As a child, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was fascinated by him. Many years later, I found an anecdote about the filming of this film: at lunchtime, people who played chimpanzees and people who played gorillas ate in separate groups.
They say that "There are two types of people in this world: those who divide people into two types, and those who do not." In fact, the first type of people is much more. And the consequences of dividing people into “ours” and “not ours”, members of our group and the rest, people and “others”, can be very serious.
All people draw a dividing line "friend / foe" by race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socio-economic status, and so on. And this is not good. We do this surprisingly quickly and neurobiologically efficiently. We have a complex taxonomy and classification of the ways in which we slander "them". We do this with variability ranging from petty momentary aggression to savage carnage. And also we constantly determine what is wrong with “them” based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalization, which we confuse with rationality. It's sad.
But, most importantly, there is reason for optimism. Mostly because we all have many different definitions of us / them in our heads. “They” in one case may be belonging to the category of “we” in another, and the transition from there to here may take a moment. So the hope is that with the help of science, fellowship and xenophobia can subside, perhaps even to the point where Hollywood chimpanzees and gorillas can dine together.
The power of the idea of "friends" versus "outsiders"
Substantial evidence suggests that the division of the world into us and foes is deeply rooted in our brains and is an ancient evolutionary legacy. To begin with, we note that we distinguish between our own and others with amazing speed. Put a person in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), a brain scanner that detects activity in different parts of the brain under certain circumstances. Quickly show him photos so that each of them is delayed by only 50 milliseconds - 1/20 of a second - it barely exceeds the recognition level. It is noteworthy that even in such a situation, the brain will process images of strangers differently from its own.
This effect has been extensively investigated in relation to different races. Quickly show a person pictures of people of your own race or of a different race, and, on average, viewing images of people of a different race will trigger the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with fear, anxiety, and aggression. What's more, the faces of people of other races activate less of the fusiform cortex, which is specialized in facial recognition. Besides, people remember faces of other races worse. Watching a film in which a person's hand is pricked with a needle triggers an "isomorphic reflex" in which a part of the motor area of the cortex associated with hand movements is activated, and the viewer's hand twitches - unless the film shows the hand of a person of a different race, in which case such an effect is noticeable weaker.
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The brain errors associated with division into Us and Them are also demonstrated by the hormone oxytocin. He is known for his involvement in social activity - he makes people become more trusting, sympathetic and generous. But in this way it only affects your behavior towards the people of your group. In relation to outsiders, he acts exactly the opposite.
The automatic, unconscious nature of the reaction of one's own / another's testifies to the deep nature of this mechanism. This can be demonstrated with a damn clever implicit association test. Let's say you are strongly opposed to trolls, and believe that in development they are below people. This can be detected using a hidden association test, where the subjects look at images of people or trolls combined with words of a positive or negative nature. These couples may support your inclination (say, a human face and the word "honest", a troll face and the word "treacherous"), or they may run counter to it. And it takes people a little longer, a fraction of a second, to process conflicting pairs. This happens automatically - you don't get angry about the business practices of the troll clans or the troll brutality of the Battle of Gdetoburg in 1523. You process images and words, and your anti-troll tendency makes you subconsciously pause due to the dissonance associating a troll with "handsome" or a person with "smelly."
We are not alone who divides everyone into friends / foes. It's no secret that other primates can make violent friend / foe divisions. Chimpanzees gather together and systematically exterminate the males of the neighboring group. Recent work adapting the latent association test to other species suggests that even other primates have latent negative associations with strangers. Rhesus monkeys look either at images of their group members or at images of strangers paired with pictures of things with positive or negative connotations. Macaques look longer at couples that do not match their disposition (for example, images of their group members paired with images of spiders). These macaques don't just fight with their neighbors for resources - they associate negative associations with them. "Those guys are like ugly spiders, and we, we are like fragrant fruits."
How strongly the concept of friend / foe is ingrained in the brain manifests itself through: the speed and the minimum set of stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; the tendency to build a group on the basis of arbitrary criteria, and endowing these criteria with supposedly rational meaning; unconscious automation of such a process; its rudiments in other primates. As we will see, we usually think about ours, but not about others, quite straightforwardly.
The nature of its
In different cultures and throughout history, people who are part of their group are considered in a superior way - we are the most correct, intelligent, highly moral and worthy. It also includes inflating the benefits of inherent features - rationalizing why our food tastes better, the music is more inspiring, the language is more logical or poetic.
Belonging to one's own implies a commitment to the members of a group - for example, during a study at a sports stadium, a scientist pretending to be a fan and wearing a jersey of one of the teams was more likely to receive help from another fan of that team than from the opponent's fans.
Intra-group favoritism raises the main question - do we need our people to do well by maximizing the level of well-being, or simply better than others by maximizing the difference between us and them?
We usually state that we are striving for the first option, but we may secretly desire the second. That could be a boon - in a tough race, losing a hated rival to a third party will be as welcome as winning your team, and in sports fans, both options equally activate the brain regions responsible for reward and the production of the neurotransmitter dopamine. But sometimes choosing “better than” instead of “good” can be disastrous. It is hardly worth rejoicing at winning the Third World War if we have two clay huts and three torches left, and they only have one of both.
One of our most socially directed actions towards group members is the willingness to forgive them for their wrongdoing. When strangers do something wrong, essentialism works - this is because in essence they are, they have always been and always will be. When our own people are wrong, we tend to situational interpretations - we are usually not like that, and here are extenuating circumstances explaining why we did this. Situational explanations for misconduct explain why lawyers are looking for a jury who will treat a client as one of their own.
Something completely different and quite interesting can happen when someone's wrongdoing reveals their dirty laundry, confirming a negative stereotype. In-group shame can lead to severe punishments that benefit outsiders. Take Rudolph Giuliani [American politician, mayor of New York in 1994-2001 from the Republican Party - approx. transl.], who grew up in Brooklyn in an Italian-American enclave where organized crime was in charge (Giuliani's father was imprisoned for armed robbery, and then worked for a mafia money lender). Giuliani rose to fame in 1985 as the prosecutor who indicted the heads of the "five families" in a trial against the mafia, which ultimately destroyed them. He really wanted to refute the stereotype that the "Italian American" was synonymous with organized crime:"If a successful indictment is not enough to eliminate a mafia-related bias, then there is probably nothing that can help eliminate it." If you want someone to savagely judge a member of the mafia, find a proud Italian American who is pissed off by the stereotypes created by the mafia.
Thus, belonging to one's own carries with it a whole list of expectations and obligations. Is it possible to switch from one category of your own to another? This is easy to do in sports - when a player moves to another club, he does not serve as a fifth column, playing poorly on purpose to give his old team an advantage. At the center of the contractual relationship lies the equivalence of the employer and the employee.
At the other end of the scale is non-negotiable belonging. People do not pass from Shiites to Sunnis, from Iraqi Kurds to Sami reindeer herders. A rare Kurdish woman wants to be a Sami, and her ancestors will probably turn over in their coffins when she touches her first deer. Defectors are often retaliated by those from whom they split - Meriam Ibrahim was sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014 for converting to Christianity - and are greeted with suspicion by those they have joined.
Alien nature
Do we consciously or emotionally dislike strangers?
The cognitive justification for the friend / foe division is easy to articulate. The ruling classes perform amazing somersaults to justify their status quo. You also have to make an effort to justify a good stranger who helped us in something: "Ah, this stranger is different from the rest."
Cognitive subtleties are required to present strangers in a threatening light. The fear of being robbed by strangers is rife with pretense and particularism. But in order to be afraid that strangers will take our jobs, manipulate banks, dilute our gene pool, etc., economics, sociology and pseudoscience are required.
When the Confederate general was wounded in the American Civil War, he gave a secret Masonic sign recognized by a Union officer who protected him and sent him to the Allied Hospital.
Despite the role of reasoning, the essence of the friend / foe division is emotional and automatic, and this is described by statements like: "I can't say exactly why, but it's wrong when strangers do it." Jonathan Haidt of New York University has shown that reasoning often turns out to be an excuse for feelings and intuition experienced in the past, and is needed to convince ourselves that our choice is rationality.
This can be demonstrated in studies using brain imaging. When a person sees the face of a stranger, his amygdala is activated. And this happens much earlier (on the timeline of the brain) the activation of the cortex responsible for conscious reasoning. Emotions are triggered first.
The most compelling evidence that negative attitudes toward strangers appear during emotional, automatic processing is that supposedly rational reasoning about strangers can be subconsciously manipulated. Here are some examples of the results of these experiments. Show the subjects slides with photographs of a little-known country; if the faces of people expressing fear appear between the slides, and for such short intervals that they can only be perceived subconsciously, then the subjects will have a more negative impression of the country as a whole. Being near unpleasant-smelling garbage makes people more conservative about the characteristics of representatives of out-groups. Christians speak worse of those who do not belong to this religion if they have just passed the church. In another study, peoplethose commuting to work by train, at transport stops in places where the predominantly white population lives, filled out questionnaires about political predilections. Then, Mexican pairs appeared daily at half of the stations for two weeks. They were conservatively dressed and spoke softly. Interestingly, the presence of such couples has led people to become more supportive of the decline in legal immigration from Mexico and the law making English an official language, and less support for amnesty for illegal immigrants. However, their attitude towards Asians, Negroes or Arabs did not change. In another study, it turned out that women during ovulation are more negative about men.filled out questionnaires about political bias. Then, Mexican pairs appeared daily at half of the stations for two weeks. They were conservatively dressed and spoke softly. Interestingly, the presence of such couples has led people to become more supportive of the decline in legal immigration from Mexico and the law making English an official language, and less support for amnesty for illegal immigrants. However, their attitude towards Asians, Negroes or Arabs did not change. In another study, it turned out that women during ovulation are more negative about men.filled out questionnaires about political bias. Then, Mexican pairs appeared daily at half of the stations for two weeks. They were conservatively dressed and spoke softly. Interestingly, the presence of such couples has led people to become more supportive of the decline in legal immigration from Mexico and the law making English an official language, and less support for amnesty for illegal immigrants. However, their attitude towards Asians, Negroes or Arabs did not change. In another study, it turned out that women during ovulation are more negative about men.that people were more supportive of a decrease in legal immigration from Mexico and a law making English an official language, and less support for amnesty for illegal immigrants. However, their attitude towards Asians, Negroes or Arabs did not change. In another study, it turned out that women during ovulation are more negative about men.that people were more supportive of a decrease in legal immigration from Mexico and a law making English an official language, and less support for amnesty for illegal immigrants. However, their attitude towards Asians, Negroes or Arabs did not change. In another study, it turned out that women during ovulation are more negative about men.
In other words, our intuitive and emotional relationship with strangers is conditioned by hidden forces, the existence of which we did not suspect. And then our consciousness strives to catch up with the emotional self, creating a set of facts or a reliable fake explaining why we hate strangers. This is a kind of variant of such a cognitive distortion as the tendency to confirm one's point of view: remembering facts confirming the point of view is better than refuting facts; test things so that the results support, but do not disprove the hypothesis; be more skeptical about outcomes you don't like than those you like.
Alien heterogeneity
Of course, different types of aliens elicit different feelings (and different neurobiological responses). More often than not, strangers are seen as threatening, angry, and unworthy of trust. In economic games, people treat other races as less trustworthy or less worthy of reciprocity. It seems to white people that the faces of blacks are meaner than those of whites, and more often they tend to attribute evil faces of an undefined race to a race different from their own.
But strangers evoke not only a sense of threat; sometimes it's disgust. This is where a part of the brain called the insular lobe, or islet, comes into play. In mammals, it reacts to the taste or smell of rot and causes stomach cramps and gag reflexes. In other words, it protects animals from poisonous food. However, in people, it controls disgust associated not only with sensations, but also with morality - if the subjects remember any of their vile actions, or see an image of actions that are repulsive from a moral point of view, an island is activated in them. Therefore, there is no metaphor for the fact that we are sick of things that are disgusting from a moral point of view. And strangers, disgusting, activate the islet no less than the amygdala.
It is difficult to have unpleasant feelings on an intuitive level in relation to strangers; the island has a hard time dealing with the disgust associated with the abstract beliefs of another group. Friend / Foe markers provide a framework for this. Now, if we say that our disgust towards strangers is due to the fact that they eat disgusting, sacred or very cute things, pour themselves disgusting flavors, dress vulgarly - the island will swallow such characteristics with ease. In the words of University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rosin, "Disgust serves as an ethnic marker or a sign of belonging to a group." The decision that strangers eat disgusting things makes it easier to decide that strangers have disgusting ideas, say, in the field of deontology.
And then there are strangers who can be ridiculed - that is, use humor as a weapon. When an out-group makes fun of our group, it is a weapon of weak outsiders trying to weaken the chain of command. But when our group makes fun of someone else's, it reinforces negative stereotypes and hierarchy.
Aliens are also often seen as a more homogeneous mass than their own, with simplified emotions and reduced sensitivity to pain. For example, be it Ancient Rome, medieval Europe, imperial China or the pre-war South, the elite have excuse stereotypes for slaves - they are dumb, like children, incapable of independence.
Thus, different aliens are of different kinds, but with the same essence - they are menacing and evil, disgusting and repulsive, primitive and undifferentiated.
Cold and / or incompetent
An important work by Susan Fisk of Princeton University is studying the taxonomy of aliens in our minds. She found that we are trying to categorize strangers along two axes: warmth (whether an individual or group belongs to enemies or friends, wants good or evil) and competence (how effectively an individual or group can accomplish what is intended).
These axes are independent. Ask the subject to rate someone; if you give him hints of a person's status, it affects ratings on a scale of competence, but not warmth. If you give him hints of competitiveness, the effect is the opposite. These two axes form a matrix with four corners. We ourselves rate ourselves highly both on the warmth scale and on the competence scale (W / W). This is how Americans generally view good Christians, black professionals, and the middle class.
There is also the other extreme, low in warmth and competence (N / N). Such ratings are assigned to homeless people and drug addicts.
There is an area of high warmth and low competence (H / L) - people with mental problems, invalids, decrepit old people. Low warmth and high competence (H / V) - how people from "developing countries" assess the Europeans who colonized them (here competence is not a set of skills or knowledge, but the effectiveness with which people, for example, steal the land of your ancestors), and how many minorities in the United States view whites. This is a hostile stereotype with which Asians are treated in the US, Jews in Europe, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Chinese in Indonesia, the poor are rich - they are cold, greedy, closed in their circle, but if you are seriously ill, go to such a doctor.
Each extreme case causes persistent sensations. I / O (for example, my own) - pride. Н / В - envy and indignation. B / L - pity. N / N - disgust. Viewing people of category N / N activates the amygdala and islet, but not the fusiform gyrus, which is responsible for face recognition; the same is obtained, for example, from viewing a photograph of a wound affected by larvae. Conversely, viewing images of people of the H / W or W / H categories activates the emotional and cognitive portion of the frontal cortex.
Places between the extremes evoke their own characteristic reactions. People who evoke feelings between pity and pride evoke a desire to help. Between pity and disgust lives the desire to humiliate and expel. Between pride and envy lies the desire to attract and receive benefits. Between envy and disgust is the most hostile desire to attack.
What I like the most is changing someone's categorization. The most understandable change is the change in the status of high warmth and high competence (H / W).
- I / O to I / O: One parent falling into dementia makes him want to take care of him.
- I / O to N / V: a business partner whose long-term theft has just been exposed. Betrayal.
- From I / O to N / N: a rare case when a successful acquaintance had a terrible thing, and now he is homeless. Disgust mixed with surprise - what went wrong?
There is also a transition from N / N to N / W. When I was a kid in the 60s, American parochial attitudes toward Japan fell into the first category. The shadow of World War II bred dislike and contempt, and the Made in Japan label was about cheap plastic junk. And then, all of a sudden, "Made in Japan" meant an edge over American automakers.
When a homeless person spends a lot of effort to get someone's wallet back, and you understand that he is more honest than your friends, this is a transition from N / H to H / H.
More interesting is the transition from H / W to H / H, which evokes malevolent glee and helps explain why persecution of H / W groups is usually associated with humiliation and relegation to the status of H / N. During the Cultural Revolution in China, representatives of the rejected elites were first dressed in clownish hats, and then sent to labor camps. The Nazis got rid of mentally ill people who already belonged to the N / N category by simply killing them; by contrast, treatment of Jews (H / V) before death included wearing yellow armbands, cutting off beards, and scrubbing sidewalks with toothbrushes in front of mocking crowds. When Idi Amin expelled tens of thousands of Indo-Pakistani (N / W) citizens from Uganda in the 1970s, he first gave his army the ability to loot, beat and rape them. The most barbaric cases of human behavior are associated with the transfer of strangers from the category of N / A to the category of N / N.
Difficulties with the division of strangers into categories is full. There is the phenomenon of grumpy respect, even camaraderie with the enemy. An apocryphal example will be the aces of the First World War, where between people trying to kill each other, "their own" spark jumps. "Oh, monsieur, at another time I would love to discuss aeronautics with you over a bottle of good wine." "Baron, I am honored that you will hit me." And there are also difficulties with the separation of economic and cultural enemies, new and old, distant foreign and local living in the neighborhood. Ho Chi Minh [first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam - approx. transl.] during the American military action in Vietnam, he rejected the help of the Chinese, arguing: "The Americans will leave in a year or ten, and the Chinese, if they are allowed in, will stay for a thousand years."
And then there is the surprising and strange phenomenon where a member of an alien group brings with him negative stereotypes associated with his group, and prefers the members of your group. It was demonstrated by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clarke in their "doll study" in the 1940s. Back then, black children, like whites, preferred to play with white dolls over black ones, and gave whites more positive characteristics. In Brown's case against the Department of Education, it was mentioned that this effect is most pronounced in black children in segregated schools. Or consider the case of a man who strongly protests against gay rights who turns out to be a hidden homosexual - a Mobius leaf in the world of pathology, denoting the realization that you belong to a clan of fearsome strangers. We are far ahead of even such complex manifestations of the psyche of monkeys as the connection of alien monkeys with spiders, when we indulge our psychological whims associated with dividing the world into friends and foes.
The diversity of its
We also recognize that other people belong to different categories, and change our perceptions of which ones matter most. Unsurprisingly, a lot of this thinking is about race, and we're trying to figure out if this categorization really takes precedence over the rest.
The superiority of race has the appeal of folk wisdom. First, race is a biological attribute, a conspicuous identity that provokes reasoning in the spirit of essentialism. Moreover, humans have evolved in conditions in which differing skin color clearly indicates belonging to strangers. And further, in a large percentage of cultures, before contact with Western civilization, there was a status division according to skin color.
However, the evidence suggests otherwise. First, while there are obvious biological elements to race differences, race is a biological continuum, not a clear category. For example, unless you customize your data, genetic variation within a race will usually be as strong as differences between races. And this is not surprising if you think about the diversity within racial categories - compare, say, Sicilians and Swedes.
In addition, the race cannot cope with the role of a fixed classification. At various times in US history, Mexicans and Armenians were considered races; southern Italians and northern Europeans were classified differently; a person with one black great-great-grandfather and seven whites was considered white in Oregon, but not in Florida. Such a race is a product of culture.
Unsurprisingly, the friend / foe racial dichotomy often recedes before other classifications. In one study, subjects looked at images of people, white or black, associated with statements, and then they had to remember which race was associated with which statement. Racial categorization was automatic - if the subject was confused about the belonging of the quote, then the right and wrong persons most likely belonged to the same race. Then half of the black and white in the images were wearing the same conspicuous yellow shirt, the other half in gray. Now the subjects most often confused the statements according to the color of the shirt. Also, gender reclassification suppresses unconscious racial categorization. After all, races in the history of hominids appeared relatively recently (perhaps only a few tens of thousands of years ago),and all our ancestors, almost down to the ciliates, had different attitudes towards different sexes.
An important study by Mary Wheeler, who studied amygdala activation with images of people of a different race, showed how categorization changes. When subjects were asked to look at a dot that is visible in each image, the faces of other races did not activate the amygdala. The second group had to evaluate how much the faces in the images are older than a certain age, and in this experiment the amygdala was activated. The third group was shown an image of a vegetable before the photograph of their face and asked to rate whether the person liked this vegetable. As a result, the amygdala remained at rest.
Why? You look at strangers and think about what kind of food they like. You imagine how they shop or order food in restaurants. In the best case, you decide that you share a passion for vegetables with them - there will be a slight rapprochement between your own and others. At worst, you decide that you are different from a rather peaceful alien - there are hardly any examples of blood spilled in history due to the feud between adherents of broccoli and cauliflower. Most importantly, when you think of a stranger at dinner enjoying a meal, you think of him as a person - this is the best way to weaken the automatic categorization of friend / foe.
Rapid categorization can occur in the harshest, most unlikely, and dire situations:
- At the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate General Lewis Armistead was mortally wounded. Lying on the battlefield, he gave a secret Masonic signal, hoping that another member of this society would recognize him. And he was recognized by Union officer Hiram Bingham, who protected him and brought him to Union hospital. Instantly the categories of friend / foe on the Union / Confederation scale faded before the Freemason / Non-Freemason.
- During World War II, British commandos kidnapped German General Heinrich Kreipe in Crete, followed by a dangerous 18-day trip to the coast to meet a British ship. Once the detachment noticed snow on the highest peak of Crete. Kreipe muttered to himself in Latin the first line of Horace's ode to a snowy mountain. British commander Patrick Lee Fermor immediately continued the quote. Two people realized that, in the words of Lee Fermor himself, "drank from the same fountains." Recategorization. Lee Fermor saw to it that Kreipe was healed and kept safe. They communicated after the end of the war, and a few decades later they met on Greek television. "No offense," said Kreipe, praising their "daring operation."
- Finally, on the Christmas truce in World War I, soldiers who fought each other in the trenches spent the day chanting, praying and having fun with each other, playing football, exchanging gifts and trying in every possible way to prolong the truce. It took only one day for the confrontation between the British and the Germans to be replaced by the understanding that this is a confrontation between soldiers and officers in the rear, forcing us to kill each other.
There are many dichotomies in our minds, and those that seem inevitable and critical, in the right circumstances, can instantly disappear.
Reducing the influence of the division on friend / foe
How can we get rid of these dichotomies? There are options.
Contact. Long-term contact with strangers can affect the work of categorizing friend / foe. In the 1950s, psychologist Gordon Allport proposed a "contact theory." Its wrong option: gather your friends and foes together (for example, teenagers from two warring nations in a summer camp), and then the hostility will disappear, and the similarities will begin to prevail, and everyone will turn into “us”. A more correct option: gather your friends and foes together in specific conditions and either something similar will happen, or the situation will explode and only get worse.
An example of effective specific conditions: the parties roughly coincide in number, they are treated equally and unambiguously, contact lasts a long time and on neutral territory, there are meaningful tasks on which everyone is working together (for example, turning a meadow into a football field).
And even then, the effect is usually limited - friends and foes quickly lose connections, changes are short-lived and sometimes it turns out that "I hate these strangers, but one of them whom I met last summer is basically a normal guy." A fundamental change in relationships occurs with really long-term contacts. Then there is progress.
An approach to the subconscious. If you want to reduce the impact of unconscious friend / foe categorization, one way is to provide a counterexample to the stereotype (for example, everyone's favorite alien star). Another approach is to make the hidden explicit; point people to their cognitive biases. Another powerful tool is talking from a different perspective. Imagine that you are them, and tell them why you are unhappy. What do you feel? Will you feel resentful after spending some time in their place?
Replacement of essentialism with individuation. In one study, white subjects were asked how they felt about racial differences. Half were initially inclined towards Essentialism, announcing that "scientists have found genetic evidence for race differences." The other half learned that "scientists have found that there is no genetic basis for race differences." And members of the other half expressed less agreement on race inequality.
Decrease in hierarchy. Too developed hierarchies reinforce the differences between friend and foe, because those at the top justify their status by slandering the lower ones, and the latter view the ruling class with a low warmth / high competence ratio. For example, there is a cultural trope that says that poor people are more careless, they are closer to real life and are able to enjoy its simple pleasures, while rich people are unhappy, under stress and are under pressure of responsibility. Likewise, the myth “they are poor, but full of love” refers the poor to the high warmth / low competence classification. One study of 37 countries found that the wider the income gap between the rich and the poor, the more the rich support this view.
Conclusion
From excessive barbarity to minor troubles caused by micro-aggression, division into friends and foes leads to a lot of unpleasant consequences. But I do not think that the goal should be to "cure" the habit of dividing people into categories of friend / foe (not to mention the fact that in the presence of the amygdala this is impossible).
I myself am prone to loneliness - I spent a lot of time living in a tent in Africa, studying another species. But my happiest moments are associated with the feeling that I am among my own people, that they accept me, that I am safe and not alone, that I am part of something larger and that surrounds me, the feeling that I am on the right side and with me things are good. For some divisions, my / someone else's I - an abstruse, meek, amorphous pacifist - is ready to kill and die.
If we take it for granted that there will always be different sides, it is very difficult to be on the side of the “good”. Don't trust essentialism. Remember that rationality is often just rationalization, an attempt to catch up with subconscious forces, the existence of which we do not suspect. Focus on shared goals. Practice a side view. Engage in individuation. And remember how often in history really malicious strangers hid and substituted some third party.
In the meantime, make way for the people whose cars adorned with a sticker "rude sucks" and remind everyone that in this fight we are on the same side of the barricades, against Lord Voldemort and the Slytherin house.
