If we experience life through a lens where the people we deal with seem most like us, it’s easy to think we have a leg up on navigating our world more successfully. Many people feel that they understand how other people think and can predict what they might do. This is natural, because we’d all like to assume those who look like us have similar upbringing, expectations, behaviors, and methods. We’d also like to think we can understand others’ intentions and plans without real conversation.
And we’d be wrong.
People who seem the most like us, those who present a socially-similar demeanor and affectation, are likely to have inner lives that diverge the most. Or to be more specific, their secret inner lives diverge the most. And dealing with these folks may be most surprising when we start behaving like our authentic selves. The push back can be the most severe. Betrayal is a big word that lands here, and shunning, or choosing grief over connection is a common emotional response to an authentic person we thought was “like us”, but that’s another essay.
However, if you choose to associate yourself with people who are most different, either in social, racial, gender, or economic ways, you are more likely to have meaningful and authentic communication AND learn something. Because then you can’t coast on what you’d like to think is your knowing. You can’t assume much, and that’s the gift of these relationships.
This learning – the work of relating – in finding common ground is the stuff of a better life. It enriches your ability to access and accept more parts of yourself, and stretches your ability to find commonalities. Both of these outcomes make for a happier you and a happier world. And, because we are all in this world together, it’s just common sense.
This is why travel is so important, and not just travel from 5 star resort to another, but travel into the everyday cultures of the places you visit. Here you can talk with the real people who live there, who serve tourists (or tolerate, or run circles around) tourists like you.
This is also why diversity is a high-level intelligent aim in hiring and in building communities. Diversity makes all the people stronger, even if the work to understand and communicate at first feels harder. Hard work, after all, is what makes great things happen.
Here and Now
When I see what’s happening at the hands of the Replican1 Administration (oops! I mean Republican Administration), I see a small group of fearful, insecure folks, pulling power moves and perpetuating country-club back-slapping lands, expecting them to work like before. Their aims appear to be resource hoarding and relaxation, and the ‘maga’ moniker makes lots of sense here. They want to go “back” because they feel it was easier then. And because the old ways stopped working, they are getting bolder, and going further into the past to mimic authoritarians to achieve dominion. The power grab is meant to cement their homogeneous group of white men+ allies into a position of insulated power, with everyone else feeling too fearful to challenge it.
But we aren’t. We are diverse in external ways, and internal ones. And we each have power. And we are not subjects of dominion. We are human beings with rich inner and outer lives, and those who choose the quiet realms of the every day life and perhaps the most dangerous to the status quo.
The way to unseat unseemly power grabs by the fearful: don’t pretend to fit in and don’t let them insulate themselves further with your resources. This means, you need to stand up for who you are – even if on the surface, you’d be in the ‘protected class’2 and therefore safe. You must stand up. There is no real safety under authoritarians, they keep grabbing power by violence and destruction because they come from a fearful, lazy space.
So I hope you stay out there, stay loud, stand proud and be the brilliant human that you are. As real people, you have real power. And it starts with knowing yourself and relating to the rest of us.
FOOTNOTES
- Okay, new fun word: REPLICAN. Reminds me of replicate, which is precisely what they are trying to do: create a power structure ruled by country-club style white guys (and their staunchest allies and cow-towers) and their middle class replicants. ↩︎
- I would be in this class, and I know that coasting on “feeling safe” is something I must work against. None of us are safe right now, and the sooner we wake up to this, the quicker we can end this GOP fever dream. ↩︎
