“What can you do when another person is simply someone that you not only disagree with, but also don’t respect, don’t trust, and dislike intensely, perhaps even hate—and it’s clear they’re not going to change?”
This is the question I was asked recently when I was guest speaker in a ‘salon’ conversation. We were discussing ideas about how to create new practices for taking care of ourselves, our loved ones, and the planet. I had shared my view that, as a consequence of accelerating change and our living in what I call a ‘real-time world’, at least two foundational beliefs of our society—prediction and control—are disappearing.
If you share my observation and accept this premise, the implications are profound. Virtually every planning and budgeting system, every investment strategy, and the entire field of management are based on the assumptions that: a) the future can be predicted, and b) it is possible to control people and processes to achieve desired outcomes.
I had just pitched the idea to the group that this view of what’s happening suggests you and I need to learn to live in the moment, trust our vision for the future, and navigate based on assessments of the gap between what’s emerging and our commitments. Further, learning how to continuously reinvent yourself is becoming an essential skill if you wish to remain relevant and able to impact how the future is unfolding.
My first response to the salon participant’s “What can you do…” question was to point out that the question itself revealed how deeply embedded and limiting our fundamental belief in prediction is. His certainty that the ‘other’ person would never change was a prediction of how they would be in the future. It was also an objectification, in that he was relating to that person as a fixed object, not as a living, breathing, ever-evolving being. Unfortunately, his prediction killed several possibilities, among them: 1) the possibility of the person changing (from his perspective); 2) the possibility of him imagining other approaches to their relationship; and 3) the possibility of the two of them ever having a conversation that might alter their relationship.
Our exchange got me thinking about how polarized our nation has become and the vehement disregard and, in many cases, disdain we have for those on “the other side”.
This tendency we humans have to objectify others leads to what in popular culture has been called ‘othering’. Othering is a term that, in the context of social and racial justice, has become a central notion in contemporary conversation and scholarship. Shall we continue to marginalize or demonize the ‘they’ or the ‘them’? Shall we continue to institutionalize discrimination and dominate the ‘other’? We must answer these questions in the negative if we are to resolve this universal problem and have the possibility of a future in which human beings can include their differences. For those interested in new approaches to this problem, john a. powell and Stephen Menendian just published an excellent book on this topic called Belonging without Othering – How We Save Ourselves and the World.
Let’s explore this notion of ‘othering’ in a broader context.
Why do we build walls, isolate ourselves, and sometimes aggressively attack those we don’t like or with whom we disagree?
One answer is that, historically, we, as individuals and as communities, have defaulted to the belief that you must put ‘the other’ down in order to: raise your own status, justify holding onto whatever you think you have that the other doesn’t, or win whatever game you’re playing.
Another view is that we ‘other' each other because, since the dawn of time, something in our DNA tells us that, when we are in a small group, we need to be wary of people in other groups because they are, or appear to be, different. We assume any ‘others’ are a potential threat to whatever we value and the persistence of whatever we’ve come to know as ‘normal’. Therefore, differences are dangerous.
A cynic might explain ‘othering’ as being about power. By ‘othering’ a group of people that has a different lifestyle, we maintain some form of control in the relationship with them, whether that be control over resources (financial, educational, nutritional, health, etc.) that impact their quality of life or symbolic control over their ability to make choices.
There may be more answers to my question. But I realize that trying to explain or justify why we ‘other’ people is not really useful: what I need to do is try to figure out why ‘othering’ persists.
I started by making a list of the people I have personally excluded, marginalized, or thought of as a ‘them’. At the top of my list: anyone who is an active member of the Trump MAGA cult or is participating in undermining and devaluing American democracy or our nation’s traditions.
Our nation is divided, not united. And we are largely divided because both the left and the right are locked into a death spiral of ‘othering’ the other. This is not sustainable. Regardless of who wins the election in November, the ‘other’ side will still be here, the divide will no doubt become even deeper, and we’ll be even more estranged from our fellow citizens.
One thing I am fairly certain of is that the belief that ‘they’ (the other side) won’t change is at the heart of this problem persisting. Each side views the ‘other’ as posing an existential threat. Both sides have rejected the legitimacy of the other: politically, economically, and/or morally. On the other hand, if ‘they’ don’t change, most of us can’t imagine or tolerate living with ‘them’ or ‘they’ with us.
One principle I’ve learned to trust in life is that ‘they’ won’t change unless or until I change. Another way of saying this is that ‘othering’, like love, is in the eye of the beholder.
If there is a possibility of resolving a political divide, it begins when one of the two parties owns the reality and says, “I am 100% responsible for this log jam. I didn’t cause the log jam, but it’s my relationship and my log jam.”
The next step is for that party to ‘give up’ or surrender to the facts:
The relationship is broken and it is unlikely to even be repairable until one party or the other acknowledges the right of the other to have their view—no matter how unbalanced, unhinged, or confused it might sound.
The current state of affairs shows no possibility of changing unless both parties can agree, “We are in the same boat.”
Both parties must find a way to include each other and acknowledge neither can achieve what they really want without the other.
More on ‘othering’ soon…