Look at the other again

Not understanding the differences makes us afraid. And instead of appreciating the information that comes from other people´s perspectives, different from our own, that might enrich us, we react with the primitive impulse of fighting or flying. This is the beginning of a vicious circle that ends badly for everyone. 

At the beginning when coronavirus became a pandemic, a feeling of “now, we are all in the same boat” appeared. Unfortunately, this beautiful (even if it was caused by an awful reason) feeling of humanity as a whole community, almost immediately made us realize that we are in the same storm, but each of us is in their own and different boat.

And the classic division “us and the others” resurfaced stronger than ever.

The conspiracy narrative blaming someone, always the other, always the different one, only helps by transforming something very complex and difficult to understand into a kind of cartoonish simplification of reality. Transformation that ended up pushing people to make decisions based on bias beliefs, and fake news, impulsive decisions only induced by emotional impulses, without real, proven data.

It takes a lot of courage and a deep ethical sense to stop our primitive reaction of fight and attack the one we are afraid of and try to have greater awareness to face the situation.

Another option is to look at the other again without prejudices, or at least with a greater awareness of our ways of thinking. Let’s look again trying to see the differences as just differences and not a malicious conspiracy. We would be exercising our condition of being human beings, of belonging to the only species that thinks its emotions before acting on them.