"If our contemporaries are not encouraged to accept their multiple affiliations and allegiances; if they cannot reconcile their need for identity with an open and unprejudiced tolerance of other cultures; if they feel they have to choose between denial of the self and denial of the other --- then we shall be bringing into being legions of the lost and hordes of bloodthirsty madmen."
-Amin Maalouf, 1998.
I've been stuck for a very long time trying to figure out what should the next Baby Step be, and honestly I didn't manage to go that far.
Most of my thoughts were generally surrounding the notion of empathy; or better empowering empathy. But how, to what extent and concerning what exactly that has been a never ending dilemma to wrap my head around; until I accidentally went back to Maalouf's Les identités meurtrières, which explores into the meaning of identity and the gruesome acts of expression committed in its name.
And it hit me.
What I've been for so long trying to lay down as a basis for coexistence is empathy for our own identity and the identities of those we are sharing life with.
Now remain the questions of what is empathy? How to practice it? What is identity? How our relationship with this identity imposes a danger? And how could all of this correlate into something we need?
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