Build community. Go meet your neighbors. Find common ground — you have to build the bridges before you can walk across them and meet in the middle. But if we’re standing on opposite sides of the canyon, blaming each other and assigning responsibility for creating the canyon and building the bridge, the bridge is never going to be built, and we’ll eventually give up and go our separate ways.
It doesn’t matter which corner of the socio-political landscape you consider, you will find this problem. Because it’s not a socio-political problem, at all — that’s just the landscape it has most recently surfaced in, since politics became the dominant force guiding social relations in the modern world. The answer is more meta than that.
Our willingness to pursue (or even prefer) conflict over compromise is the heart of all our problems as a society. Our egos are individualized (and full of arrogant hubris to boot!) and concerned entirely with our subjective perception. When objective generalizations conflict with our subjective perceptions, our egos generally perceive two options: assimilate or abdicate, but there is in fact a third option: cooperation.
The issue with cooperation is that it demands a degree of humility that most individuals and social groups are unwilling to exercise. They have become too convinced of the objectivity of their subjective perceptions (and the subjectivity of objective reality), which shuts the door to cooperation in most cases. A preconceived notion or inherent disposition of the most minuscule proportions — regardless of where it comes from — is enough to impede compromise and stoke conflict.
Humility is critical in overcoming this problem at the most basic human level. If you find yourself making objective judgments of subjective situations, or assuming your subjective perception is shared by everyone (as an objective fact), then you have fallen for this ego trick. No matter how correct your objective perceptions are, and how valid your subjective assessments are, they are yours. We can share objective perceptions with others, but we will each have our own conceptions of the phenomena being perceived and our social (shared) subjective assessments within a group are based on a dialectic within our social group.
A society, collectively, can also have an “ego” of its own in this way; its own subjective perceptions of problems — a sort of group-thinking in which all members of a social group adopt the same subjective perception — and this society can also choose conflict over compromise — leading to large scale social conflicts.
The solution to these conflicts is to expand the dialectic and the social group. Find common ground with the other social group — no matter how different you think you are. This is how you prevent xenophobia — it’s literally an adverse or defensive response triggered by encountering something different while harboring the subjective opinion that different is equitable to dangerous. When we shift this perception — so that different becomes something interesting or unique, and something to be curious about — we open a door way to compromise, and the social groups’ dynamic becomes one of coalescence, not annihilation.
Do you understand? Can you read between the lines of your perceptions and experiences enough to see the realities of the situation? Or has your ego so hijacked and clouded your perception that you are incapable of the most basic human trait — finding a balance in yourself that encourages balance in the world around you? If you are, you are in good company. Capitalism and liberalism in their modern context (or, collectively, ‘neo-liberalism’), by weaponizing consumerism, have established a social dynamic that encourages isolationism and toxic individualism in people, and directly threatens social cohesion.
When people are individualized enough (in capitalism, the goal is to “win” — to make the most money — and this achieved, in theory, by being the “most special person” in a demographic where the root social value is competition) and isolation (not necessarily as individuals, by to a specific demographic group where collective thinking ensures a uniform collective conception of certain phenomena) becomes a tool to reinforce the ego with “echo chamber” methodology, we quickly build walls between ourselves and others based on fabricated “differences.”
The differences that these lines are usually drawn in accordance with are fabricated. Always. It doesn’t matter if it’s race, religion, resource scarcity, social class, … whatever they can politicize becomes a tool. We must acknowledge that the core issue here — the source of the differences that provide the subjective conflict in the individual that becomes xenophobia, and spreads to others with similar subjective perceptions — is politics. Politics has, since the days of ancient empires, been one of the primary tools for organizing and managing society; capitalism and religion are the others.
Politics is the problem. Or rather, the arena of politics as a forum for resolving social discrepancies is insufficient because — especially coupled with capitalism and the heavily-embedded consumerism that drives modern lifestyles — it encourages conflict and competition. This antagonistic dynamic results in two people or social groups (or whatever phenomena, really) trying to enforce their conceptions on the other without allowing the other to participate in the process of conception. When someone (or some group, or some phenomena of the world we live in) is compelled to participate in a system that they have no inherent influence on the operation of, this then becomes de facto oppression.
Stop participating in something that is designed to perpetuate isolationism and toxic individualism. Build community. Learn to cooperate, and deconstruct your own subjective perceptions and conceptions before you try to force other people to see them — in any instance. Even if you are objectively right, you owe it to other people — we are all equal, after all (unless you don’t actually believe that, in which case, there are bigger problems) — and capable of rationally understanding the world according to our perceptions. It is only fair to assume that others are similarly attuned to their situation, and to consider their subjective perception of the situation when it involves them.
It only takes a moment to review your motives and intentions — assuming you’re capable of being honest with yourself in some capacity — and you’ll find that conflict in your life more often gives way to compromise and cooperation. We can go a lot further together than we can, individually, and we are much more cooperative and compromising when we kill the cop that’s sleeping in our own hearts.
Build community. Stop arguing about theory and politics — that shit’s useless if you don’t apply it and let it evolve. Go meet your neighbors. Find common ground and ignore the political bullshit (might I suggest the arts, sports, or STEM hobbies?) — you have to build the bridges before you can walk across them and meet in the middle. But if we’re all standing on opposite sides of the canyon, telling the other person it’s their responsibility to build the bridge because the canyon is “their fault,” is kind of unfair. By the same token, when the canyon is your fault, you need to own it. Nobody’s going to want to come meet you in the middle when you build the bridge if they feel like you’re just going to fuck them again — you have to own and learn from your mistakes.