Learn To Live With It

All of us, sometime in our childhood have been asked to answer this question: “How do you make a line shorter without erasing it?” All of us were fascinated by the simple but clever answer, “By drawing a longer line next to it”, the first time we heard it. There always seemed to be more to this question/answer, beyond a mere childish indulgence.

In the US, the Chief of the country’s largest investigating agency was summarily sacked by the President only because he can do it. The lessons were in the President’s explanations. He could have been the ‘longer’ line by taking a different stance. But the outgoing Director today seems ‘taller’ because of his dignified silence and the glowing endorsement from the incoming Director. So, the President has become ‘shorter’, in trying to ‘erase’ the standing of the sacked official.

A Moral Science teacher in school told us that there are two ways for a person to feel good about himself or herself. One, you put down somebody, and revel in the feeling of superiority that this gives you (erasure). Two, you compare yourself today to whatever you were yesterday, and feel good about the progress you have made (you are ‘taller’ if you know why and how).

All of us have both these choices. Don’t judge their choices because their right is our wrong, and vice-versa.

At a 2010 course in Billund in Denmark, we were excitedly describing the birth of a new political party in India that was choosing to do everything differently. One of the course participants from Syria had a strange question: “But who are they against?” His contention was that you must be against somebody for the party to have an identity. One should marvel at his prescience when you see that the party today is exactly in that position – of opposing others rather than explaining their own reasons to exist.

Describing who you are not rather than who you are, denigrating those who are different from you in thoughts and practices and ‘putting down’ those who you claim you will never become, seem to be the most preferred ways to identify oneself. The CEO of the world’s largest database software company put down a well-known Web Services provider as the purveyor of a ‘partial’ solution, and the latter darkly hinted at ‘technology dinosaurs’ and their coming extinction. Here are two respectable, successful, global companies that have their own reasons to exist, and yet found it necessary to juxtaposition with imagined competition to best explain themselves.

Which is why we need to beware of start-ups who start their stories by saying they are like/unlike Amazon, Google or Uber. Making sense of your world by comparing to those of others seems a lazy way to get by. The “solitarist” theory says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group. Amartya Sen, in Identity and Violence, warns us of such forced identity creation:

“With suitable instigation, a fostered sense of identity with one group of people can be made into a powerful weapon to brutalize another…and in a conveniently bellicose form can also overpower any human sympathy or natural kindness that we may normally have.”

China believes OBOR (One Belt, One Road) is great for one-third of mankind, and anybody opposing it is “paranoid”. The “others” believe that any country that practices 15th Century “land-grabbing” methods cannot do anything beneficial to the larger world. Once again, we stand polarized.

We have made laws, created justice and propounded values – in an ascending hierarchy that will help make people ‘taller’. Yet political parties, national leaders, corporations in the same marketplaces, and nations prefer to stick to single, mono-chromatic identities as their definitions. Why must a sense of belonging happen only when the sense of “otherness” is high?

When asked to, do make the right choice that makes you taller. Learn to live with “otherness” because as Amartya Sen says,

“Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot”.

Ramesh is a Corporate Speaker for Leadership and Strategic Meets. Ramesh’s approach and style are largely to do with interpreting and elaborating the factors that affect organisations, trends in the industry that the companies need to watch out for and the methods that they can use to achieve their goals. Read his other posts here.