What reason could change people's mentality to treat each other as members of one kind?
Let me explain further the idea.
Nowadays (as thousands of years earlier) many people bound themselves in their mind to a particular nation, country, town, neighborhood etc. And very often these people think that they are good ones and other people, who live everywhere else are not so good, just because they are others. From my experience, I see that people who travel a lot are less exposed to comparative kind of thoughts. Of course, they compare people between each other, but they don't judge them so harshly as others do.
So, people always divide other people for allies and enemies by some factors: nationality, religion, wealth and so on.
Now imagine the world where all people treat each other as equals. And I mean not only their doings but thoughts also. Not "This guy is different and I don't like him, but I should act like I do, because of tolerance/politeness/some other rules". But "Hmm this guy is like me, he is human" in spite of this guy lives in another country and has different skin color and is totally another in our current understanding of this subject.
Some more analogy. Imagine kids who laugh at other kid who is taller than they are or smaller, or has big ears. But as these children grow this reasons become silly to laugh at, and in the age of 20 or 30, you don't care how tall or small the person is. And if this is one step to the final state of mind, imagine this state, when there are no reasons to treat one kind of people in a different way from another kind. The state, when we outgrew all this stuff, as those kids did.
And the question is What should happen to change human's way of thinking?
I have some ideas about that.
1. Face another intellectual kind. Maybe this kind has to be aggressive, to band people together against the general enemy.
2. As interracial children will be born and general intelligence and wealth level will increase, the need to separate people for allies and enemies will become redundant (but this idea is very optimistic).
3. It is impossible and contradicts to people's nature and primal instincts of group animals (where we have this feature from) to protect our group(Ño-cavemen, co-villagers, country) from others.
Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker. I hope that my idea is clear.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/62016. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
One thing I can see working is a forced marbling of society.
You see it all the time with immigrants; they move to a new country, find people with a shared background, move into the same communities, and you end up with places like Little Italy, China Town, etc.
Basically small towns inside of a large city.
I was talking to a Canadian a couple weeks ago about how Canada is accepting a lot of refugees from the middle east, but instead of doing things to try to get them integrated into Canadian culture, they are all moving to Toronto and clumping up in neighborhoods so they can pretend they are back home, not contributing.
So a potential solution would be to have an event that breaks these clumps up and forces disparate groups together. Something like the mandatory relocation to Happy Humanstown in the movie Home would be one very drastic way to do it.
It could also be a government mandated thing, where for the good of society peoples rights to live where they want are suspended and the government forces them to live among people with different cultural backgrounds.
People would hate it at first, and you'd get a lot of conflict in the beginning, but eventually people would see that even though these people look different or have different beliefs, they are basically the same underneath.
One thing is that you'd want to keep the neighborhoods somewhat small, as humans generally can only really have so many social relationships, and if the groups get too large then you'll start to get clumping again.
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