Now of course I try to be mindful of people's feelings. I'm not totally socially inept. I just find that over time, it always creeps through. Perhaps it isn't even what I say but how I say it. I have been ridiculed for using words people didn't understand and even for simply being too articulate. Then there is the boredom I experience around most people and pain I experience listening to them. And of course there are those dreaded ideas of mine that just seem weird to most people. Maybe I should just stop expecting people to get it.
You might find the thread on verbal giftedness (sometime in the last month)to be relevant.
I have to wonder though: if your reaction to others is that it is painful to listen to their ideas/what they have to say, why are you surprised to get an unfavorable response in return? I don't find that people need to be on equal intellectual footing to have high quality conversations, but I do think that the people involved in the conversation have to be interested in seeing a different perspective, and they have to respect what the other person has to offer enough to do more than wait for their own turn to talk. Even those with different intellectual gifts/capacities can grow from each other. It's not so much about being right or wrong, I think.
As a teacher, I spend a lot of time talking to elementary school students. They all have substantially less life experience than I do; they often have less knowledge than I do; and most of them express themselves with a much more restricted vocabulary than the one with which I express myself. However, I often find my conversations with students to be fascinating and thought provoking despite those weaknesses(at least that's true when we share an interest in the topic--I admit that my eyes glaze over rather quickly when the topic turns to video games, pokemon or anything related Twilight
). Seeing something through the eyes of someone who appears to be "more" or "less" intelligent/knowledgeable/articulate/experienced/etc.. than you is (imho), informative not because it is right or wrong, but because it is part of the sum total of how voices interect in our world to impact policy and culture.
I would not want conversations with my students to be the sum total of my conversational opportunities, and I do also look for opportunities to talk with people who have specific knowledge or experience with a topic of interest. However, even in those conversations I expect that I will not understand everything that is said to me in the way that it is intended; and I expect that people will not always understand everything I am trying to say in the way that I intend it to be understood. Communication is often imperfect.
Finding other people who approach conversation similarly works well for me. Finding myself in conversation with people who are overly tied to "right" and "wrong" perspectives/philosophies does not work for me, and name calling or derision is an interaction stopper for me. I recognize that some people find those interaction styles energizing, but they don't work well for me. That said, I come from a background where conversations get loud and can be punctuated with interruptions. That does work for me, and I feel stifled in groups where the norm is highly structured conversation, and where disagreements over *ideas* have to be carefully prefaced/apologized for so as not to offend. Of course, people who *are* comfortable with those highly structured norms don't love *my* conversational style.
If you are honestly interested in figuring out what is going wrong, you might try tape recording an interaction and listening to your own responses relative to the responses of others. Are your words derisive? Is your tone derisive? Do the people you are conversing with seem to have a different tone or different rules for conversational turn taking? It may be less about the "what" of the conversation than it is about the "how" of the conversation. Try looking for people with similar norms for tone/language/turn taking.
With respect to what you are saying about money impacting the way in which ideas are "heard" by others, I think that on a one:one or small group level, it is at least as likely to be the "how" as it is the "who". I acknowledge that in bigger groups, stereotypes and generalizations get more play and can shut down opportunity before a conversation ever gets started. But 1:1 or with people you've spent a lot of time with...that's less likely. As people become familiar with one another those generalizations tend to lose sway when applied at the individual level. An individual who doesn't seem to fit a person's preconceived notions becomes the "exception" to the generalization (in other words: "you" the individual are no longer judged so heavily by generalizations, but "you" the individual do not necessarily challenge the person's prejudices/preconceptions--you just become an exception to the rule).
Not sure this was at all helpful (and sorry it was so long), but those are my thoughts for whatever they're worth.
