#132. Why Can't We Be Friends?

“She just hits me wrong.”

“I don't really trust them.”

“They always want…”

Oh, dear.

When did they become them?

We all sort people. It's one way to make sense of a complicated world. Familiar. Unfamiliar. Like me. Not like me. Safe. Maybe not. Yet somewhere between noticing difference and deciding what that difference means, something else sneaks in.

Suspicion. And suspicion sells.

None of this is new. Humans have been sorting “us” and “them” since the dawn of time. What feels potent right now is how effectively our differences are being packaged and sold back to us.

And that’s called manipulation. Categories that help us understand real differences in experience become something else when they're used to tell us whom to fear, blame, or distrust.

The message isn’t hate them. It’s much quieter. They're getting something you're not. They're changing something you value. They're taking up too much space. Nobody listens to people like you anymore.

Just like that, difference becomes othering. And othering is dangerous. Not only because it changes how we see other people, but because it changes what we're willing to believe about them.

Once someone becomes them, we're more willing to accept the worst explanation for what they do. We begin treating the loudest or ugliest member of a group as representative of everyone in it. We can see the manipulation much more easily when it's happening to somebody else. Those people have been brainwashed. They believe anything. How can they possibly vote for that?

Stop! Who might be saying that about us?

Othering has another useful feature: it saves us the trouble of complexity. If I “know” what kind of person votes that way, lives there, worships there, comes from there, or looks like that, I don't have to deal with the inconvenient person who doesn't fit neatly into the category I've assigned them.

That's precisely what makes the manipulation so effective. It gives us certainty, which can feel awfully good in a world gone crazy.

Let’s become harder to manipulate by looking for what othering hides: shared values, worries, and goals.

We want meaningful lives and enough security to live them. We want our youngsters to have an education. We want communities that work, to be treated fairly, to have a say in what happens to us. We want to believe that tomorrow holds something better than today.

We may disagree about how to get there. Common ground doesn't require us to pretend those differences don't matter or abandon values we hold deeply. It means refusing to assume that disagreement is all we share.

Common ground asks us to see the whole person again. To recognize that the person we've put into that category may share more of our hopes, worries, values, and goals than the category allows us to see.

That's where othering begins to crack. We don't have to agree on everything, but once them becomes us again, we might find something worth working toward together.