When Other People are Bigots

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 126

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So I'm recording this the week that the election has just happened in America. And by the time that this goes out into your ears, the handover of power will have already taken place.

And what is on my mind quite a lot this week, and I can imagine is only going to get more intense. And I think I can imagine that this is something that is going to be in conversation whenever I put this podcast out, is how we think about other people, especially how we think about other people who have different political views to us, especially how we think about other people who we think are wrong. And I guess most importantly how we find connection and moments to move and ways to move forward without just demonising other people and embedding the problem.

Now what I mean by that is how we can humanise the people in front of us and stop "othering" people so that we can stop feeling like we are completely helpless in a world that is spinning out of control.

Now I know that lots of my friends have very strong opinions that we shouldn't necessarily need to be connecting to people whose political views may deny their own humanity, or deny their own basic freedoms. And whilst I hear that point and I don't want to undermine anyone else's opinion and the way that they live their lives, and I certainly don't want to undermine anyone else's hurt who is experiencing very real life consequences according to hatred that is put out towards them as a human being; I also want to propose some ideas that may be appropriate in various different areas of your life.

Because it isn't just big political spheres where people have different opinions to you. It might be family members, might be relationships, might be friendships, might be work colleagues. There are quite often situations where we think you're wrong and you're bad and I've got. And if you could just think a bit more like me, I'd be having a much nicer time, thank you very much.

And when we embed ourselves in the "I'm right, you're wrong" narrative, what happens is we put other people into a place that is somewhere that we could never go. Somewhere that is way more awful than we could ever be and something that we couldn't possibly imagine being so selfish, dreadful, hurtful, narrow minded, whatever we're saying about them.

And when we have these kind of views, "they are wrong and bad and how stupid of them. And how could they be so selfish?" Firstly, if we speak it out, all we're doing is we are letting them know that we have nothing to say that they want to hear. You would immediately get people to be defensive. But also we are putting ourselves into a place of trying to train our brains in a way to say that we could never be wrong, that we could never be that kind of person, that we wouldn't do that kind of thing to somebody else.

And in my lifetime I've made some stupid mistakes. I've had opinions that I've held very, very strongly and I was utterly wrong about. And I want to, and hope that I have enough life experience now to know, that I want to be in a state of learning constantly. Life has become infinitely more expansive for me when I stopped feeling like I need to be right and presume that I probably don't know things. I'm probably not saying the right thing. And I know that phrases, terminology and ideas that I have are constantly evolving. And I want to constantly be in a place of learning and listening so that I can be open to new ideas and the possibility of expanding things when new information comes to light. I want to be in a place where I'm flex rather than fixed in one place As life moves on and as the universe moves on and I'm stuck with these old opinions, I want to be able to learn what the new language is and how we phrase things and how we support each other.

When I think about my own personal learning journey, frankly, some of the most of the biggest life lessons that I've ever had is because someone, especially things that come from other people's experiences, because someone took the time to teach me and someone thought that I had the capacity to listen enough that they was worth them speaking and spending the time trying to explain to me or to teach out there in the world that there could be a possibility of change.

ASo I wonder if you can think of someone who is obviously clearly bad and wrong. And I wonder if you can think of any times that you've thought something along the lines of the kind of things that they have been thinking. I wonder if some of your sort of animosity and hostility towards them is because you can think of a time where you used to think something a little bit similar to that, or you did something a little bit similar to that, even if it's on a much tinier scale and you're a bit embarrassed or you're a bit ashamed.

Where have you been wrong in these things that you're very sure are wrong now?

And how did you learn that that isn't okay?

How did you learn Something different?

And how can you see things from their point of view?

Is it that someone has been brought up in a particular environment where they've never or experiences have surrounded them? I am thinking of a lot of friends from LGBTQI+ community in America who are very frightened right now about existing, about just existing as themselves. And I think about how someone could have such hostility and hatred towards what other people do with their bodies when it literally has nothing to do with them. And I think, if I was brought up in a very small town, surrounded by people who were telling me that to be gay was to be wrong, and everyone around me was so embedded in this idea that no one around me felt safe enough to come out or to have any kind of variant on heteronormativity. And I was surrounded by that. And I was constantly told that this is the way things were. Would I think the way that I do now? I don't know that I would. I know that I would because I've had the. The joy and the love and the wonderful breadth of experience to know and love a whole load of different humans.

When I think about how people could have come to that place where from the outside it just looks like it's riddled with hatred, then I can see it begins to stop them being some big monster and makes me be able to see the possibility of their humanity. And when I can see them as a person, I can think, okay, well, what was it that benefited me, that enabled me to be able to expand my horizons of what love is and how more people should be able to feel safe and warm and kind and welcome and like life is available to them and that other people don't threaten their very existence; What was it for me that made those joined those dots?

When I'm looking at them as a human rather than a monster, what kind of things do I think that I could say or do or act or put out there or speak on in a podcast or write a blog about that might be able to phrase something that melts a bit of that hardness. And when I have to do that from a place of seeing them as a person as opposed to seeing them as an enemy, or they're not going to listen and I'm not going to be able to phrase anything that is worth hearing when I am coming from a place of, you're wrong, you're evil.

It has to be from a place of an open heart, allowing people to be able to make mistakes.

I think one of the reasons that this is so important from a world apart from just from a world point of view and apart from to be able to make the effort to do this for the sake of people's genuine safety right now is because if we are telling people that if you are wrong, you are a bad person, of course the person that you use that most against is yourself. And if you are telling yourself that you are wrong because you thought something bad or you had a bad opinion, that's going to prevent you from learning in the future. That's going to prevent you from being open to things in the future. You have no idea in your lifetime what is going to come up and challenge what you think are your very great politics right now.

There's going to be all sorts of things that the kids come up with, we're going to become the dinosaurs so quickly with new technology and new phrases of things and new ways of being. And if you want to be someone who perpetually has an open heart rather than becomes one of the people who just gets it more embedded in their own ways, what you think of now as very good politics will become outdated very quickly.

We have to be able to allow ourselves to be able to make mistakes and ourselves to be able to get things wrong. And frankly, what better learning ground of being able to expand that bit of our own hearts and our own bit of empathy than with people who quite frankly, we're thinking right now are bigots. We have a huge testing ground into how to make the world a more kind, more loving, more accepting place right now in front of us.

What we do in this very, very pressure cooker moment will impact things for generations to come. This is not easy work and it's way easier to sit there saying "I'm right and you're wrong." But the consequences of that are just a little bit of dopamine in the moment and very little long term benefits, especially not for people in marginalised identities if you have any kind of structural privilege at all, we have a responsibility to be able to hold ourselves to account for where we are willing to put the effort into learning for ourselves and where we're willing to put the effort into sitting and listening and having some really tricky conversations with people around us who may possibly then be able to make decisions which include more people and allow more people to feel more safe. This is the moment I believe that we're in right now.

And of course it is intrinsically linked to the way that we treat ourselves. I got accused on social media this week of trying to pander to the masses and of being ridiculously political in my work. And that made me realise that if someone has that response to me, that I've clearly not been political enough because that the fact that they felt that it was all right to come at me with that response and the fact that they were surprised that I was speaking like that made me realise that I'm not speaking enough about issues that are important to me. And people's rights, people's equality, people's safety is really important to me. And I hope that if you're around these parts, it's important to you too.

The amount of impact that we can have on the world is directly correlational to how much discomfort we are willing to feel both in being right in ourselves and how much we are willing to stretch ourselves to be able to reach out to other people's humanity safely, obviously at all times. If you'd like any help in how to learn to do this for yourself or for other people, always happy to have a chat. Drop me an email. I can send you either some resources or we can look at ways that we could work together to work on this stuff.

I'm wishing you safety, I'm wishing you well being and I'm wishing for a world where all of us can feel safe in our own skins and in our own homes and on our own streets. I'll speak to you next week.