#Philosphy_Of_The_Neutral_Zone

Have you ever come across two persons or sides engaged in a heated conversation and both of them think they are telling the truth? Almost all of us, but is it possible that both of them are telling the truth when their viewpoints are on opposite extremes. Surely one of them is telling the truth or is it so. This brings us to a very fundamental and rather interesting question,What is truth? “That what is close to reality”,is what you will find if you Google it,but if only life was that simple.
That arises the question,do we all live in same reality? A person’s reality is based on a lot of things like his location on the map,the kind of family Ze is born into, the kind of social conditioning Ze receives during course of lifetime and so on. For eg- The reality of Kashmir for a person born in Pakistan is bound to differ from a person born in India. They both will have their own version of truth or reality depending upon the propoganda they are exposed to in their country. However their version may or may not be close to actual truth or reality. Similarly if you are born in a deeply religious family it is bound to have an effect on your version of reality.

                Coming back to the two persons engaged in heated argument. So because their individual truths are close to their versions of reality both of them feel they are telling the truth. Now the problem with this is that it is possible  that both of them are far away from the actual truth and reality but they won’t be able to see it because they are blinded by their own versions .And sometimes they might not even want to see it because they have become too comfortable with their versions and don’t want to look beyond.  Let us take a  little example and try to understand this.

Jack from his childhood had believe that earth was flat because his father and people around him believed so too. One day Jack meets a scientist who tells him that he has been thinking wrong the whole time and his truth is a lie. Now Jack faces two option.
1. To stay with what he believes,what he has and everyone around him has told him that is his version of truth or reality.

2. To accept the possibility that he has been wrong for his entire life and earth is infact round!

        Jack chooses to go with the first option because number two is too difficult and the first one too easy. Now Jack looks for bricks, bricks made of  ideas ,arguments,facts that support his version ,to build a wall of his perception of truth around himself.

Sadly most people choose to take path of Jack. They build and lock themselves in cages, cages of their perception of reality and refuse to leave their cages. Some people turn these wall into fortresses so that no criticism of their version or even a slightly different version can enter. In common terminology these people are referred to as extremists. You would think that in age of social media where you can engage with so many different ideas people would tend break down these walls. But the reality is quite the opposite, people tend to use social media to strengthen these walls. For example most people tend to like, follow people and pages that support their end of the argument. Comment sections have become a place not to engage to understand but to wage war, war of words. And often it is not a war between individuals but people tend to support and team up with people on their side.

But by far the biggest consequence by building of these walls is creating a lack of interest, concern and sympathy that is indifference and that too not necessarily only between individuals but between communities and even countries. Indifference is a very dangerous ingredient because it acts as a catalyst for conversion of feelings like anger, jealousy etc into hate. Not only that indifference is the main reason for sustaining and exponential growth of hate.

For example Imagine that your best friend forgets to wish you on your birthday. Now you are angry, after a few days you start thinking that he doesn’t care and maybe has got a new best friend etc. But this might or might not be true this difference between your and actual reality can eventually lead to creation of indifference. Indifference in combination with anger fuels hate. But if you sit down with your friend and talk about it, you might disagree and be angry at the end of  it but  you won’t be able to remain angry for long and your anger won’t transform to hate. This is a very simplified example to explain how indifference not only leads to formation of hate but also sustaining and its exponential growth.

In Nazi Germany, Germans were lead to believe that Jews are responsible for all that is wrong. This created an indifference towards jews in turn fueled that hate and we all know what followed.

From this we can also conclude how hate is formed, building of walls of individual truths around people and communities leads to creation of indifference which when mixed with feelings like anger, jealousy etc leads to formation of hate. Now that  we know how hate is formed we can effectively counter it. If we can weaken these walls, we can stop the creation of indifference so people will still tend to disagree and be angry but it won’t get converted into hate.

Based on this is our solution, “The Neutral Zone” to the problem . The Neutral zone is based on what we like to call the C approach.

Suppose there are two persons with idea A and idea B that are contradicting. If we engage the first person his idea A he would happily do so but the response might not be the same if we try to engage him on idea B. He may have a tendency to reject the idea completely or counter it in every way possible. So the idea is to develop a platform which both persons can use to accept the possibility of an idea C ,explore it and have a meaningful dialouge about it. By doing this both persons end up learning something about the other  person's idea though they might still disagree with it, what this does is it stops creation of indifference and in turn hate. This weakens the walls of individual truth and realities, so that we can break them down someday.

When you approach an idea in  “The Neutral Zone” you need to follow these four rules

1. Enter with an open mind.

2. Leave pre conceived notions behind.

3. Engage to understand and not to wage war.

4. Disagree but don’t hate.