We live in a more and more insular society where communication is often restricted to the sending and receiving of words and pictures on digital devices. It reminds me of the short story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster, about a future humankind that lives underground individually in hexagonal room, each exactly the same as the other, all over the world. The machine controls the air temperature, the lighting, the access to food and water and provides a way to communicate with others around the world through screens. No one travels or even leaves their room, life is solitary, lived through a global machine. This is an extreme situation but it resonates, I think, with the way we often communicate, or don’t communicate with each other today.
I often sit in social situations, like a restaurant or a pub, and the majority of people that have clearly come to this place together are not talking to each other, or even looking at each other, they are silently checking their social media on their mobile phones for snippet of other people’s lives and to see who has liked or commented on the snippets of their own lives that they have shared. It seems ludicrous to me that people socialise with others, without socialising with them, without interacting with them, they are just people who know each other that are in the same area. The rise of mobile phone technology and social media has created a rift in our culture between people, created by the lack of social skills needed to navigate human relationships. The generations growing up with this technology are failing to learn the social communication skills of holding a conversation with someone, sharing their thoughts and feelings with someone and are more likely to turn to Facebook than a person when they suffer from mental difficulties like depression or anxiety.
This is the problem, unseen by many, which has two parts to it. Firstly, the more we use social media to communicate with each other the less able we are to have face to face interactions. The trial and error needed to learn these social skills while growing up happens less because there are less opportunities, due to the time spent on social media. These social skills are needed to have healthy, positive relationships with family and friends, romantic partners and colleagues at work. So many people become daunted by the idea of striking up a conversation with a stranger or an acquaintance, because they have not had the practice while growing up. Secondly, the very nature of social media means that we accumulate social media friends which agree with the things we believe in or do what we do, and it becomes very easy to remove a connection to someone by unfriending them; instantly cutting ties with a person with a click of a button, if their way of being clashes with ours. As a result we rarely engage with people we disagree with, so the skills needed to debate with others or to find our own values and beliefs become lost, because these things come from interacting with people we disagree with.
This all creates a situation where we are less likely to engage with people who are different from us, so we begin to fear people who are different. This might manifest in the belief that our town/city, country, religion, lack of religion, politics, language, culture, skin colour, home, car, family, friends are better than those of other people who are different. This manifests in the dislike of ‘foreigners,’ or people fro a different town or city within our own country, without the realisation that we are foreigners in the eyes of others too. In any culture, whether it is a country or a business, difference is an advantage. Life flourishes in the places where a multitude of species coexist. Creativity flourishes in the same type of environment, where difference is abundant. The ability to accept others who are different from us and to interact with them using an open mind and an open heart is certainly an advantage. When we become so caught up in our own ideologies we become tribalistic, we become extremist, we become intolerant, we become an us, as opposed to a them. In the Bible Jesus said “Love your enemies,” to me this means that if we love our enemies then we will have no enemies. Love is the antidote to fear. When you hear reporters or politicians referring to people from other places in terms of a them, reframe the situation in your mind and think of them as one of us. Our tribe is called mankind and we are in this together. There is only a ‘them’ if we choose to use this term to refer to other people. We are in control of how we see the world and each other. Let us disagree, debate and share our ideas together as a collective, so we can change each other for the better.
Question:
What beliefs or experiences in your life cause you to fear others?
The Fullfilment Project 