Empathy is the answer. What was the question?

2016 has been quite the rollercoaster if you’re active on social media. Though it’s been fairly established that people use Facebook and Twitter as an echo-chamber for their own pre-established set of beliefs, one always holds a glimmer of hope that you’ll be able to have that one person see the goodness in the UK remaining in the EU or voting for Hillary.

So history took care of that. For the past month I’ve been mostly shielding myself from mentions to the US election, Trump or Putin. I unfollowed most political pundits, took a break from Colbert and The Daily Show and came to terms with a new political establishment that is strongly against migration and globalization.

It’s a hard thing to realize you’re losing synch with the world. I belong to the first generation born into a Portuguese democracy and remember vividly entering the EU and the falling of the Berlin wall. I read both Perestroika and Glasnost in my teens and thought myself lucky to be stepping into adulthood as the world was finally moving forward as one.

There was nothing in the 90’s and 2000’s that shook my belief that progress moves perpetually forward. Even 9/11 and the rise of Islamic terrorism seemed like minor bumps, the last hurrah of atavistic minds that were unable to cope with the newfound freedoms of Muslim countries.

But this year has shown us something entirely different. It’s not a crazy few fighting progress and the rest of mankind, it is a majority of voters in the countries we look up to as the beacons of democracy, such as the US, UK, France or The Netherlands, taking up extreme political views, or at least condoning them, and bringing them into the mainstream.

You can think and speak all you want about migration without dehumanizing the immigrants themselves. You can criticize the EU’s border policies without normalizing full-blown racism in mainstream media, such as the Sun did in April last year on a piece where, among other hate-filled comments, it addressed refugees as “cockroaches”.

This brings me to empathy, or the lack thereof. For all the troubles we’ve faced, from wars to terrorist bombings to economic crises, I truly believed each of us would come out of it with greater empathy for other humans. That cheap travel and the internet would give us the ability our parents lacked of engaging and understanding people from other races and creeds. That if you spot a nervous darker-skinned passenger on the plane your first assumption is that he’s just as nervous of flying as you are, not that he’s readying to blow himself up.

I believe that most of the people that might read this or my Twitter feed will feel the same way. Those of us who work at or with multinationals, travel frequently and speak good enough English feel a sense of enlightment and understanding of our peers at other countries. We even feel superiorly prepared to connect across languages and cultures, whether it’s arguing Ronaldo is better than Messi with your driver in Angola or discussing with your Turkish professor the unreasonable pressure to publish put by universities on its faculty.

But we got trapped in our own echo chamber, even before the rise of social media. We were aiming at greater commonality with other countries and cultures while losing it to others closer to home. We replaced local economic elites with global cultural ones. Social media did not create anti-globalization, it just gave voice to the disenfranchised masses who had never felt part of a globalized world in the first place. They’re connected enough, through TV and social media, to see the world changing around them but not involved enough to feel nothing but fear from it.

So to put it in the most clichéd way as possible, we need to go back-to-basics and retake the pulse of our individual countries and communities. “Country first” is not just a worn-out slogan from an opportunist politician, it’s a genuine longing of a significant part of the population that should be heard and understood, and not immediately dismissed as ignorant or racist.

Each of us that believes global trade and freedom of movement to be some of mankind’s greatest achievements has the responsibility to hear those who don’t see the same way and compromise on policies that might work against our own views. Better that than leave the field open for self-serving populists that package a rightful fear of change with an irrational fear of “the other”. And we should all be painfully aware of the horrors that may come if we let that happen.