6 Degrees Berlin 2020 — Personal findings
A clear sky on a cold Tuesday became the perfect setting for Berlin’s second edition of 6 Degrees. The Institute of Canadian Citizenship brought together panelists from different backgrounds, stories, and perspectives. The main discussions happened right in the middle of the beautiful Pierre Boulez Saal of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, setting which allowed everyone in the room to engage in the lively conversation, thanks to its unusual 360° setting.
The questions were clear from the start: What does it mean to be a member of a community? How do we define identity? What’s the narrative that promotes xenophobia and the resurgence of the far-right? What can we learn from the past on how to bring people together? What type of changes would institutions need to go through to create inclusive societies? What specific actions do we need to take? All of these topics, and more, were debated.
Instead of telling you all of the details of what was discussed there — those can easily be found online -, I will share my personal findings, the most important messages, and the essence of the discourse that could help us move forward towards an inclusive society.
We live in a world where people from different backgrounds are living together. Diversity is here, and inclusion is the option to choose when we want to make every individual reach their full potential for them to be an active and productive member of any community. Multiculturalism benefits us all. Even though some people could feel tense to live next to someone who might seem different, we need to embrace the idea of tension as a great positive force from which dialogue will take us to a mutual agreement — not highlighting our differences, but finding a common identity.
The narrative that has been making a lot of noise lately is based on the exploitation of fear. Fear of what’s different, fear of evolving, fear of listening to facts that question the discourse each person wants to believe in, fear of the unknown. This fear is based on disinformation, dividing society into subgroups that are put against each other. Public discourse based on fake news has been gaining power on social media, and Facebook’s and Youtube’s algorithm is designed to show users similar content to the one they usually react to. This creates an echo chamber, where only similar ideas are shown to people with the purpose of creating more engagement, where people are in contact with an ideology that only reinforces what they think, even if this type of information is not true. Disinformation and distrust in institutions are key to dismantle an established democracy. The narratives of conflict create and maintain fear. Wrong facts are poison and disinformation seems to be winning.
How can we start a dialogue with people who don’t believe in true facts (flat-earthers, people denying climate change, people denying the holocaust, for example)? Even though it’s important to be vocal, confront, and shut down these types of ideas, it’s not the only way. If we want to start a real dialogue with someone who doesn’t seem to share our point of view, we need to start building an environment of respect and trust from a common ground. Even if we need to go through the emotional challenge of starting from “we’re both human beings,” it’s a great place to start. We can build the way up to group belonging and open a real and enriching conversation.
Our living patterns are changing. Difficulty comes with the natural human tendency of rejecting change. We’d rather stay with what we know, what’s familiar to us. However, given the fact that this world is constantly and quickly changing, staying the same becomes unsustainable. Let’s move away from the 19th century thought of ‘this is what it means to be (place any nationality you want)’ so that we can start seeing things from a new, more inclusive point of view. We need to go through these tough times, be brave, correct the facts, shut down racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and any other separative discourse that turns other human beings into the enemy. We’re not enemies, we’re neighbors.
The issue of inclusion is a collective fight. In Germany, the concept of integration is in people’s minds, but it’s not a real part of citizens’ lives, especially when a person doesn’t have German citizenship. Institutions haven’t been able to renew fast enough to cover all of the needs of inclusion, and this is demonstrated by systemic discrimination taking place in the different levels of society (for example, people can easily be rejected based just on their name when applying for jobs or housing). Even though the general landscape has been improving in the past years, there’s still a long way to go.
If the narrative of conflict and separation is rising rapidly — to the point where far-right political parties are taking electoral power — we need to establish a new one where we’re all allies, facing the problems that we need to solve together as a community, instead of becoming a fragmented force that could easily break. We have to become the narrators of the story we want to tell. Inclusion is the key message to have when creating new types of communities where we can all support each other, instead of using our differences as arguments to separate us. If we want to move forward together, our different backgrounds will be the basis of the abundance of solutions from which we’ll be able to solve our problems. It is incredibly valuable to have different points of view. The main goal is to have dialogues that will take us to an agreement, always having in mind these three ideas that Max FineDay mentioned: peace, prosperity, and mutual benefit.
