Take "the Other" to lunch | Elizabeth Lesser

213,227 views ・ 2011-01-14

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
This room may appear to be holding 600 people,
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but there's actually so many more,
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because within each one of us, there is a multitude of personalities.
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I have two primary personalities
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that have been in conflict and conversation within me
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since I was a little girl.
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I call them "the mystic" and "the warrior."
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I was born into a family of politically active intellectual atheists.
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There was this equation in my family that went something like this:
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if you are intelligent,
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you therefore are not spiritual.
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I was the freak of the family.
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I was this weird little kid
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who wanted to have deep talks about the worlds that might exist
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beyond the ones we perceive with our senses.
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I wanted to know
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if what we human beings see and hear and think
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is a full and accurate picture of reality.
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So, looking for answers,
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I went to Catholic mass; I tagged along with my neighbors.
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I read Sartre and Socrates.
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And then a wonderful thing happened when I was in high school:
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gurus from the East started washing up on the shores of America.
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(Laughter)
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And I said to myself, "I wanna get me one of them."
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(Laughter)
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And ever since, I've been walking the mystic path,
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trying to peer beyond what Albert Einstein called
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the "optical delusion" of everyday consciousness.
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So what did he mean by this?
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I'll show you.
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Take a breath right now of this clear air in this room.
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Now, see this strange,
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underwater-coral-reef-looking thing?
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It's actually a person's trachea.
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And those colored globs are microbes
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that are actually swimming around in this room right now,
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all around us.
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If we're blind to this simple biology,
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imagine what we're missing at the smallest subatomic level right now
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and at the grandest cosmic levels.
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My years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions.
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They've made me a proud "I-don't-know-it-all."
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Now, when the mystic part of me jabbers on and on like this,
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the warrior rolls her eyes.
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She's concerned about what's happening in this world right now.
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She's worried.
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She says, "Excuse me, I'm pissed off,
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and I know a few things,
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and we better get busy about them right now."
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I've spent my life as a warrior,
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working for women's issues,
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working on political campaigns,
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being an activist for the environment.
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And it can be sort of crazymaking,
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housing both the mystic and the warrior in one body.
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I've always been attracted to those rare people
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who pull that off,
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who devote their lives to humanity
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with the grit of the warrior and the grace of the mystic --
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people like Martin Luther King, Jr.,
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who wrote, "I can never be what I ought to be
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until you are what you ought to be."
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"This," he wrote, "is the interrelated structure of reality."
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Then Mother Teresa, another mystic warrior, who said,
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"The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family
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too small."
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And Nelson Mandela, who lives by the African concept of "ubuntu,"
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which means "I need you in order to be me,
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and you need me in order to be you."
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Now, we all love to trot out these three mystic warriors
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as if they were born with a "saint" gene.
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But we all actually have the same capacity that they do.
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And we need to do their work now.
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I'm deeply disturbed
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by the ways in which all of our cultures are demonizing "the other,"
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by the voice we're giving to the most divisive among us.
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Listen to these titles of some of the best-selling books
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from both sides of the political divide
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here in the US:
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"Liberalism is a Mental Disorder,"
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"Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot,"
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"Pinheads and Patriots,"
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"Arguing with Idiots."
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They're supposedly tongue-in-cheek,
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but they're actually dangerous.
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Now here's a title that may sound familiar,
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but whose author may surprise you:
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"Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies,
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Stupidity and Cowardice."
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Who wrote that?
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That was Adolf Hitler's first title for "Mein Kampf" -- "My Struggle" --
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the book that launched the Nazi Party.
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The worst eras in human history,
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whether in Cambodia or Germany or Rwanda --
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they start like this, with negative otherizing.
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And then they morph into violent extremism.
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This is why I'm launching a new initiative.
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And it's to help all of us, myself included,
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to counteract the tendency to otherize.
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And I realize we're all busy people,
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so don't worry, you can do this on a lunch break.
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I'm calling my initiative "Take the Other to Lunch."
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If you are a Republican,
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you can take a Democrat to lunch.
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Or if you're a Democrat,
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think of it as taking a Republican to lunch.
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Now, if the idea of taking any of these people to lunch
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makes you lose your appetite,
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(Laughter)
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I suggest you start more local,
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because there is no shortage of the other right in your own neighborhood:
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maybe that person who worships at the mosque
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or the church or the synagogue down the street;
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or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict;
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or maybe your brother-in-law who doesn't believe in global warming --
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(Laughter)
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anyone whose lifestyle may frighten you
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or whose point of view makes smoke come out of your ears.
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A couple of weeks ago,
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I took a conservative Tea Party woman to lunch.
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Now, on paper, she passed my "smoking ears" test:
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(Laughter)
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she's an activist from the Right,
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and I'm an activist from the Left.
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We used some guidelines to keep our conversation elevated.
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And you can use them, too,
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because I know you're all going to take an other to lunch.
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So first of all, decide on a goal:
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to get to know one person from a group you may have negatively stereotyped.
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And then, before you get together,
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agree on some ground rules.
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My Tea Party lunch mate and I came up with these:
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"Don't persuade, defend or interrupt;
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be curious, be conversational, be real;
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and listen."
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From there, we dove in, and we used these questions:
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"Share some of your life experiences with me --
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what issues deeply concern you?
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And what have you always wanted to ask someone from the other side?"
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My lunch partner and I came away with some really important insights,
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and I'm going to share just one with you.
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I think it has relevance to any problem between people anywhere.
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I asked her why her side makes such outrageous allegations and lies
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about my side.
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"What?" she wanted to know.
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"Like, we're a bunch of elitist, morally corrupt terrorist-lovers."
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Well, she was shocked.
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She thought my side beat up on her side way more often --
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that we called them brainless, gun-toting racists.
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And we both marveled at the labels
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that fit none of the people we actually know.
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And since we had established some trust,
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we believed in each other's sincerity.
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We agreed we'd speak up in our own communities
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when we witnessed the kind of "otherizing" talk
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that can wound and fester into paranoia
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and then be used by those on the fringes
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to incite.
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By the end of our lunch, we acknowledged each other's openness.
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Neither of us had tried to change the other,
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but we also hadn't pretended
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that our differences were just going to melt away
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after a lunch.
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Instead, we had taken first steps together,
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past our knee-jerk reactions
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to the ubuntu place,
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which is the only place
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where solutions to our most intractable-seeming problems
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will be found.
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So who should you invite to lunch?
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Next time you catch yourself in the act of otherizing,
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that'll be your clue.
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And what might happen at your lunch?
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Will the heavens open
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and "We are the World" play over the restaurant sound system?
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Probably not.
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Because ubuntu work is slow, and it's difficult.
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It's two people dropping the pretense of being know-it-alls.
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It's two people, two warriors, dropping their weapons
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and reaching toward each other.
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Here's how the great Persian poet Rumi put it:
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"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
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there is a field.
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I'll meet you there."
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(Applause)
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