Capacity to Hear “No”

I recently spoke to someone who works in customer service, and the individual was complaining about the differences between most people in the working class and those in the dominant narrative. “See, this is why we haven’t gotten any further, because we don’t know how to push for what we want. We have to stop taking ‘no’ for an answer.” I responded, “Yes, and look at how destructive, stressful, and painful it is, living in world where people refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer.” To that, there was no response, because what could be said? The world would be a lot different if people could simply hear a “no.”

Anyone still in denial about the environment is about as useful as cream in a volcano. One of the reasons that anyone is still pretending that everything is fine is because there is a smear campaign on environmental activism by people who want to keep doing whatever they want. People keep lying that building more housing will reduce costs and that everyone can and should own a car, but no one wants to accept that we need more trees and less oil and gas development if we ever want to experience cooler summers. Refusing to change our lifestyles because a couple of people want more money is the height of idiocy when the death of humanity is on the line. Not hearing “no” is destroying the planet where we all live.

While everyone is worshipping electric vehicles and rechargeable gadgets, not enough people are thinking about the social and environmental costs of continuing to produce more stuff. Socially, there has been a lot of violence surrounding the acquisition of oil and gas, but almost no one has discussed the problem of demanding lithium and cobalt. Why was the coup of the United States so successful? Because the Coup Facilitator had already gotten what he wanted from another country, demanding lithium for his mediocre vehicles. The empire keeps demanding mineral rights from other nations because they want to work us into the ground and they need to distract us while they do it. Not hearing “no” is how the empire functions, and that mindset is why there are so many unemployed people.

Even the people who are employed are receiving crumbs for their work, which is why so many workers are beginning to tell employers “no.” For decades, people were emotionally beaten into submission about the importance of working, regardless of getting paid a decent wage. We are all so conditioned that someone resting receives vehement hostility from the populace, and folks keep pushing that person to exhaust themselves to death. These days, employers want to pay even less for more responsibilities, but they also want to keep charging more and more while demanding that people go into offices for no reason. Refusing to hear “no” has not improved the economy for anyone but the obscenely rich.

Finally, racial injustice is the epitome of refusing to hear “no.” Regardless of whatever Black people do to maintain any community we might start, it is impossible for people to accept that no means no. Slavery meant dragging unwilling people to do work the lazy people commanded. Independent Black communities were burned to the ground when slavery “ended,” and almost no one is educated about those communities because people need us to need them. Indigenous communities had to constantly fight to maintain any semblance of their nations, but people referred to them as “violent.” It can safely be said that all racial violence is refusing to hear “no.”

In the past, I saw a video that stated that a test for a narcissist is to tell them no, and I have seen that play out on an international scale. There were swarms of comfortable people with money all over the world, and people were able to get to a relatively tolerable standard of living in other countries, not simply the United States empire. However, because so many people failed to hear and respect the “no” coming from some folks, mental illness is rampant, violence is everywhere, and everything is expensive. The dominant narrative can never be satisfied, but people keep lying to themselves that giving in will lead to peace.

Rather than show how stubborn one is–especially for irrelevant issues, like how “nice” someone is while working–we need to start being better people, and accepting that we cannot have our ways all the time. When someone says, “No,” they are not required to explain anything or placate someone. Accepting rejection is part of being an adult, and it is time for people within the dominant narrative to expect people to reject their sense of entitlement. Moreover, retaliating for hearing “no” is not a sign of flex, but a sign of a tantrum. Learn to hear a “no” and move on with life, because there are going to be plenty of them as the empire collapses.