Embracing difference without abandoning complexity:
There is a question I have found myself returning to recently: What are we becoming accustomed to hearing? Not simply which political position we support, what we think about migration levels, border control, public services or how effectively governments are responding to the pressures facing communities. Something more fundamental. What are we becoming accustomed to hearing one human being say about another human being?
I found myself thinking about this again after reading recent reporting from an anti-migrant protest in Gosport. Among those gathered were children reportedly heard chanting the words “let them drown” through a megaphone. Read The Guardian’s report from Gosport Those three words stayed with me. Not because they tell us everything about the children who said them. They do not. Not because they tell us everything about everyone who attended that protest. They do not. And not because concerns about migration, borders or pressures on local communities should somehow be dismissed as illegitimate simply because some people express those concerns in disturbing ways. The Guardian
But because those words take us somewhere psychologically different.
There is a difference between saying, “I believe fewer people should be crossing the Channel” and saying, “let them drown.” One is a position about policy. The other asks us to consider what may be happening to our relationship with the humanity of the people being discussed. It leaves me asking: When does disagreement with what people are doing begin to erode our concern for what happens to them as human beings? And perhaps there is another question before even that one: What has to happen in an environment for those words to become sayable?
Perhaps normalisation begins before we notice it
We often talk about the normalisation of harmful language. But perhaps normalisation does not begin when everybody agrees with something. Perhaps it begins earlier.
Perhaps it begins when we stop being surprised to hear it.
A phrase that once shocked becomes familiar. Something that once would have produced discomfort begins to pass almost unnoticed. A way of describing another group becomes part of everyday vocabulary. We may not repeat it ourselves, but neither do we respond to it in the way we once might have done. Gradually, the psychological boundaries of the environment move.
This is one reason I am becoming increasingly interested in environments within the Six Stages Framework. When children use extreme language, I do not think the most useful question is simply, “What is wrong with those children?” I find myself looking around them instead. What have they heard? What have they watched? What have adults around them said or left unchallenged? What have their digital environments repeatedly shown them? What receives laughter, approval or applause? What has become ordinary? What have they begun to learn about whose suffering deserves concern?
None of those questions tells us what happened in the mind of any individual child. But they move the enquiry away from locating the problem only inside a person and towards examining the environment within which particular responses become easier to think, say or express.
Difference is not necessarily the danger
This is also where I think conversations about inclusion can sometimes go wrong. Inclusion does not require agreement. People can hold very different positions on migration. They can disagree about public spending, housing, borders, education, policing or almost any other social issue. They can disagree strongly. Difference itself is not necessarily the danger.
Two people can hold opposing political views while continuing to recognise one another’s basic dignity. Equally, two people who begin with the same concern can move in very different psychological directions depending upon the people around them, the explanations they encounter, the emotions that become activated, the narratives repeatedly reinforced and the behaviour their environment begins to permit.
So perhaps the more useful distinction is not simply between those who agree and those who disagree. It is between difference and direction of travel.
This also connects with something I explored in an earlier Weekly Reflection, What Lens Are You Looking Through?Two people can encounter the same event and interpret it through very different psychological lenses. The challenge is not simply to decide which person is right, but to remain curious about what has shaped what each person is able to see, overlook, fear or understand.
Through the SSF Lens, I am interested less in using a Stage to label somebody and more in noticing movement. When does concern begin to harden into suspicion? When does suspicion begin looking for somebody to blame? When does blame become hostility? When does hostility begin creating permission? And when does that permission start changing the environment for everybody else?
This connects with the distinction I have recently been exploring between Stages and States in What State Are You Occupying? A Stage tells us something about where we tend to stand over time. A State tells us something about what is active in us now. Fear, anger, suspicion and resentment may become active in particular environments. But so can curiosity, empathy, compassion and courage. Environments can make some of those states easier to occupy than others, and what becomes particularly important is what happens when particular states are repeatedly reinforced.
Legitimate grievance does not guarantee legitimate behaviour
The recent school protests in France have made me think about this from another direction.
The movement emerged amid concerns about teacher and staff shortages, overcrowded classes, deteriorating school buildings, educational inequalities and pressures within the education system. As the protests spread, peaceful action existed alongside violence and clashes, while debate intensified about political influence, policing and the causes of escalation. Read Le Monde’s reporting on the French school protests Le Monde.fr
What interests me psychologically is not deciding which one of those competing explanations tells us the whole story. It is almost the opposite.
Human behaviour rarely arrives neatly packaged.
A person can have a legitimate grievance and behave harmfully. A movement can contain peaceful protesters, angry young people, opportunistic actors and people with very different motivations at the same time. Authorities can have responsibility for maintaining public safety while their own responses also influence whether tension escalates or reduces. An underlying grievance can deserve attention even when some of the behaviour arising around it does not deserve justification.
Yet we seem increasingly drawn towards explanations that require us to choose only one reality.
Perhaps that is another Cave within the SSF.
The Cave of False Choice
The Cave of False Choice tells us that we must choose between taking community concerns seriously or challenging prejudice; between believing in border control or caring about migrants; between recognising the grievances underneath a protest or condemning violence; between acknowledging structural inequality or holding individuals accountable for their behaviour.
But why must one truth erase another?
Psychological maturity may require something much harder: the capacity to hold competing realities without immediately collapsing one into the other.
We can listen seriously to anxieties about housing, public services or rapid social change without turning another group into the explanation for every difficulty. We can defend people’s right to peaceful protest without excusing harmful behaviour. We can condemn violence without deciding that the grievance underneath it therefore becomes illegitimate. We can debate difficult questions about migration without becoming indifferent to whether another human being lives or dies.
Perhaps that capacity to remain with complexity tells us something important about positive direction of travel within the SSF. The positive continuum does not lead us towards universal agreement. It leads us towards greater psychological capacity: the capacity to notice, tolerate discomfort, become curious rather than immediately defensive, seek context and understanding, examine our own reactions, think systemically and eventually take greater responsibility for the environments we are helping to create.
Who is shaping the environment?
There is another reason this feels particularly important now. Our environments are no longer only the families, workplaces, schools, communities or friendship groups immediately around us.
They are digital too.
In my recent reflection Algorithmic Acceleration: Who Is Setting the Speed of Your Thinking?, I explored what I have described as psychological digital literacy: the capacity to notice not only what we encounter online, but what repeated exposure may be doing to our attention, emotional responses, interpretations and certainty.
A feed is not simply a collection of information. Repeated exposure to particular narratives can make some interpretations increasingly familiar. Emotionally charged material can travel rapidly. Complex events can be compressed into fragments, images and slogans.
So perhaps we need to ask ourselves questions that go beyond “Is this true?” Why am I seeing this repeatedly? What did I see before it? What appeared next? What context is absent? Whose humanity disappeared as the story became simpler? And one of the questions I keep returning to: Am I becoming better informed — or simply more certain?
This matters because environments do not merely surround us.
We participate in creating them. We are part of one another’s environments.
The politician speaking into a microphone contributes to an environment. So does the journalist choosing a headline. The teacher responding to something said in a classroom. The psychologist sitting in a meeting. The parent talking around the dinner table. The colleague who challenges a comment. The friend who laughs at the joke. The person who says nothing. The person who shares something online.
Each contributes, in different ways and with different levels of power, to what another person encounters as their psychological and social environment.
Returning to the child with the megaphone
And so I return to the child.
Not because that child represents an entire community. Not because I know what that child believes. And certainly not because children should carry responsibility for social conditions created long before they arrived.
I return to that image because children listen, watch and learn.
They notice what receives laughter. What attracts applause. What adults repeat. What adults ignore. What people around them appear comfortable saying.
Children can sometimes reveal what an environment has made available to learn, repeat and regard as permissible.
And that brings me back to what it means to build inclusive futures.
Perhaps embracing difference does not mean constructing a world in which nobody disagrees. That world has never existed.
Perhaps it means creating environments in which we learn how to disagree without progressively removing one another’s humanity.
Environments where we can listen without automatically conceding, challenge without humiliating, remain curious without becoming passive, acknowledge grievance without allowing grievance to become permission for hatred, and hold people accountable without becoming incapable of understanding the conditions surrounding their behaviour.
Because what we permit today helps construct the psychological environment somebody else will enter tomorrow.
Perhaps the question is therefore not simply:
How do we teach people to embrace difference?
Maybe it is more demanding than that:
What are we teaching one another to do when we encounter difference?
And underneath that sit three questions I suspect I will keep returning to:
What are we permitting? What are we normalising? And who are we becoming together?
You can explore the wider SSF Visual Psychological Formulations collection, where VF015 accompanies this developing reflection, and browse further SSF Weekly Reflections examining human behaviour, social environments and direction of travel through the Six Stages Framework.
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