself.

In other words, the gatherings allowed her not only to learn the material being presented but also, and more importantly, to weave together separate and disparate events that, once connected, restored both her memory and her narrative coherence. Her life story, then, became her feedback, her commentary, and her opinion of the project.

At the opposite extreme, I know a man who, after acquiring a certain reputation in one particular field, believes that this “authority” can be immediately transferred to any other subject, regardless of how far removed it may be from his education and experience. And so he speaks and pontificates about politics, religion, sports, movies, mental health, or whatever else may arise.

It is well known that confidence in one’s own knowledge tends to increase rather than decrease among people with limited knowledge, a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This produces an epistemological mismatch that, consciously or not, prevents a person from accurately estimating how much they truly know or do not know about a subject, while doing nothing to prevent them from expressing an opinion about it.

Contemporary society, by blurring the boundaries between personal reaction and informed analysis, rewards precisely those who, instead of asking themselves, “Am I the right person to speak about this subject?” ask, “What do I have to say about this subject?” A positive response from the audience then leads the person to regard those opinions as validated.

I wonder what would happen if the woman mentioned above told her story to the man mentioned above, but I will leave that thought experiment for another time. Still, when these two modes of interaction are placed side by side, it becomes clear that the woman was saying, “I want you to know something about me,” while the man was saying, “I want you to know that I have something important to say.”

For the woman, this may have been her only opportunity to tell the story of her life, and so she did so with authenticity and vulnerability. The man, by contrast, must “perform” authority before an audience that demands his constant presence: authentic self-disclosure versus performative self-presentation.

So, which person are we?