One of the great challenges of our time is resisting the impulse to dehumanise those with whom we disagree. The words we use continue to reveal ancient anxieties. 

The Greek word bárbaros, from which “barbarian” derives, originally referred to those who spoke incomprehensible tongues, just as the biblical story of Babel speaks to the fragmentation of communication. 

Both narratives highlight our fundamental human struggle with difference - the fear of what we do not understand, or perceive as other.

This article first appeared in Mona Kher's newsletter The Inside Look, published on Substack. 

Dystopic

In a world overwhelmed with information, anxiety, and noise, we find ourselves living in a modern-day Babel with communication fragmented by ideology, media bubbles, and a relentless digital cacophony. 

We are witness to a landscape where genuine dialogue has become increasingly difficult through the sheer volume of information, misinformation, and competing narratives. 

We see those outside our political, national, or ideological tribes as barbarians, as threats to our way of life rather than fellow human beings navigating the same uncertain world.

The challenge before us, to avoid full immersion into the spiral of division and hatred, is to resist this conditioning and cultivate a politics of connection and awareness rather than separation. 

Some might say this is a naive and unrealistic proposition, given the reach of dystopic presentation of information through our social media feeds, government edicts and the rest. But what alternative do we face?

Ideology

The alternatives are grim. Can we rely on hope - the last gift trapped in Pandora’s box? The collective choices we make today have the power to change our future.

In a time where identity is weaponised to reinforce divisions, we must ask ourselves: What kind of world do we want to build? Are we willing to embrace the discomfort of listening to those we might otherwise dismiss?

As Confucius said: “The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute. The man who does not ask is a fool for life.”

Living in a time marked by profound divisions, by a compulsion to categorise and control, we judge others based on fragments of their identity, reducing them to ideas we either agree with or reject. 

We are encouraged to focus on what separates us - ideology, nationality, identity - as though our differences are insurmountable. A violence that is the inevitable conclusion of a politics built on dehumanisation. 

Borders

Yet the fiercest conflicts often arise not from irreconcilable differences, but from competing versions of similarity. Nations with shared histories become bitter rivals. Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan. 

Politics need not be only a struggle for power. It can be a collective act of creation.

These conflicts are not simply clashes of civilisations but struggles among peoples whose pasts are intertwined. Even within political movements, religious sects, and identity groups, the most toxic divisions often come from within.

It is not distance that divides us, but proximity - a closeness distorted by fear, ego, and the illusion of separation. War, at its core, is a failure of imagination. 

Russia and Ukraine will remain neighbours long after their leaders are gone. Israelis and Palestinians are bound to the same land, despite current circumstances. 

Without compromise, each generation inherits deeper hatred, which inevitably returns to wound the next. The pattern repeats at every scale - neighbours over fences, villages over boundaries, nations over borders.

Transform

It is time to compose a new world - one where we are no longer trapped by our divisions but freed by our shared experience. If we are to move beyond cycles of division and violence, we must shift our perspective. 

Instead of focusing on difference, can we accept our closeness, our similarity? Instead of succumbing to fear, can we embrace connection? 

Our shared humanity is not a weakness; it is our greatest strength. Only by recognising that we are more alike than we are different can we begin to heal the divisions that threaten us all.

The greatest political challenge is not merely to govern effectively but to reimagine what governance can be: a force for unity rather than fragmentation. 

This requires leaders with the courage to transform fear into dialogue, ego into service, and power into a tool for collective flourishing. That alternative is not to be found in mere pragmatism or cynicism but in a radical reimagining of what it means to be human in a political world. 

Free-market

Satish Kumar once said: “We have given the realists their chance of a free rein for decades. What have they delivered?” 

By resisting the temptation to dehumanise, by learning to see ourselves in the other, we can take the first step toward a future where politics is not a battlefield but a space for transformation.

Politics need not be only a struggle for power. It can be a collective act of creation, a way of composing the future, much like an artist composes a work of art. 

The poet Shelley wrote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” As with art, politics must find its rhythm - fluid and improvisational, rooted in tradition yet open to innovation.

We are living in a time of ecological fragility, systemic inequality, and monopoly power disguised as free-market capitalism. The antidote lies not in more division, but in a politics of interconnection — a politics that sees the whole.

Reconciliation

Such a politics demands a moral shift: not policy alone, but a transformation of our collective and individual mindset, in the stories we tell ourselves and the structures we build. 

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme was not just music but a declaration of resilience and love in the face of dehumanisation. Can this rhythm guide us toward a new world - one where respect, tolerance, and creativity replace fear and division, where we are inspired not by what is, but by what could be?

We have seen that when the enlightened and emboldened human spirit merges with political movements, it can transform the world. The abolitionist Quakers, refusing to dehumanise even their oppressors, acted from a place of radical compassion that sowed seeds for emancipation. 

Gandhi drew upon that same spirit, proving that nonviolent resistance could reshape the destiny of India. His example inspired Martin Luther King Jr., with a conviction that love and understanding could break the chains of hatred and retaliation in the civil rights movement. 

Nelson Mandela embodied this truth, and the world feels the absence of leaders like him today. His powerful words, guiding South Africa toward reconciliation: “As I walked out the door towards the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.” 

Freedom

Vaclav Havel harnessed the quiet power of truth and imagination to bring down the walls of totalitarianism. He claimed, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” His words remind us that courage and imagination matter even when outcomes are uncertain.

The world stands at a critical point where there has never been a more important time for us to change collectively. 

Tolstoy believed that individual transformation was the seed of broader social change, urging people to live by the teachings of love and humility rather than waiting for institutions to reform - profoundly influencing Gandhi, who saw in it not abstract philosophy but a practical framework for nonviolent resistance and ultimate freedom.

There are of course practical issues of governance. Henry Kissinger had a point when he argued that the fundamental issue in international and domestic affairs was not the control of wickedness, but the limitation of self-righteousness. 

He claimed the aim of policy was to reconcile what was just with what was possible. Those outside government - journalists, activists, freedom fighters - had the luxury of concerning themselves only with what was just. Policymakers had no such luxury.

Awakening

But transformation can only begin with awareness. We must train ourselves, individually and collectively, to observe without bias. This is not passive observation, nor is it indifferent. It is a conscious act of witnessing the full complexity of life - its contradictions, its pain, its beauty - without collapsing into judgment or despair.

When we cultivate this kind of awareness, a new political imagination becomes possible. In the political realm, this means staying engaged, not selectively paying attention to what confirms our biases but remaining open to complexity, contradiction, and the uncomfortable truth that change rarely follows a straight line.

Profound societal change has never occurred without first transforming the minds and hearts of individuals. Society is the reflection of our collective mindset, and until we change as individuals, society will remain bound by the same patterns of control, division, and fear.

True politics starts within. If we wish to change the world, we must begin by changing ourselves.

Yet we live in a world that does everything it can to prevent that awakening. We are kept in a permanent state of distraction, numbed by fear and noise. 

Protest

Social media and 24-hour news cycles drown us in information, flooding us with narratives designed to distract and pacify, keeping us reactive, perpetually moving, and emotionally manipulated. A numbed population is far easier to control than a thinking one.

What is the result? We have become collectively alienated from ourselves, from each other, and from the power of our own minds. We are taught to look outward for solutions - toward governments, leaders, and institutions - when the real revolution must begin within.

The most radical act in today’s world is to reclaim your own mind. To pause, to reflect, to think for yourself. Imagine if we all woke up and refused to participate in the endless game of fear. Imagine if we stopped reacting to every outrage fed to us by the media. Imagine if we refused to be categorised into political tribes that fight each other while ignoring the deeper forces at play.

As we have witnessed throughout history, power has relied on keeping people passive - whether it was the church exerting control over thought in the Middle Ages, or authoritarian regimes silencing dissent in the twentieth century. 

Alarmingly, in liberal, free, tolerant Britain today, we are witnessing this pattern unfold before our eyes, where our civil right to protest is under severe threat with new laws expanding the power to restrict our right to public assembly. Totalitarianism is coming to town.

Vacuum

Even our education systems prioritise obedience over critical thinking and creativity. We have dehumanised the learning experience to a machine rote of statistics engineered as tick boxes. We funnel our children into an endless loop where the exam result is the only horizon, devaluing the human spirit of discovery, creativity, and understanding.

The critical question - and perhaps the beginning of a solution - is how do we imagine a new future? The divisions and civil unrest we are currently witnessing in Britain stem not only from cultural clashes and binary ideas of immigration, but from a deeper sense of abandonment - from large parts of the country that feel left behind, forgotten in a world growing wealthy without them. 

It is not a racist response to the arrival of others, but an angry cry from communities that have been left behind. Decades of neglect and uneven investment in our infrastructure have left many in the UK without a sense of community, of purpose - uneducated, untrained, and without hope. 

Today, that scapegoat is the migrant. But the problem is not migration itself; it is the vacuum left by a politics that abandoned vast communities to despair.

This is not a call for, nor an acceptance of, uncontrolled migration. The real question is why didn’t the previous government act? Why, at the very moment they were campaigning on “Stop the boats,” did they permit such high levels of legal migration? 

Division

Was it simply ineptitude, or was it a cynical manoeuvre to divert the narrative from the real problems facing the country? Perhaps it was something more systemic: the larger the population, the stronger the headline GDP numbers, even as GDP per capita stagnated. Politicians knew our Western economies were running out of options, yet instead of confronting the truth, they chose to massage the figures and transfer as much wealth upward as possible before the party was over.

Today, we face crises not just here, but globally: ecological collapse, systemic inequality, and a global culture of division and fear. It is easy to feel overwhelmed, to believe that the problems are too vast for any one person to make a difference. But that belief is part of the illusion. Real change has always begun with individuals who dared to think differently, to live differently.

The alternative being presented is grim and divisive. It risks taking Britain down a road once trodden in Europe - a road where grassroots anger, scapegoating, and disillusionment fed the rise of National Socialism. 

The Nazis did not begin with tanks and camps. They began with small rallies, loud rhetoric, and a promise to restore pride to a humiliated people. They grew not because they were strong at the start, but because the majority dismissed them as too fringe to matter, until it was too late.

That is the danger now. We already see the shoots of this movement in Britain: large far-right marches on our streets, the scapegoating of migrants, and a politics of division that thrives on fear. If we remain complacent, if we dismiss this as “just protest,” we risk waking up in a country we no longer recognise.

Alignment

We have a choice. We can come together as a nation, stand up and be counted, and refuse to be silent. Or we can allow a minority to act in our name, dragging us backwards into a known abyss. The path forward must be collective. 

After the Second World War, the UK was as poor, if not poorer. What was different was the vision of its leaders to transform and rebuild the country. There was a collective spirit to transform from the debris of devastation and destruction. The alternative we are facing today is to sleepwalk into history repeating itself.

It is time to stop waiting for politicians or institutions to save us. We must find the courage and awareness to step outside the narratives that have been handed to us.

We get the society we deserve.

We get the politics we deserve.

We get the art we deserve.

This is not a prediction. It is a statement about alignment.

When we change ourselves, we change the world. The future is not written by governments or corporations. It is written by individuals who dare to imagine something new and have the courage to live it. When we transform, society can follow.

This Author

Mona Kher publishes The Inside Look on Substack.