Common enemies and common ground

Jamil Zaki of The Huffington Post wrote a fascinating article about our psychological, instinctual habit of arranging ourselves into competitive, usually arbitrary groups and offers solutions for encompassing everyone into broader, more compassionate "human" groups.

Like other flavors of categorization, imagining that other groups lack complex feelings can be necessary to our survival, and - more darkly - to our ability to harm others during conflict. Fully processing the emotional states of everyone we see would make commuting in New York even more exhausting than it already is, and our natural aversion to suffering would prevent us from killing in war if we allowed ourselves to think about the other side's fear. By denying strangers, foreigners, and enemies human qualities, we can justify the extraordinary pain we may cause those people in conflict.

This isn't specifically about literature, but I thought it was relevant to this newsfeed since Bibliotrekking is about finding the universal human voice while paradoxically dividing voices into nations, cultures, regions, and languages.