What follows is my comment to a most excellent post over on CJ's page. I'm reposting it here because the thought involved is solidly part of my (slow to press but ongoing) series "The Third Reality of Man."
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To Darkwolf, Rand-J and Karl: well said gentlemen. Somehow I feel I might be at risk of hearing a chorus from a Carly Simon song to commenting on this post at all, and worse might even deserve it, but why not. Here goes nothing.
"Othering" sounds to my ears like one of the many words reassigned and modified by those who are (unwisely) attempting to homogenize (and ultimately bottle for retail) all of humanity, a word well chosen to carry Big Brother's disappointment and displeasure, it works well as precursor to a veiled threat. Still though, the function has been present in the human condition from the beginning, it deserves a name.
If it is accepted that Othering has been present since the beginning it would seem reasonable to assume it served some needed function, to my thought probably more from the realm of security than sustenance: if the others helped there would be plenty for everyone, but the others might simply take our effort and leave none for us, there are after all more of them than there are of us. To state the obvious, but there are always more of them than there are of us. Us refers to those within our personal sphere of empathy, a local variable, the Other refers to those who are not, an all inclusive default definition very global indeed.
Which brings me to my reason for defending Othering as an absolutely necessary function in maintaining civilization.
The reasoning behind this stance is dependent upon several facets and factors concerning the concept sphere of empathy (IMO the headwaters of all civility), first and most critical is that sphere of empathy would appear (and God knows I hope I'm wrong about this!) to be an inverse-square function: the actual amount of working empathy human to human resolves as the inverse of the square of the distance between them (source-seed: Enigma, "The Gravity of Love").
Secondly, the sphere of empathy is a dynamic loading on the emotional structures of life, any life. You can only truly care about just so many people before the emotional burden of engaging your thought, your emotions, simply over-runs the available amount of processor time available if nothing else, self preservation imposes a very finite limit on anyone's working sphere of empathy.
The third, and for the sake of civilization the most damningly critical facet is this: from the observations of my lifetime it appears to me that the sphere of empathy behaves much like a balloon... over-inflate it, artificially drive it beyond the strength of that membrane and it POPS and you've created an individual with no empathy at all!
Gentle reader, I ask you to look at the world we live in, consider our recent history. Does not the degree of callous indifference, the ever escalating degree of genuine barbarism speak to an ever increasing number of individuals whose sphere of empathy got popped? Of course there have always been those who were formed with little to no sphere of empathy, the most brutal of tyrants has a sphere of empathy enclosing only one person, himself. But that number should remain in some linear proportion to the population, and yet it would appear that it does not. I ask you, how many of the most hard shelled of the neo-fascist conservatives in just our nation, The United States of America, began their lives wholly committed to the new-age notion of universal love, universal brotherhood, one universal group identity? What might that number be, world wide?
And so I'll go on record and say I believe that Othering is not the bane on civilization so very many consider it to be, but is rather an absolutely critical function of civilization currently under heavy attack by a great many who mean well, but don't have a full understanding of the consequences of their actions, or any concept of how to create a peaceful and sustainable state between Us, and Them.
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