In Politics or Religion, do you think people despise and fight each other because they have more differences or because they are similar to each other? Refer to the book below. Make connections to current events if you like.

The Stranger Within Us by Arno Gruen, written in 2002
The book isn't available in English but a summary/analysis can be found here: https://www.arnogruen.net/the_need_t...arno_gruen.pdf

"We live in a world in which we are becoming increasingly dependent on one another andyet at the same time are turning more and more against one another. Why are peoplehostile to what connects them, to what they have in common - their humanity?
[...]
Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo "butcher of Lyon" who tortured a French resistance fighter to death [...] what the butcher did to his victim he did in acertain sense to himself. [...] Hatred of the foreigner always has something todo with self hatred. If we want to understand why people torment and humiliate others, we must first deal with what we despise in ourselves, for the enemy we believe we see inthe other person must originally exist inside. We want to silence this part of us bydestroying the stranger who, because he resembles us, reminds us of it. That is the only way we can distance ourselves from what has become foreign to us in ourselves. That is the only way we can maintain our self-esteem and feel as if we are holding our headshigh."


book quotes:
"If we want to understand why people torment and humiliate other people, we must first deal with what we abhor in ourselves."

"It is the similarities that make people fight each other, not the differences."

"Empathy is a fundamental ability of all living things. It is the barrier to inhumanity and the core of our humanity, and therefore the core of what is our own. But if this self must be despised and separated as not belonging to us, then empathy can not develop freely."



Arno Gruen (May 26, 1923 - October 20, 2015) was a Swiss-German psychologist and psychoanalyst.Gruen's place in the history of psychology can be summarized as follows. According to Sigmund Freud, human beings are born with an innate tendency to destruction and violence; throughout his scholarly and clinical career, Prof. Gruen challenged that assumption, arguing instead that at the root of evil lies self-hatred, a rage originating in a self-betrayal that begins in childhood, when autonomy is surrendered in exchange for the "love" of those who wield power over us.
-Wikipedia