The other guy, the other race, the other party, even the other gender. We are taught to believe that the other is to be feared, is inferior. and is of little value in society. I submit that this false myth is the cause of the major social tension that is currently exploding in most every aspect of our lives. Politics would have us believe that if you are not in my party, you are the enemy. Some politicians have been willing to suggest that if you do not agree with them you are unpatriotic or even a traitor to your country!

Every human being on this planet is a self aware conscious animal who can only  see the world from an individual self centered points of view. So we are all naturally self centered individuals. We naturally look out for our own interests over those of others. Normally raised in a family setting with at least one parent, we learn early on that the only way to get our own needs satisfied is by cooperation with the others in our family. Because of differences in the point of view for different families, not all families produce offspring with the same point of view. While this is not inherently a bad thing, it leaves open the possibility for folks to develop a non-productive or contradictory point of view about how the world works.

In Dan Brown’s latest book “Origins” he presents an excellent example of how different points of view can see things very differently. Consider being given a slip of paper, asked whether the statement on the paper is true or false, you see: I + XI = X, and you reply, “The statement is False”. Next you are told to turn the paper over, at which time you see: X = IX + I, to which you must reply, “This statement is True!”. The viewed object is either a true statement or a false statement, but depends on how the object is viewed.  If two people hold the paper between them in a way that each can read the statement on the paper, one will see the statement as true while the other will see it as false! Each person is looking at the same object and drawing a different conclusion about its truth or falsehood. The object has no innate truth value, it depends upon how you look at it.

To extend the specific example to the general principle, everything we experience in life comes to us through the filters of our perceptions created by the cultural point of view we have been taught. The people we see as terrorists, see themselves and are seen by their peers as fighting for a higher truth, as acting to reject the oppressor of their truth, as being in the right. This person sees us as being in the wrong, as being both dangerous and inferior and worthy of death. We see them as evil, as morally corrupt, and psychopathically dangerous. The truth is that both sides of this cultural divide are being taught false myths about themselves and the other. The facts are that all of us are the same, we have just been raised to different points of view. We all want the same things, if we aren’t just totally devoid of empathy, we want security and comfort in a happy and useful lifestyle. Yet our cultural setting tells us we can only get those things by taking them away from others. That others have less rights to existence than you do. This point of view fails to understand that reducing the other does not elevate the self. Since we are all others this point of view allows your rights to existence to be reduced as well.

Jesus of Nazareth said the same things in the famous phrases we know: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself”. These are not religious statements. They do not talk about man’s relationship with the creator. They are not even spiritual in nature. What they are is a social directive, a preferred way for human being to deal with each other in an equitable fashion. They are in direct opposition to the Roman ideals of domination and slavery. I submit that those Roman ideals are more entrenched today that they were in Jesus time. I also submit that he lost the fight for freedom, not when he was killed, but when Constantine made a religion out of whole cloth that declared the freedom fighter was actually the Son of God, putting the message in the hands of a priesthood that simply became another arm of the government. Another social mechanism that further defined some as saved and some as others.

We are each unique individuals different in aspects of our appearance. Our parents tell us just how unique and special we are whenever we need an emotional boost from the beat down of every day life. While this statement is completely true, it is also as irrelevant as hair or eye or skin color is to whether or not we are a fellow human. Our uniqueness is useful only in identifying one person from another. In order that we might tell Mary from Jane, Jon from Herbert, or even Frank from Susan. It is only social fiction that one particular set of physical characteristics are better than some “other” set. We all have the same organs in relatively the same places. We have enough in common that any one of us who has been trained as a Doctor can treat any one of us for most of the things that can go wrong with humans with about equal probability of success. Any healthy male can pass on a somewhat random set of his characteristics to almost any human female to produce yet another unique individual.

I submit that the idea that others are to be feared is an entirely unproductive point of view. It makes much more sense to the survival of an individual that they associate with people different from themselves. Learning about the experiences of others is almost as good as having those experiences, specially when you give some value to that other person and those experiences. The more points of view that can be focused on a problem the more resolvable that problem becomes.

Love thy neighbor, because life is easier when we pool our knowledge and understanding.