The Courage to See Each Other Again

There’s a pattern I keep noticing, and once you see it, it’s hard to stop seeing it.
Open any news feed and the loudest voices are arranged into two camps, glaring at each other across a line somebody else drew.
I remember a passage from Desiderata that goes something like: “Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.” It feels as though that wisdom is playing out on a much larger scale today.
Men are pitted against women. Race against race. Left against right. Native against immigrant. Vaccinated against unvaccinated. One tribe of the internet against another.
Each side is convinced the other is the problem. Each side is fed, hour by hour, a stream of content engineered, not by accident but by design, to reinforce that certainty.
The algorithm doesn’t care which side you’re on. It only cares that you keep watching, liking, commenting and sharing. Outrage is simply the cheapest fuel available.
A calm and accurate take on a complicated issue rarely travels as far as a 30 second reel designed to make you angry at someone who isn’t there to discuss or answer back.
And so the cycle feeds itself. The more divided we become, the more attention division receives. The more attention it receives, the more it appears to be the whole story.
This is the part that worries me most: it doesn’t require “a single mastermind” pulling the strings anymore. It only requires “a system”, an algorithm, that rewards division more reliably than it rewards understanding and compassion.
It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984. In Orwell’s world, people are taught who to fear, who to hate and what to believe, often without ever questioning why. The machinery of the system becomes more important than the truth itself.
At times it feels as though we are play out this dymanic in reality. Media built on attention naturally drifts toward conflict because conflict performs. Politics built on turnout naturally drifts toward enemies because a frightened electorate is easier to mobilise than a united one.
Nobody needs to conspire for the outcome to resemble a conspiracy. The incentive structure does the work by itself. When attention becomes the currency, division becomes the most profitable product.
And the cost of all this isn’t abstract anymore. It isn’t measured in clicks, ratings or election results. It’s measured in human lives.
It’s the man who sits quietly with his struggles because somewhere along the way he learned that asking for help makes him weak.
It’s the woman whose warmth and softness have been buried beneath layers of protection, shaped by years of being silenced, diminished or hurt by those who should have cared for her.
It’s two people who would agree on almost everything that truly matters, never discovering it because they meet each other first as members of opposing camps rather than as fellow human beings.
It’s friendships that never begin. Conversations that never happen. Relationships that are written off before either person has a chance to be seen or heard fully.
The reality is that most people are far more alike than they realise. Beneath the labels, the dogma, the politics and the identities - most of us are longing for the same things: to feel safe, to be valued, to belong, to love and be loved, and to know we matter in some way.
For all the noise that surrounds us, the human heart remains remarkably simple. I don’t want to play the same game here as I’m not trying to say I’m right and others are wrong. I’m trying to avoid that.
What I’m trying to get at is something simpler: the courage to see each other again.
We seem to have forgotten that two things can be true at the same time. This system has hurt men in ways we rarely acknowledge, and it has hurt women in ways we are still learning and trying to amend. Neither truth cancels the other out. Neither needs to be diminished for the other to be recognised.
Reality is rarely as neat as some arguments make it. There is often some truth on both sides, and some blindness too. A little light within the shadow, and a little shadow within the light. Yin within Yang. Wisdom begins when we stop asking who is completely right and who is completely wrong, and start asking what each of us might be missing.
Healing begins when we become curious instead of certain. When we listen before we judge. When we remember that beneath most anger is pain, beneath most fear is a longing to belong, and beneath all our labels is a human being trying to make sense of life.
We don’t rediscover each other through winning arguments. We rediscover each other through discussion, compassion and the openness to hold one another’s complexity without reducing us to heroes, villains, allies or enemies.
Now don’t get me wrong - Real harm exists and accountability definitely matters. But so does love. So does understanding. The people who benefit most from our division are rarely the people sitting across from us.
We need to find our way back to one another. To remember that before we were tribes, dogmas, identities, men or women, left or right, we were human beings.
And maybe the way forward is not through choosing a side, but through choosing each other.
- Ian | www.ianclaxton.com