Overcoming Divided States

No matter where you look, so long as you’re not sheltered from it, you’ll see evidence of people behaving from divided states of being, and thinking through divisive languages. They usually seek to separate themselves by denouncing others for all sorts of reasons; wrong politics, wrong joke, not as enlightened as they are, racist, going against the conventional wisdom or acceptable social standards, etc.

With divisive belief systems, it’s easy to fall into that tribal “us and them” framework of interpretation. In fact, in many cases, it can be considered a requirement to join the group.

Perhaps it’s just what I’ve been seeing, but this seems so much more prevalent today than it’s ever been in my life that I’m concerned it’s reaching some kind of danger point. And what gets me the most about it is not necessarily the behaviour itself — it’s the philosophical implications of it. Those are the things that remain silently active within people and rarely acknowledged.

For example, if you denounce someone you disagree with as misled or maliciously wrong for evil intentions, you might rightfully decide not to take any lectures from that person. But if you publicly insult this person and push them aside, refusing to engage under the rationale of not giving a platform to problematic voices, or even going so far as to call for censorship or violence against this person, you are going some ways to create a permanent divide there.

Let’s say you’re dealing with an all-out, self-proclaimed racist. It doesn’t matter if they are sincere but just misled, or a consciously indoctrinated mouthpiece for some neo-nazi ideology — they are racist and that’s all there is to it.

Many people’s reaction would be instant scorn against this person, and to let them know they’re not accepted into whatever group may be dominating there. And with the “punch a nazi” meme being quite prevalent in many subcultures, it wouldn’t be a surprise if some violence was committed against this person for their racist views.

But what’s going on beneath the behaviour and the actions of all people involved here is much more pressing to me. I’ve met many racist people and many anti-racist; a fair share of the amount of divided and divisive people I’ve met in total.

The anti-racists seem to be in a kind of short-sighted denial, and the racists seem to get this idea that the behaviour of the anti-racists proves them right. It’s clear that the division between anti-racist and racist hasn’t been thought through, and wasn’t formed with the goal of dealing with the problem of a fragmented species at all. Rather, it seems to be intended just to announce the separation between them. As if signalling that you’re on one side or the other is enough, and so long as enough people join your team, you win.

Wrong.

What you don’t know is that you’re taking away a potential refuge from this racist, effectively entrenching them deeper in whatever divisive ideology they’ve been indoctrinated into. Taking an alternative route could have produced different, and maybe better, results; a few wise words in conversation with this person could have actually removed some of the racism from this world. Instead, all we have now is a bigger divide.

Those who sought to be recognised as being somehow more morally virtuous than most can get their props from those who saw them publicly denounce a legitimate racist, and that racist guy can go off to his racist friends and they can all laugh and joke about the emotionally fragile intolerance of the anti-racists, and how they are largely incapable of discussing certain things. Win-win.

But nothing has changed. Whatever ego-satisfaction is going on there is more than likely eroding the minds of both the racist and the anti-racist. No unity has been achieved. No misunderstandings have been corrected. Only two more people have stories to tell about how they don’t like each other.

That anti-racist is no better-equipped to deal with complex racial arguments, nor are they better able to spot legitimate racism from what can only be interpreted as racism with some twist of logic.

This isn’t just a matter of education though. It won’t do to have the anti-racist simply arm themselves with a bunch of counter-facts and be ready to throw them at the racist positions. First and foremost, it’s because these counter-facts would be coming from “the enemy.”

There are no excuses for the conscious racist; that person has made themselves an enemy outright and for whatever reason. But the anti-racist, unless they are insincere, needs to present themselves as a unifying force in order to truly deal with any kind of racist or otherwise separatist worldview. They can’t simply gather facts and bash racists over the head with them, or mob them out of existence.

The individuals may disappear from the scene, but the values that produced them will remain active and take new forms.

These tendencies aren’t limited to people with racist or anti-racist worldviews either. They can almost be considered a trademark of divisive tribal belief systems as a whole. If you look at any ‘section’ of fragmented humanity, no matter who’s right and who’s wrong in any given instance, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find some divisive, identity-oriented belief system at the bottom of the dirt, destroying any possibility of unity or wide-scale collaboration.

Overcoming this is a massive task. It can easily seem impossible, as it’s so intimidating and so all-encompassing, that I understand and empathise when people say, through their lack of knowledge, that it will never happen. But steps in this direction can be taken by rejecting the tendency to separate.

“… and one of the most dramatic characteristics of experience is being with another person and suddenly realising all the ways they are like you, not different from you…” — Richard Alpert

What would take us a long way there is learning how to disagree with each other without getting angry. I haven’t always been so great at this myself when I engage an argument — I can argue positions that I don’t care about with the conviction of a thousand generations of dead angry ego-maniacs. Picking my conversations deliberately, or being silent instead of reacting to give the brain time to form an adequate response, or even employing a different conversational method altogether such as the Street Epistemology method, is usually enough to stop such a trainwreck before it occurs.

Another thing that would help overcome the tendency to separate is to practice doubting our own thinking, especially the more shallow judgmental kind when it comes to people we disagree with, and double-especially the dehumanising kind. Dehumanisation isn’t suddenly justified just because it’s happening to someone who dehumanises somebody else.

And the reason I mention thinking as a whole here is because it’s often an error to reduce everything to our interpretations of it, especially considering all unknown factors and all the angles and vested interests our thinking can have in skewing the argument one way or another. Often, this comes down to matters of ego or identity; more than enough reason to twist rationale, to dehumanise the other, to avoid certain discussions, names and voices, etc. (This is something I will be getting into in extensive detail in the near future.)

Doubting our own thinking, especially if we are relatively superficial people, will go a long way towards allowing us to respond to who we are talking with, rather than simply to react against what we think of them. This is one of the most basic step ones when it comes to clearing up interpersonal misunderstandings and social ideological differences. On top of that, it gives rise to the kind of reciprocal, free-flowing, unifying communication that most if not all people seem to require on some level or another. Whether or not they know they require that is a different matter.

Then, when we do doubt our own thinking and open up to communication with those we might not exactly like, the format of the communication becomes even more important. If you’ve just managed to break down the us and them barrier, you don’t want to go throwing it right back up by immediately jumping in for a debate.

I’ve managed to play some small part in the deradicalisation of multiple people, and not only your standard neo-nazis, and this couldn’t have been achieved by debate. In fact this wasn’t achieved by any sort of competitive clash of viewpoints at all. It was reached through an active respect for each other’s common humanity as we engaged in some kind of quest for truth as a team. We spent the the necessary time or spoke the necessary sentences, recognising common interests despite the fact that we’d reached different answers, and we explored.

You can find stories of deradicalisation and interpersonal unification all throughout history, and a common thread among most of them is that they usually start with compassion, empathy or understanding. They didn’t start with hatred or anger because someone believes something perceived as outrageous or morally reprehensible.

To counter all of this, you could argue that human beings don’t need to overcome our divided states at all, that it’s completely natural, and, in the interest of preserving cultural identities and histories, we shouldn’t place too much importance on our common humanity.

I wouldn’t waste too much time on this argument. Natural doesn’t mean anything here, and the conditions of the old world don’t have to be the conditions of the future. Some have called it idealistic that I focus on our unification as one species. No, it’s practical, especially in the age of modern technology and communications. Otherwise, you see what we get; the consequences of division are all around us just waiting to be recognised, and they seem to me to be getting more and more intense and unavoidable.

What gets under my skin quite a bit, though, is to recognise the yearning for unity within people, and then to see it getting co-opted by various tribal modes of thinking, and then to see these people go on to further the division in humanity. Or even to see their philosophical curiosities and explorations completely crushed by the corporate, economic, political and religious institutions across the world, and replaced with cardboard cut-outs of philosophical disciplines and/or moral codes.

Alright, to wrap this one up with a side-note, I will say this… When I use the word unity or unification, I don’t mean uniformity. Not everyone has to be the same, and I wouldn’t do away with the differences among people and cultures even if I could.

Again, this is something I am planning to write about in greater detail later on.