Friendship Over Politics

On the virtues of finding common ground amongst disagreement

Our times are arguably more troubled than those which most generations born after the Second World War have had to face. Read the news, watch television, look at any social media, and you’ll see that something has profoundly changed. Conflicts have broken out throughout the world, more than Western media tends to acknowledge; violence and division are rife in what we can only call ‘the most developed democracies’ with a pinch of irony. Everywhere, the consensus we all took for granted is crumbling. 

While the world has gotten more divided, we have ourselves become lazy. Much of the news people take in is selected and tailored to comfort their existing ideas — this applies to Fox News and GB News as much as to CBS and The Guardian. Social media feeds us only the information we want to see, locking us into systems of thought which vilify anyone on the outside. As opinion has started to outweigh fact, we have, in large part, surrendered by no longer challenging ourselves into backing up our beliefs. 

Societies increasingly feel like collections of antagonistic groups with their own interests and ideals, coexisting with tension and the occasional flare-up. We don’t trust each other because we don’t understand one another anymore.

You can think what you wish about Charlie Kirk’s or Bernie Sanders’ beliefs, I certainly do, but they talked to people, confronted other beliefs, and tried  to break down walls l of incomprehension. We can’t be societies if we don’t understand one another, or without actively engaging with those we disagree with or distrust. 

I like to think that I’ve learned a few things in my twenty-odd years down on Earth. One of them is that very few people are ‘bad people.’ The proportion of real psychopaths in the world has historically been relatively low — 1.2% — and most of the people you think to be crazy or soulless because they believe X, Y, or Z are probably not. You may think they’re bad people with horrible and dangerous beliefs, but they probably also think that of you. Are they right about you? You’d say no. What makes you so sure that you are right about them? 

We all have our preconceptions about others. We all associate certain images with the communists, Trumpists, Tories, and Labourites of the world, good or bad. However, most communists want a better and more equal world, not a return of the KGB and gulags. Most Trump supporters, I believe, are either willing to put up with his rhetoric and diatribes in exchange for tax cuts or have lost faith in any other form of governance; they’re not all racists and sexists. Left-wingers and right-wingers — even the centrists — in their crushing majority seek the same thing: a bettering of life. They simply disagree on the method, due to philosophy or personal interests, and what sacrifices to make in achieving it.

I am not saying you should see all convictions as acceptable. Some beliefs are wrong; some people are stupid, selfish, dangerous, and uncaring. But not everyone.Understand why they think what they do, without writing them off as unfrequentable before doing so. Think for yourself, debate others into understanding you, and they will make you understand them. Even if you do not change their minds, or they yours, you will have made progress in healing the fractures within our society.

A person is not evil because they vote, act, look, or think differently from you —we should have moved past all this years ago. Stop relying on the caricatures drawn up by interested parties and make up our own mind. Not every right-winger is a milk-snatching xenophobe, and not every leftist is a woo-woo Stalinist. Understanding that is a conversation away.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons