What is the opposite of fear of others?

Maintaining curiosity is the key to compassion and transformation

Think about it: we are each born into this mysterious world knowing nothing about its origin or purpose. This alone is a mind-blowing fact if we spend any time actually trying to ponder creation. The fundamental question of existence is worthy of curious inspection, and yet this sense of wonder seems to be traded in for an obsession with the mundane for most adults.

As children, our curiosity is much less broad and more specific. We encounter things we don’t understand, and we inspect them an ask questions about them. If we’re lucky and have good role models, we are encouraged to safely honor our curiosity, to investigate and to learn.

However, our world seems to be dominated by adults who have abandoned their curiosity and their sense of wonder completely. While it is necessary to attend to the mundane and pragmatic aspects of being alive (food, money, possessions, etc), the dominant culture of the Western world has traded in its sense of wonder completely. The values of the cultures that dominate our world do not emphasize maintaining curiosity, and this is, to a large extent, by design. The opposite of fear is curiosity, and our power structures would much rather have you fear your neighbor and to fear people different from you than they would have you maintain any open-minded curiosity about people you don’t know and don’t understand.

So, the revolutionary act is to maintain curiosity even in face of fear. Curiosity is the path to compassion, which is the foundation for understanding, unity and identification with others. If we as radicals cannot privilege our own compassion over our fear, then we are going to fall victim to the same traps as those we are trying to oust from power. We must train ourselves to check in with our own sense of curiosity and our own good faith attempt to understand our “enemies” and adversaries even when our fear instinct kicks in.

The example that I’ll use for myself is encountering Zionists. If I wear my keffiyeh in public, and I’m accosted by a fragile Zionist who is triggered by my expression of my own cultural heritage, I will have to find a way to maintain compassion for them even through their aggressive emotional outburst. Remember that these are human beings who have been conditioned (i.e. brainwashed) to react this way, to parrot false talking points, to behave aggressively even in face of non-violent expression. If I react with the same aggression, then I am in all likelihood instigating tension and negativity. The burden on me as the more evolved and emotionally mature person in this circumstance is to try to maintain my compassion for them even while they attack me. I do not expect to necessarily transform these people in this instance, but I do think that even in these sorts of confrontational episodes, we have an opportunity to help remind people of their own humanity and to connect on that basis, however briefly.

If our culture were to normalize compassion and curiosity instead of pushing fear and division, we would be able to much more quickly see ourselves in one another and experience unity. But we cannot wait for all of society to shift, we must proactively shift our own individual approaches to how we respond to confrontation by an aggressive entity. If we can normalize curiosity and compassion in our own communities, then we have begun the real grassroots revolution.