Looking for new mindsets ... and heart-sets

It feels strange coming back onto Thought Leader and reading some of these fascinating blogs after an absence of almost a year. Still picking on the poor politicians I see, and still stressing the superficial differences as if our lives depended on it.

December 16^th is a South African public holiday. We celebrate Reconciliation Day. This is a good thing, right? I for one think that we need this, especially to reconcile with ourselves. We are so disconnected and obsessed with differentiating and separating it is not funny. No, I mean seriously.

Why is it that we always see things in shades of black and white, and some brown or yellow when it suits us? We don’t seem to be learning anything from history, and recently from the American election of Barrack Obama.

This is not another lecture about the need to all hug each other and pretend we get along. Well-respected gurus on relationships have preached about the merits of seeing beyond the artificial racial and ethnic differences. Yes, this message of connectedness goes beyond what has been taught to the world by Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jnr, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and others.

This is serious stuff. Now let me share with you what one of the world-renowned scientists of the last century, Albert Einstein, once said about this connectedness stuff: “A human being is a part of the whole [which we call the ‘Universe’], a part limited in time and space. He/she experiences him/herself, his/her thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his/her consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security”. Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German Nobel Prize winning scientist and philosopher.

Now, that’s some seriously profound stuff, not least from a German scientist who lived before Hitler’s days. And to think that he lived through the holocaust, and died ten years after the end of the Second World War …

Some skeptics tend to believe that we don’t need this mushy soft stuff. They say that it is okay that we have been taught to believe that we are all different. And they argue that this thing that we are all really Africans is just a way to numb the guilt of those that are busy stealing Africa’s mineral and other natural resources wealth.

It serves us well to maintain any status quo, especially when we are on the benefiting side of that status quo. I’m not talking here about our Chinese relatives recently becoming black, or our coloured cousins during those olden days trying hard to look, sound and behave white. I’m referring to situations where we hang on to perceptions that serve us, and we also emphasise differences when that serves us.

From quota systems in sports teams, through employee selection in workplaces, all the way through to BEE tenders, people tend to take advantage of their allocated identities to serve their selfish interests.

So the wise ones say we are all connected. Now, let us put this into a little more perspective. According to Einstein’s theory above, Verwoerd was your uncle, so was Botha and Tshaka, and Lenin. Come to think of it, you already refer to someone close by as Uncle Bob. Freaky, ha? Let us bring it closer to home. According to Albert Einstein, Julius Malema is your brother. What does that sound like to you? Come-on now, he is not such a bad-looking guy. What do you mean looks don’t count? Okay, looks aside, Sandile Memela is already calling for unity talks between the ANC Youth League leadership and its Cope counterparts. A common ground of sorts can be reached, and some leadership learning can commence.

What does it feel like to know that we all have tape recordings playing inside our heads? More interestingly, have you ever stopped to think about who gave you the eyes you see the world with? Was it the parents, siblings, relatives, the school, or was it the sports club, the street gang, the first boss, or some other role model. Ja, I know, everything is relative, and it is all about individual constructions of one’s reality and perceptions.

We all try to influence others, sell each other some idea or way of looking at stuff, even when looking at the exact same thing. Ever caught yourself asking someone: “did you see that?”, when you know very well that they did? We week affirmation, confirmation, belonging, identity and more belonging; why? Bloody gangsters all! Is Thought Leader a gang of sorts? If so, even remotely so, what is it that we are peddling here? It’s the same organising principle, right?

So how do we make sense of these exciting times we live in? Who are we as a people exactly? Someone once told me that we need to find a national identity fast. Many nations have very strong national symbols shared across and beyond superficial differences. For example, Brazilians have two very strongly shared national pastimes: soccer and Catholicism. Maybe describing these two as pastimes is not exactly right, they are both, Ja, you guessed it, more than religions. As South Africans, we have our symbols too, such as … ah, the euphoria after the winning the two rugby World Cups, the African Cup of Nations, and we have our unique heritage and history, and now the stolen braai day.

We also have the strongest sense of differences among ethnic groups. The different tribes, from the Afrikaners, Xhosa, Zulus, English, Sothos and all others, have something in common. Yet the first thing we do often when we meet someone is try to categorise him or her. We believe in boxes. We listen out for accents and then try to slot each other in the constructed boxes and then we think we know each other better. Crap.

Each one of these has a sense of superiority over another. There is this imagined armour of invincibility, of “knowing” the thoughts of others, of everyone in fact, and of “knowing” what others’ station and lot in life is.

It is an inherited illusion that is nurtured and fed and lived by, and it says that we must assert and impose ourselves on others in order for us to feel worthy … to feel safe in our idea of where everyone else is. It is a farce.

When I pass judgment on you about what you do, based on my own fear, and not any tangible data, then I doom myself to not knowing you for what or who you are, but for what I make you out to be.

Few of us ask the necessary question: what is the view from the other side, from where you are standing? Or, what does it feel like standing in your shoes? We have a duty to our children and to each other, to create space to connect and see beyond our superficial especially during days like these where we are encouraged to reach out to each other in reconciliation.

Most of our mindsets have already set, much like wet concrete after a few days. Our hope is in developing new heart-sets.