Life & Wisdom Quote by Warren Farrell

Farrell’s line is built like a lament, but it’s also a quiet indictment of how modern disagreement gets metabolized into moral panic. The surprise he claims to feel - “I have always been amazed” - isn’t naïveté so much as a rhetorical move: it casts the failure to listen as irrational, almost unnatural, which makes the reader wonder what social incentives are strong enough to override basic human curiosity.

The key phrase is “hear their best intent.” Farrell isn’t asking us to agree with opponents; he’s asking us to interpret them generously before we judge them. That’s a higher bar than “civility,” and it’s why the quote stings. It suggests that the problem isn’t merely tone or misinformation but a refusal to grant the other side interiority. When he says people “couldn’t listen,” he’s describing a kind of selective deafness: we don’t just miss what others mean, we actively filter it into something more prosecutable.

“An enormous need to demonize” points to motive, not accident. Demonizing becomes a social technology: it simplifies complicated conflicts, bonds in-groups, and turns uncertainty into a clean moral story. Coming from Farrell, whose work on gender has long been polarizing, the context matters: he’s speaking as someone who has likely watched his arguments treated as threats rather than propositions. The subtext is self-defense, but also a broader critique of discourse where the quickest way to win is to assume the worst - because the worst is easier to rally against than the messy possibility that your opponent might be trying, in their own way, to solve a real problem.