Part 1 of a 4-part series on seeing past the illusions that divide us — from the social, to the cosmic, to the technological.
I have never discussed this before at this length, but I feel inspired to elaborate on my personal belief system regarding “ingroups” and “outgroups” as they are known in sociology, but also as they manifest in our lives as we form and migrate our identities across various social groups.
I was recently inspired by the topic of relativity in a completely unrelated Neil deGrasse Tyson video. Having an ADHD mind that connects dots in seemingly unconventional — yet to me, perfectly related — ways, the end of my commentary on that thread naturally phased into the story and life witnessing below. In my newfound wisdom over four decades of operating in this way, I knew the audience on a pure science post might not survive a non-sequitur of this caliber, so I brought it here.
In that initial thought, I explored how the concept of relativity pertains to the soft sciences, as well as to our interpersonal and intrapersonal experiences. In a nutshell, my understanding of relative reality unbounds me from black-and-white thinking. I am always inspired to quote Star Wars here, where Anakin was counseled that “only Sith lords deal in absolutes.” It was this exact ability to perceive reality from multiple vantage points that allowed me to thrive among vastly different types of people in high school, just as I do now, even when they are at deep ideological odds with each other.
I refer to this way of navigating the social world as Shadow Walking — which may, for all I know, completely overlap or collide with some other established definition of the term. My version of shadow walking requires a high degree of compassionate empathy, but also an ability to shed resentment very quickly. To be honest, my early ability to do this wasn’t something I acquired through deep inner work; as many know, I was an emotionally immature mess back then. Rather, it was a function of a poor memory — an inability to retain the malice required to maintain the dense energy of resentment over long periods of time. While I carried some resentments, they were typically aimed at systemic structures rather than any specific outgroup. To best describe it, my resentment was directed at the act of “othering” itself, which I saw as a pervasive underbelly of unconscious principalities existing across society.
Even in high school, I constantly found myself swimming in the social waters of opposing groups. I remained my authentic self while showing up in specific, tailored ways to respect each group’s unique culture, though my core character was a constant to those who truly knew me. With some crowds, I expressed my fascination with psychology, sociology, science, and academia. With others, I leaned into being emotionally free, feeling the love of community, and rejecting normative society. Yet with all of them, I often lamented how much hostility existed in the world, and how rarely any of us were truly being seen.
Many people did not understand this seemingly mercurial nature. They frequently mistook my devil’s advocate stance for an attack on their entire worldview, assuming I was taking the “wrong” side. They often failed to see my core argument, which simply boiled down to reminding them that the “others” were human too. Despite their displays of animosity or varying degrees of ideological disapproval, they were often just scared, hurt, and operating from dysfunctional identities shaped by the social agents that surrounded them since birth. This might sound like an excuse, but my goal was never to excuse behavior; it was to promote connecting in a human way to the present moment, acting from that disposition rather than from a place of vitriol — which, to this day, I know diffuses conflict.
This misunderstanding of my character bothered me deeply, especially when the person listening to my devil’s advocacy held a worldview that was ethically correct, yet they were too mired in the experience to see the nuance and complexity of the issue. They would fall into a hardened, dehumanizing stance against the other side. Somehow, even at a young age, I inherently understood how personalities formed. I felt grounded in my sovereign power, knowing that being on the right side of history does not grant a pass to perpetuate harm or manufacture further community division due to a lack of clarity.
Conversely — though I lacked the courage to articulate it as clearly back then — I recognize the vital need for those who can shadow walk to protect the pervasively, repetitively harmed in society. Calling out injustice remains a front-line priority before we can advocate for those with malformed identities. That said, once immediate harm is mitigated, our society profoundly fails to address generationally malformed identities and behaviors. Instead, we resort to incarceration, outcasting, or systemic harm, which only radicalizes individuals further into their distorted realities.
Because I saw the humanity in everyone, I had a very hard time choosing sides, even when I knew exactly where the arc of justice fell. Later in life, I balanced this by establishing strong, empathetic, and well-communicated boundaries, which is crucial when living at the edges of competing ingroups and outgroups. Through the bias work I’ve done, I learned how vital it is to gently — and sometimes firmly — hold people accountable for their actions and the chain reactions they set off in our communities. Yet, even when generational harm is accounted for, who is to say which individual acted first in the immediacy of a local, present-moment conflict? That can only be assessed on a case-by-case basis, though we frequently assume who the bad actor is based purely on our alignment with the person displaying more well-adjusted thinking.
All of us should strive for a growth mindset, laboring continuously to eradicate our own malformed identities. Lately, I have been trying to hone an un-nerved penchant for positivity and to pro-actively both project and perceive a deliberately assumed goodwill of all, without inwardly letting my guard down. When you practice this way of being, you realize that assuming goodwill proactively changes how others interact with you because it builds immediate trust. The most amazing part is that it doesn’t require them to start with that same goodwill. Your proactive disposition in the face of conflict is what dismantles the very mechanics that the virus of harm relies on to propagate across community borders. This act of conscious, protected outward polyannaism becomes the cause that instigates the effect of goodwill among natural adversaries — if only enough people can adopt this way of being as an active meditation in diffusing negative energy.
If more people utilized this approach in their daily lives, the group-bound delusions of the “other” that serve to divide us would slowly dissolve, allowing a positive herd immunity to kick in and heal generations of chaotic, manufactured conflict. Someone, in every moment of conflict each day, has to start that chain reaction. True reality looks far different than the false dichotomies restricting our present-day discourse, which reduce 80% of our personal ideologies into the learned opinions of the lesser-informed generations that came before us. I personally believe the more opposing groups you can intermingle with — and the more non-threatening ways you can develop to communicate shared human goals across ideological lines — the more you are truly living outside the matrix of illusions in this world.
Psychologists have found that sustained, meaningful interaction between opposing cultures — where they share equal status and work toward common goals — can break down these rigid ingroup/outgroup barriers, fostering mutual respect and reducing prejudice.
Ultimately, shadow walking is the act of walking between worlds, and it is often a lonely, misunderstood endeavor. It is a chosen willingness to sit in the discomfort of contradiction, where there is no such thing as abstract evil, yet an understanding that evil acts do happen. It is the choice to contemplate the nature of the “other” long enough to find the thread of shared humanity woven through it. It asks everything of you emotionally, but it returns something that the comfort of a single tribe never could: the lived, embodied knowledge that the walls between us were always more fragile than the fear that built them. If even handfuls of people in in any given generation of a community commit to traveling those corriders existing inbetween various doors of identity with open hands and honest hearts, the light they carry between the lines of division becomes the very thing that makes the next generation’s walls a little shorter, a little easier to see over, and ultimately — given enough time and enough walkers — a little easier to finally let fall.
This is where the journey begins. It continues into the metaphysics in [The Scaffolding of Existence], then into a buildable blueprint in [The Personal Holodeck], and concludes with [The Mirror That Cannot Lie].
