Latest / Infinite Threads with Bob Barnett / Before We Were Opponents

Transcript

Before We Were Opponents · Infinite Threads with Bob Barnett

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: hey, hey.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Infinite Threads.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Bob.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: This week, we're beginning something new.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you love it when I say that?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm calling it The Human Things.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: For the next few episodes,
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to look underneath all the noise around us and ask a question
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: that feels especially important right now.
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  SPEAKER_00: What is still human here?
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  SPEAKER_00: And I want to begin with an image that I've come back to many times.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: A baby.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every person you have ever loved started that way.
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  SPEAKER_00: So did every person who has ever irritated you.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so did the person whose beliefs may be so different from yours
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  SPEAKER_00: that you've had trouble understanding how they could possibly see the world the way
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  SPEAKER_00: that they do.
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  SPEAKER_00: Before any of that existed, there was a baby.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've always felt that this may be the purest love that we ever are.
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  SPEAKER_00: A newborn doesn't know political parties.
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  SPEAKER_00: A baby doesn't know which group it is supposed to fear.
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  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't understand status or ideology.
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  SPEAKER_00: It knows comfort.
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  SPEAKER_00: It knows fear.
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  SPEAKER_00: It knows the feeling of being held.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then life begins.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the part I think that we forget.
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  SPEAKER_00: When we encounter someone as an adult,
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  SPEAKER_00: between that baby and the person standing in front of us now,
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  SPEAKER_00: an entire human life has happened.
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  SPEAKER_00: We don't know most of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that child grew up surrounded by love and maybe they learned very early that
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  SPEAKER_00: the world wasn't safe.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe something happened along the way that changed the way they understood people forever.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the time we meet someone, we are usually arriving very late in their story.
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  SPEAKER_00: We see the opinions they hold today.
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  SPEAKER_00: We see the thing they posted online.
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  SPEAKER_00: We hear the sentence that makes us angry.
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  SPEAKER_00: What we don't see are all the years that helped build the person saying it.
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  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that every belief deserves our approval by any means.
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  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't excuse cruelty.
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  SPEAKER_00: If somebody is causing harm, we still protect people.
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  SPEAKER_00: We still draw boundaries and we still say, no, this is not acceptable.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: But none of those things require us to forget that we're dealing with another human being.
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  SPEAKER_00: That distinction does matter, guys,
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  SPEAKER_00: because when the world becomes divided,
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  SPEAKER_00: one of the first things that we seem to lose is curiosity about each other.
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  SPEAKER_00: We stop wondering, how did you get here?
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  SPEAKER_00: Instead, we decide we already know.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're one of those people.
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  SPEAKER_00: Once we have that label, the person becomes easier to dismiss.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is where something dangerous begins.
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  SPEAKER_00: Labels are simple.
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  SPEAKER_00: Human beings are not.
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  SPEAKER_00: A person can carry beliefs that we strongly reject and still love their family deeply.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone can behave badly in one part of life while showing great kindness in another.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fear, love, anger, generosity, and old wounds Can all exist inside the same person.
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  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make harmful behavior less harmful.
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  SPEAKER_00: It makes the human being more complicated than the behavior.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think empathy lives in that distinction.
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  SPEAKER_00: Empathy doesn't say, you're right.
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  SPEAKER_00: It says, there's a life inside you that I can't fully see.
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  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that one thought can change the way that we respond.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Think about someone you strongly disagree with.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, remove the argument for just a moment.
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  SPEAKER_00: Picture that person as a baby.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somebody once held them.
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  SPEAKER_00: They cried because they were frightened or hungry.
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  SPEAKER_00: They laughed at something completely ridiculous.
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  SPEAKER_00: At that point,
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  SPEAKER_00: they had no idea that one day another person might look at them and see an opponent.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then life started shaping them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Parents, teachers, friends, loss, fear, love, success,
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  SPEAKER_00: failure.
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  SPEAKER_00: We could make that list so much longer.
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  SPEAKER_00: But we don't need to.
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  SPEAKER_00: The point is that something happened between the beginning and now.
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  SPEAKER_00: A lot of somethings.
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  SPEAKER_00: Think about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And most of them are invisible to us.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the way we reduce people to
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  SPEAKER_00: a single belief or moment.
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  SPEAKER_00: We meet the current version of someone and assume that's their entire story.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it isn't.
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  SPEAKER_00: There was a child before this person.
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  SPEAKER_00: There was a teenager.
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  SPEAKER_00: There were years when they were learning what the world was and whether they could trust it.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the time that we meet them, those years are still in the room, even if we can't see them.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't mean that we have
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  SPEAKER_00: to become amateur psychologists every time someone says something offensive.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes a bad idea is simply a bad idea and needs to be challenged.
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  SPEAKER_00: But we can challenge an idea without trying to destroy the humanity of the person holding it.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think we sometimes believe anger becomes stronger when we add contempt to it.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure it does.
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  SPEAKER_00: If anything, if anything, contempt can make us less curious.
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  SPEAKER_00: And once curiosity disappears, understanding usually follows it out the door.
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  SPEAKER_00: We begin arguing with the version of the person that we created in our own heads.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that version is very easy to defeat because we wrote the character ourselves.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Think about that.
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  SPEAKER_00: Real people are harder.
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  SPEAKER_00: Real people contain contradictions.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is inconvenient, but it's also where empathy begins.
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  SPEAKER_00: I can understand why you arrived somewhere without agreeing that you should stay there.
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  SPEAKER_00: I can recognize the wounds.
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  SPEAKER_00: Without approving of what you did with it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I can insist that harmful behavior stop without deciding that
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  SPEAKER_00: the person causing it was born beyond redemption.
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  SPEAKER_00: Those ideas can exist together.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's important to me because Infinite Threads has never been about pretending
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: that everything is fine.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: It has been about asking what actually reduces harm.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes that means comfort.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it means intervention.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it means refusing to pass hatred forward just because hatred reached us first.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I think remembering the baby helps.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because it erases adulthood, But because it reminds us that adulthood had a beginning.
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  SPEAKER_00: Before this person was ever your opponent, they were somebody's baby.
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  SPEAKER_00: And between that first day and this one, a whole human life happened that you didn't witness.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what that life contained, and neither do you.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: That uncertainty should leave a little room for humility.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not agreement, and maybe not forgiveness even.
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  SPEAKER_00: Just enough room to remember that there's still a person there.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think that's one of the human things that's worth protecting.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: The ability to disagree without dehumanizing.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: The ability to stop harm without needing hatred.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: The ability to look across a divide and recognize a life instead of only a label.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: We may not be able to change everything happening in the world,
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: but we can decide what happens inside of us when
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: the world tells us someone else is nothing more than an enemy.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: We can remember where they began.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: A little baby.
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  SPEAKER_00: No argument yet.
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  SPEAKER_00: No side.
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  SPEAKER_00: Just a human being needing love.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Life has added a great deal since then, but the person is still there.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: I love you all very, very, very much.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what I need you to do.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Go out and pass that on, okay?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Later, Gators.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Bye-bye.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: Fears.
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  SPEAKER_02: Every
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  [music]