On Presence, Dehumanization, and Remaining Human in Polarized Times
by Chuck Craytor
What happens when fear, rage, humiliation, loneliness, and the longing to belong go unattended?
Last fall, a client shared a reflection with me following an act of political violence that had deeply disturbed him. For reasons of confidentiality, I cannot share his words directly. But the spirit of his reflection stayed with me and opened an inquiry I continue to live with myself.
There are moments when the cultural atmosphere becomes so charged that it feels difficult to remain human inside it.
Not correct.
Not victorious.
Not morally certain.
Simply human.
Over the past few years, I have noticed how easily outrage becomes intoxicating. How quickly grief becomes ideology. How rapidly another person can cease being a person and become instead a symbol, an enemy, a caricature onto which we project our fear and frustration.
What stayed with me was not the politics themselves, but the deeper question underneath:
What happens to the human heart when contempt becomes normalized?
What pain, fragmentation, or loss of relationship has occurred here?
How do we remain in relationship with our humanity when the culture increasingly rewards outrage, certainty, and dehumanization?
I notice how easily this happens in myself.
The tightening certainty.
The quickness to reduce another person to a position, a headline, or a side.
The subtle satisfaction of feeling morally superior.
Presence narrows.
Curiosity disappears.
Another human being becomes less real.
And once that happens, compassion becomes difficult.
In times like these, I find myself returning to words from the Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda. He wrote:
“As each group seeks its separate roots and origins, society fractures along a thousand fissure lines. When neighbors distance themselves from neighbors, continue your uncompromising quest for your truer roots in the deepest regions of your life. Seek out the primordial ‘roots’ of humankind. Then you will, without fail, discover the stately expanse of Jiyu[1] unfolding in the depths of your life.” (1993)
I do not believe we heal division by becoming more certain of one another’s inhumanity.
I think we begin by noticing how easily any of us can lose ourselves when fear, rage, humiliation, loneliness, and the longing to belong go unattended.
Perhaps the work begins here:
not in defeating one another,
but in learning how to remain present enough to recognize ourselves in one another again.
And by asking, again and again:
What helps us return?
Reference
Ikeda, D. (1993, March). The sun of Jiyu over a new land. Seikyo Times.
[1] No English translation exists. One aspect of Jiyu is the ability to transcend differences of all kinds.