I was just reading, in a biography of Dwight Eisenhower, about his attitude toward Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev, who, in his political dealings was crude, brash, suspicious and untrusting. President Eisenhower was campaigning for openness, including sharing and showing of each country’s armaments, and a plan for gradual mutual disarmament. His wisdom and presence of mind was such that he did not see “the Russians” as “the enemy”, possessing the penetrating insight that war itself was the enemy, and he sought to bring about that same understanding in his Soviet counterpart, conscious of the fact that with the advent of nuclear weaponry, any full scale attack by either power would result in devastating tragedy for all involved. Eisenhower was aware enough of, not only of the Soviet attitude to strike first and incapacitate this country so as to eliminate the feared threat, but also of how his own Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in particular, General Curtis Lemay, paralleled that idea and mentality; they were spoiling for war.
Eisenhower, spiritually and intellectually, was bigger than the dangerous game that was being played, enough so that he saw through the appearance of the Soviet Union as being the source of threat, he saw that the game itself, of opposition in influence and dominance itself was the real threat.
People caught up in having and playing a role in games of opposition will always envision “the other side” as the source of the threat and the instigator, so entirely distancing and disconnecting from “the opposition” as to, in their envisioning, grant no recognition of the other’s basic consciousness as a being like themselves. One wonders what it will take to bring about a change, to consciousness of others.
I see such things played out over the internet every day, in fact tons of groups, with the groupings, and group names in fact, based on a common interest in opposing another group. To me, this is a great paradox, people engaged in, and perhaps, obsessed with, “distancing themselves from, and opposing” other people, when, in the bigger picture, they are simply reinforcing the bubble encapsulating them in this game, along with “the other side” in the game they are both playing- together.