Last winter, I found myself seated around a massive table with about forty others on the ground floor of the historic Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, in Chicago. A group of curators had invited me to participate in “Parts of Speech,” an exhibit consisting of six lectures by six artists held at venues across the city. Instead of a typical talk, where I’d speak from a stage or behind a lectern, I’d proposed hosting a debtors’ assembly—a forum where people could share stories of their financial hardship.

I’d never hosted such an assembly before. As the participants (not “audience members”) trickled into the room, I reminded myself that the event was supposed to be about listening, not talking. Even so, I couldn’t resist making some opening remarks. I told the group that my work as an organizer and documentary filmmaker had led me to understand listening as a deeply political act, and an underappreciated one. I suggested that our lack of attention to listening connected to the larger crisis of American democracy, in which the wealthy and powerful shape the discourse while many others go unheard. After I’d finished, Laura Hanna, the co-director of the Debt Collective, an economic-justice group I’d helped found, reeled off statistics demonstrating that we live with Gilded Age levels of inequality. Then she invited people to share their stories. In that ornate, wood-panelled room, an ominous silence descended. Looking from one quiet face to another, I panicked. What if no one talked?

The first person to speak confessed to owing a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in student loans; many people in his life were unsympathetic to his plight, he said, because he had studied art and not “law or something.” A young woman began to cry. “I’m a first-generation student, I come from a family of poverty,” she said. “Sorry if I get emotional, but I’m here with my little one, and I’m thinking about her future. I’m a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in student-loan debt, and that’s a huge number.” When she finished, the room burst into applause.

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The dam broke. A young man spoke of a mental-health crisis that had caused his debt to balloon; it included ambulance and hospital bills that took three years to pay off. A middle-aged woman described herself as “teetering at that edge of poverty” after she quit her job because of racist comments made by a colleague; her high debt load meant she couldn’t help her college-age son. Another woman explained that her hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in student loans were overwhelming not just her but her mother, who had taken many of them out on her behalf; she described the pain of feeling judged a failure when you are trying the best you can. An older man told how, after arriving as a refugee from Liberia, he’d thought education would be a lifeline. He’d gotten a degree in chemistry and then attended nursing school, but now the money he owed was a trap from which he couldn’t escape.

As the forum progressed, the mood in the room changed. Some people listened silently. Others, taking it all in, felt emboldened to reveal hardships they’d been reluctant to divulge elsewhere. A few got fired up: after hearing others’ stories, the crying woman asked, “How can this be legal?” A mountain of debt and shame was becoming visible—an overwhelming burden that was also a common bond. I’d suggested a debtors’ assembly because I wanted to create a space in which both sides of the communicative coin—speaking and listening—could be valued equally. Even so, I found myself surprised by listening’s power. Though I work on issues of inequality, I was stunned by how much suffering the circle held.

“We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak,” the stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote, two thousand years ago. That’s long been one of my favorite quotes. The truth, though, was that it had been a long time since I’d had an opportunity to listen, silently and at length, to what many other people had to say. Afterward, walking in the cold, I couldn’t help but think of listening as something we’re all entitled to—a right we’re often denied, and that the assembly had just reclaimed. Today, we are constantly reminded of the importance of free speech and the First Amendment; we exalt freedom in the expressive realm. Is there some corresponding principle of listening worth defending?

We expect powerful people to be talkers, not listeners.

The idea that the right to listen to one another should be defended in a democracy seems strange. That’s probably because we lack a shared vocabulary or framework for understanding listening as a political act. We pay lip service to the idea of listening: stage-managed “town-hall meetings,” at which politicians and candidates respond to curated questions from a screened audience, are a familiar part of the political landscape. In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg embarked on a highly publicized national “listening tour,” which yielded photographs of him riding a tractor with a farmer, going to church in a small town, helping out on an automobile assembly line, and so on. No one really imagined that Zuckerberg would listen to anything the people he visited had to say. We expect powerful people to be talkers, not listeners.

Philosophers, too, have thought mostly about speech—biased, perhaps understandably, toward dazzling utterances. When Aristotle declared man a “political animal,” he argued that what distinguished us from other creatures was our capacity for rational discourse. Modern philosophers have developed a framework of “deliberative democracy” in which oration and argument, declamation and debate, play out in an idealized public sphere. Careers have been made studying “speech-act theory,” which examines how certain verbal expressions do things in the world (a judge declaring a defendant “guilty,” for instance, or a couple “married”). A corresponding “listening-act theory” doesn’t yet exist.

But to listen is to act; of that, there’s no doubt. It takes effort and doesn’t happen by default. As anyone who has been in a heated argument—or who’s simply tried to coexist with family members, colleagues, friends, and neighbors—well knows, it’s often easier not to listen. We can tune out and let others’ words wash over us, hearing only what we want to hear, or we can pantomime the act of listening, nodding along while waiting for our turn to speak. Even when we want to be rapt, our attentions wane. Deciding to listen to someone is a meaningful gesture. It accords them a special kind of recognition and respect.

In 2015, I began making a documentary called “What Is Democracy?”—a feature exploring the fate of self-government in the Trump era. Immediately, I remembered that one of the hardest things about beginning to shoot a new documentary is remembering how to listen. I had to make a concerted effort to bite my tongue, so as not to babble over my subjects, ruining the footage (the way I had, to my eternal embarrassment, during my first film shoot, more than fifteen years ago). I found that listening well, so that I could respond genuinely and substantively, was exhausting work.

One of the things I heard, when I listened, was that many of the people I spoke with—immigrant factory workers, asylum seekers, former prisoners, schoolchildren—simply assumed that no one was interested in listening to them. At a community center in Miami, I asked a group of teen-agers if they ever discussed democracy at school. “Yes, but it’s about branches of government,” a boy said. “They don’t ask us, ‘How do you feel about the school?’ ” As far as the kids could tell, their opinions didn’t matter to their teachers or the administrators in charge, and they didn’t feel there was much they could do about it. “My voice isn’t going to change anything,” a girl told me, with a shrug. I asked them whether they thought the adults in their lives had more of a say than they did. “I don’t think people of higher power really want to hear a black mom that’s poor in a ghetto,” the girl responded, matter-of-factly. Similarly, a boy warned, an adult standing up for himself at work would only get into trouble; it was better not to speak out and “just get it over with.” Their certainty about going unheard was painful to hear.