> [!summary] Progressive Summary > Such a validation that my practice of Nonviolent Communication is critical in this age of division. She says the same things without the terminology, and makes it more accessible to a different audience. She also speaks eloquently of the need to tell stories, and to cultivate knowledge in books. Her psychological insights remind me of Eric Hoffer. # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Stories > To be deprived of a voice means to be deprived of agency over our own lives. It also means to slowly but systematically become alienated from our own journeys, struggles and inner transformations, and begin to view even our most subjective experiences as though through someone else’s eyes, an external gaze. > We are made of stories – those that have happened, those that are still happening at this moment in time and those that are shaped purely in our imagination through words, images, dreams and an endless sense of wonder about the world around us and how it works. Unvarnished truths, innermost reflections, fragments of memory, wounds unhealed. Not to be able to tell your story, to be silenced and shut out, therefore, is to be dehumanised. It strikes at your very existence; it makes you question your sanity, the validity of your version of events. It creates a profound, and existential anxiety in us. > Still today, as a novelist, I am not only drawn to stories but also to silences. My first instinct as a storyteller is to dig into ‘the periphery’ rather than ‘the centre’ and focus my attention on the marginalised, underserved, disenfranchised and censored voices. Taboos too, including political, cultural, gender taboos. There is a part of me that wants to understand, at any moment in time, where in a society the silent letters are hidden. ### Listening > If wanting to be heard is one side of the coin, the other side is being willing to listen. The two are inextricably connected. When convinced that no one – especially those in places of power and privilege – is really paying attention to our protests and demands we will be less inclined to listen to others, particularly to people whose views differ from ours. Communication across the cultural and ideological spectrum will falter and, eventually, crumble. And when communication is broken, coexistence, inclusion and social harmony will also be damaged. In other words, if perpetuated and made routine, the feeling of being systematically unheard will slowly, gradually, seal our ears, and then seal our hearts. In retracting our willingness to listen to others, we ensure that they, too, feel unheard. And the cycle continues, worsening every time it revolves. > The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning. Because the truth is we don’t learn much from sameness and monotony. We usually learn from differences. > > In life most of what we have come to understand throughout the years we have acquired by interacting with dissimilar, and often challenging views, and by encountering information, criticism and knowledge hitherto unfamiliar to us, and then processing these internally by growing insight from seeds of discussions, readings and observations. >  > The thing about groupthink or social media bubbles is that they aggressively feed and amplify repetition. And repetition, however familiar and comforting, will never challenge us mentally, emotionally or behaviourally. Echoes simply reiterate what has already been said at some point in time, long gone. Like dead stars, they might seem to have a presence from a distance, but in truth, they are completely devoid of life and light. Echo chambers, therefore, severely limit the breadth and depth of the views we subject ourselves to, they ration knowledge. And, at the same time, they limit wisdom: wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy and understanding, allows us to reach beyond the lonely confines of our own minds and engage with the rest of humanity, to listen to them and learn from them. To leave one echo chamber for another is no solution either. We must strive to become intellectual nomads, keep moving, keep learning, resist confining ourselves in any cultural or mental ghetto, and spend more time not in select centres but at the margins, which is where real change always comes from.    > If all my friends and acquaintances think like me, vote like me, speak like me, if I only read the kind of books, newspapers and magazines that are in line with what I have read before, if I only follow online sites that sympathise with my preconceived verdicts, if I only watch videos or programmes that essentially validate my worldview, and if nearly all of my information comes from the same limited sources, day in, day out, it means that, deep within, I want to be surrounded with my mirror image 24/7. That is not only a suffocatingly claustrophobic setting, it is also a profoundly narcissistic existence. >   > But here’s the thing: sometimes narcissism is not merely an individual trait, it is a collective one. The shared illusion that we are the centre of the world. This notion was examined in detail by various thinkers in the last century, especially Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm. What these writers had in common was that they had witnessed, first hand, the rise of nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia and totalitarianism. Their warnings are apposite today. Central to group narcissism is an inflated belief in the clearcut distinctiveness and indisputable greatness of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’. One unsurprising consequence of this conviction is an enduring resentment towards others. If I am convinced that my tribe is far better and worth more, I will first doubt, and then denigrate anyone who refuses to recognise our superiority. >  > In a world that is profoundly complex and challenging, group narcissism has become a compensation for our personal frustrations, flaws and failures. But above all, it provides a counterbalance to two troubling feelings: disillusionment and bewilderment. ### Disillusionment and Bewilderment > Elderly Turkish and Kurdish women in Anatolia say ‘beware of thresholds’. Because they see such a point of transition as the domain of the djinn, creatures made of smokeless fire, famous for their fickleness. I am interested in oral traditions and I find it intriguing that in that unwritten culture a threshold is regarded as the domain of elusiveness, obscurity, precariousness. To employ the same metaphor, it is frightening to suddenly find ourselves in a zone of unpredictability. But if there is one thing that is even more frightening, it is to find ourselves here all alone. To be part of a collective feels more anchored, less anxiety-inducing. This is what Erich Fromm highlighted when he explained how an individual, after being afflicted with insecurity and vulnerability, aspires to gain a new sense of safety and self-worth by equating himself/herself with a large body of people. 'He is nothing – but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.’ > > According to Fromm, collective narcissism at times cloaked itself in nationalism. At other times, it camouflaged as religious narcissism, when believers doggedly held the conviction that members of their faith were dearer to God and far more deserving of paradise and more virtuous than others simply by being born into it. Depending on place and time, narcissism could acquire other forms of collective identification. In each case, ‘the individual satisfies his own narcissism by belonging to and identifying himself with the group. Not he the nobody is great, but he the member of the most wonderful group on earth.’ > Today, social media and digital communication have both accelerated and heightened group narcissism. Stuck in our whispering galleries we have become bad listeners and even worse learners. Whether in public or digital spaces nuanced debates are not welcome any more. Instead there are clashing certainties. Media panels often exacerbate dualities. On our television screens or YouTube channels almost every day we watch people from opposite camps, talking and shouting over each other. They are not there to listen and they are not there to learn. They are there to make a point, and to harangue and fulminate. Likewise, far too often, we viewers are not tuning in with the aim of discovering anything new either – ordinarily we want to see ‘our guy’ beat ‘their guy’. > > Meanwhile, the algorithms pick our preferences so that the next day, and the day after, they can feed us more of the same, albeit at the same time magnifying and intensifying the messages little by little. If, for instance, I have anti-Semitic or Islamophobic or misogynist or homophobic tendencies to begin with, the algorithms keep showing me more content in that vein, steadily convincing me that my suspicions are vindicated, that Jews or Muslims or women or homosexuals are the source of all ills. The more I follow such material the more knowledgeable and up-to-date I assume myself to be. I continue gathering ‘evidence’, scoring points in polemical debates with make-believe enemies inside my head. Have you noticed that people who are obsessed with conspiracy theories and take a certain satisfaction in diatribes and monologues, tend to know a remarkable amount about the subject that possesses them, most of it either pure misinformation or information filtered to suit their initial prejudices? > >Feeling systematically unheard, unsupported and unappreciated can make me painfully resentful, and abiding resentment will probably turn me into a reluctant listener. If and when I am a reluctant listener, I will also become a poor learner. I will interact less and less with theories and opinions that do not agree with mine. And there will come a point when I will simply stop talking to people who are different from me. Why should I even trust them? > > When coexistence is undermined in this way societies become extremely polarised and bitterly politicised, ever wary of the ‘other side and their intentions'. Democracy, which is essentially about compromise and negotiation, conflict resolution and pluralism, a system of checks and balances, suffers from this constant tension and escalating antagonism. > > In badly fractured societies that have lost their appreciation of diversity and their regard for pluralism, opponents will be seen as enemies, politics will become replete with martial metaphors and anyone who thinks and speaks differently will be labelled as a ‘traitor’. > > It is not a coincidence that all across the world authoritarian demagogues go to great lengths to incite and inflame polarisation. They know they will benefit from it. They love it when there is more division, friction, mutual exclusion. They love it when the river between ‘us’ and ‘them’ overflows its banks and drives us apart, so that we can no longer see or hear each other above the roaring torrent. The swirling waters that submerge our individual voices and personal stories is music to the ears of political incendiaries. The less that people from different backgrounds can communicate and empathise with each other, the smaller our appreciation of our common humanity, the less egalitarian and inclusive our shared spaces, the more satisfied the demagogue. ### Crisis of Meaning > What we are going through is also a crisis of meanings. > > For far too long, in our social and political dealings, we have consulted the same old leather-bound dictionary that was for the most part compiled in the aftermath of the Cold War. So accustomed have we become to using this weighty tome as our reference that we no longer feel the need to look up rudimentary words, taking it for granted that we already know well what they mean. But now a strong wind is blowing in, turning the pages too fast. There is a burning candle next to the dictionary and before we realise it the wind tips it over. Our dictionary is in flames. We reach out to save what we can, but many pages of entries are badly scorched. We must replace them, and that leaves us to redefine some of our fundamental concepts. Paradoxically, the simplest will be the hardest. > We assumed we had the proper definitions of all these core concepts, mostly thanks to the generations that preceded us, who had done the hard work. We surmised that we would never have to deal with ‘the basics’ as we were far beyond that historical stage. But now, with a half-destroyed dictionary in our hands, we need to sit down and rethink the entries. ### Anger > How can we turn our individual and collective anger into a force for good? I find the question important. We must be very careful here: anger can also easily turn repetitive, intransigent, corrosive. Equally, it can be a paralytic emotion. It’s as if the intensity of it is enough to persuade the person feeling it that they’ve done enough – or else, it might keep you in a state of brooding and obsessing over the wrong without being able to move forward, to find a way to heal the wrong. Unless we manage to channel anger into a more productive, calmer but not necessarily less intense force, it runs the risk of becoming highly combustible and blindly destructive, burning through buildings and bridges and human connections, burning in a vicious cycle in which violence begets more violence. We cannot let that happen. > When the world is blatantly infuriating we can’t keep repressing our anger. At the same time, we need to go out and connect with our fellow human beings and stand by those who are hurting; we shouldn’t forget to look within, critically examine our own assumptions and hidden stereotypes, expand and soften our hearts; and as we do all that, we must go on and continue working just as others have before us. ### Apathy > APATHY – SEEMINGLY TRANQUIL yet probably the most pernicious emotion. Just as the colour white is a combination of all colours, apathy is a combination of many emotions: anxiety, disillusionment, bewilderment, fatigue, resentment … mix them fast, mix them hard and you end up with pervasive paralysis, lack of feeling, numbness. > Acts of barbarity can happen fast and on a large scale not when more people turn immoral or evil, not necessarily, but when enough people become numb. When we are indifferent, disconnected, atomised. Too busy with our own lives to care about others. Uninterested in and unmoved by someone else’s pain. That is the most dangerous emotion – the lack of emotion. > > One of the greatest paradoxes of our times is that hardliners are more passionate, engaged and involved than many moderates. When we do not engage in civic discourse and public space, we become increasingly isolated and disconnected, thereby breeding apathy. > When we become more engaged, more informed about all that is happening, however, we feel more disappointed, anxious, angry, surrounded with negative feelings in the face of current news and fast-moving events. It is too much to deal with. We crave simplicity; we retreat into ourselves, into the familiar. This is a dangerous moment because it is when the populist demagogue enters into the picture, promising to simplify things for us. > > Here is one of our main challenges: How do we simultaneously remain engaged and manage to remain sane? ### Information, Knowledge, Wisdom > We live in an age in which there is too much information, less knowledge and even less wisdom. That ratio needs to be reversed. We definitely need less information, more knowledge, and much more wisdom. > It is a problem, the endless barrage of information – let alone, misinformation. We cannot process this much, and the truth is, we don’t. In reality, we only skim through the news, scroll up and down our screens, without contemplating, and more importantly, without feeling. After a while, numbers don’t mean much any more, whether it is 5,000 refugees who have died or 10,000, the difference doesn’t and won’t register unless we know the personal stories behind the statistics. Information flows amid our fingers like dry sand. It also gives us the illusion that we know the subject (and if we don’t, we just ‘google’ it) when, in truth, we know so little. Paradoxically, too much information is an obstacle in front of true knowledge. > > Knowledge requires reading. Books. Indepth analyses. Investigative journalism. Then there is wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy. For that we need stories and storytelling. > No doubt we are living in challenging times and there is a lot we need to deal with – individually and collectively. Yet just imagine, for a moment: a world without books, without storytelling, a world without empathy, would be a much more divided and a lonelier place to exist. > Too much optimism generated complacency and ignorance and an illusion of perpetual progress. It also led to the assumption that human rights, women’s rights, minority rights and freedom of speech were values that other people in other lands had to worry about and fight for, but not the citizens of the democratic Western world, since they were beyond such passé concerns. These were stable and solid democracies, after all. The battles had been won. > > In the post-pandemic world we understand better that no country is beyond such concerns. Now we are universally aware that history can go backwards, that progress is neither guaranteed nor steady. Democracy is hard to achieve, yet easy to lose; it is an interconnected system of checks and balances, conflicts, compromises and dialogues. It withers under widespread numbness, as philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt presciently warned when she wrote about the dangers of a ‘highly atomised society’. We all need to be more engaged, more involved citizens wherever we might happen to be in the world. > > A dose of pessimism is actually not necessarily a bad thing in itself. It makes the mind more alert, more cognisant of what is happening here, there and everywhere. But too much pessimism weighs the heart down, drains us of energy and motivation. It is emotionally and physically debilitating. Perhaps in an era when everything is in constant flux, in order to be more sane, we need a blend of conscious optimism and creative pessimism. In the words of Gramsci, ‘the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will’. > It is mostly through stories that we learn to think, perceive, feel and remember the world in a more nuanced and reflective way. As we gain a better understanding of the struggles of people from different backgrounds, and start to imagine lives beyond the one we are living, we recognise the complexity and richness of identities and the damage we do to ourselves and to others when we seek to reduce them to a single defining characteristic. > > As a novelist, I believe in the transformative power of stories to bring people together, expand our cognitive horizons, and gently unlock our true potential for empathy and wisdom. In the swirl of news that surrounds us – the inequalities, the injustices, the seemingly unstoppable turning away from the path of co-existence and diversity and inclusion – it is easy to feel like the story we are living in is not the one we would have chosen. That the narrative is distorted by the events we are living through. That our version of truth and reality is trampled under the feet of others, who shout louder, who have more power. This increasing cacophony that crushes our voices can feel like a state of madness, a loss of sanity – a denial of our dignity and humanity. It is natural to seek out a collegial and congenial group who will reinforce our core values and primary goals, and bring us closer to the stories we want to hear and prioritise. That can be a good starting point but it cannot be the entire destination. Until we open our ears to the vast, the endless, the multiple belongings and multiple stories the world has for us, we will find only a false version of sanity, a hall of mirrors that reflects ourselves but never offers us a way out. > Do not be afraid of complexity. > > Be afraid of people who promise an easy shortcut to simplicity. > We have all the tools to build our societies anew, reform our ways of thinking, fix the inequalities and end the discriminations, and choose earnest wisdom over snippets of information, choose empathy over hatred, choose humanism over tribalism, yet we don’t have much time or room for error while we are losing our planet, our only home. # Quotes > Stories bring us together; untold stories keep us apart. > "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." – Maya Angelou > ‘the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will’ > – Antonio Gramsci # References