Overcoming Conflict by Seeing Others

This Cisco ad captures what I hope media can do to bring countries and cultures together: linking people, especially children, real time. There’s no reason, given the technology today, that we should be so ignorant of others. That ignorance fuels the belief that our way is the only way–and the US tends to be high on the solipsism meter anyway.

We need to see that other countries are made up of people working hard to take care of their families with hopes, dreams, and good times and hard times, just like ours. This is the only way to begin to break down the us-versus-them perspective. While it is a natural and hard-wired response to create a sense of group affiliation, it is also a root source of conflict. When times are hard, it’s easy to blame the “other” guy, whether it’s at home or abroad. It’s easy to see the ‘other guy’ as all the same. Those Arabs, Chinese, immigrants, Republicans, Democrats, those Muslims, those Christians, those bankers, those politicians, those teenagers, those _______ (fill in your object of choice–you know you have one). In spite of how much lip service we give to political correctness and not negatively stereotyping, we do it every day. It’s just that the object of approved targeting changes.

History is full of heinous behavior when people are worried and scared and look for an ‘other’ to blame. No country is immune–not even us. Think about McCarthyism, Klu Klux Klan, and Guantanamo as some of the examples of abuses of power that people readily tolerate when they are scared. That’s why it’s important to have what Amartya Sen’s ideal of identity complexity–the ability to define ourselves in multiple ways so that we can recognize what we have in common with many different people.

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Sen, A. (2007) Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.