The Importance of Groups
The human brain is a predicting machine. No other animal on Earth thinks about tomorrow. It’s when the brain can’t predict that it experiences a state of anxiety.
Anxiety is worse than fear. The difference between anxiety and fear is the difference between walking through a dark jungle at sunset and spotting a tiger and walking through the jungle and not spotting any threat. If you do spot a tiger, you immediately experience fear, but if don’t spot a threat, knowing that a life-threatening threat may be out there, just waiting to attack, creates anxiety.
Not knowing is worse than knowing. Anxiety is worse than fear, because with fear you know what you’re dealing with and can at least formulate a plan to either escape or combat the threat. Experiencing anxiety is cocking the trigger for disorganized, unfocused panic when you do encounter the threat.
It’s for this reason that we form groups such as family groups, school groups, neighborhood groups, religious groups, and national groups. Being a member of a group reduces fear and anxiety, because it allows us to predict each other’s behavior, and know that we’re all protecting each other from threats emanating from outside the group.
Combating cultural, religious, and racial hatred means convincing those vilifying and threatening the group that we’re all in the same larger group. We’re all freedom-loving citizens of the same country, protectors of a free society, tolerant of others, or whatever label you can think of to convince those who threaten the group that we’re all in the same larger group.
The trick for members of a minority, then, is to be different enough to reassure fellow members of the group that we’re all in the same group, but not so different that we’re excluded from the larger group of freedom-loving Americans or whatever country you’re from.
For this reason, we, as Americans, need to support and emphasize the idea that American is not a melting pot but a stew, and having so many visibly different ingredients is what makes America so delicious and so successful.