Empathy for a divided nation
For many waking up in the UK this morning, it feels like Groundhog Day – a morning much like 23rd June 2016 when the Brexit vote revealed a deeply divided nation. Once again we are hit with the news of split country, a polarising of opinions (and votes) and a difference of beliefs.
However, what if what we’re not being shown is just how connected we are in the choices we’ve made and how similar our votes actually were…
All of us, whether consciously or not, know and love people who voted very differently to ourselves in yesterday’s election. We may well be asking, “But how on earth could they have voted for that party?” in our reflections – naturally so. In a world where we are being encouraged to see many things as binary or opposite, it may seem that people are either “with us” or “against us". Yet, if you scratch back the surface (and the rhetoric and party politics) aren’t we actually all really voting for the same thing?
Whether consciously or not, we are all of us living in bubbles. We naturally surround ourselves by people like us, sharing our intimate lives with those with whom we feel safe and carving out metaphorical “safe spaces” in which to live. We all, naturally, want to nurture, protect and keep secure these safe spaces that we know, love and care deeply about. Of course we do. And anything that feels threatening to that can be seen as opposing what we know and love. That is our natural compassion at work.
Because many of us feel safe and contended within our lives (or bubbles), we might not think about or worry about bubbles beyond those that we see, know and understand. We care for our loved ones, we do good things for our communities and take care of the people in our lives. We are also perhaps not exposed to ideas which encourage us to think about how other bubbles connect to our own, or to empathise with lives different from our own. We may not be offered the opportunity to connect the dots and see outside of our bubbles.
We may not be aware that our lives (our own safe bubbles) might be having direct or indirect impacts on other people’s bubbles. We maybe haven’t ever connected with many other lives outside of our own communities, or got to know many other lives that are different to our own. We may not have been given the opportunity to make connections between how the actions in our lives influence people we don’t know, or people we will never meet.
This “not knowing” is not our fault - it is in many ways actively encouraged in the “filter bubbles” of the media that we are surrounded by. If our way of life works in the way we know and understand, then it is very natural that we want to keep nurturing this and helping it to be sustained. We are all actively compassionate in helping our friends, our loved ones, our communities to flourish, and will naturally choose (or vote for) systems that allow this to happen.
On the other hand, we may have seen how different lives (or bubbles) impact each other. We may have seen or experienced how what happens in some people’s live that works well for them can actually affect other people’s lives, sometimes in a negative way. We may understand how the actions of all of us have consequences on others, meaning that other people’s “safe spaces” are impacted through our choices, even if this impact may not ever be known or understood.
We may also be someone who has care and compassion for our own lives and for lives (or bubbles) we don’t inhabit and people we may never meet. Perhaps we know people living in these bubbles, or maybe we’ve seen or understood the ripple effects of our actions and how they may impact other people around us. We may be making choices that allow us to nurture and support the communities in which we live and feel safe as well as making choices that nurture communities that we are not part of, extending our empathy beyond our own bubbles.
In this election (as with the Brexit vote) and with many democratic votes across the world, the system only gives us simple, binary choices that will naturally make people fall into one camp or the other. This is not our fault, it is simply the system that we are in – taking huge complex issues and making them seemingly solved one way or another. It is therefore natural that the results will seem to show division, separation, difference. What we need is a system that allows our leaders to listen, reflect on ideas and come together to act on the shared values that we all support.
We may have all voted for different politics and policies, but we are connected in the motivations behind our voting – to want a better world for those we love. We are connected by the values that we hold dear and we are connected in the limitations of the choices we have been given. And we are all moving into the future together, working and living side by side in our communities, our bubbles overlapping whether we like it - and whether we know - it or not.
We are also connected in how we move forward into tomorrow. We can choose to keep hold of these divisions, separations and oppositions and fuel them with our fears. We can choose to remember our shared values and nurture these in our communities. We can choose to start to see just how connected we all are and move forward learning from each other.
This is why I am waking up today with empathy. Empathy for those who feel saddened by this vote, empathy for those who feel excited, empathy for those who feel fearful or unsafe, empathy for those who feel elated.
This is why I spend my days helping teach young people how to think, not what to think - so that they can learn to think critically about the choices they make, rather than just accept what they are told. This is why helping children learn to understand the impacts of how we are all connected feels such important learning, so that they can see the impact of their own actions on those they know and love as well as on the wider world around them. And this is why stepping into empathy is, for me, what I choose to take with me into my tomorrow.
Rachel Musson
Director of ThoughtBox Education
