September 16, 2010
Sometimes, when we struggle with understanding the religious and ideological extremism we hear about in the news, we wonder, "How do people get that way? Why don't they listen to each other?" But if we really want to understand it, all we have to do is look at ourselves. We all struggle with ambiguity, and we all have tendencies toward fundamentalism. How often do we objectify people and situations by putting them into a box: "He is like this; she is like that"? We have fundamentalist attitudes toward others when we simply refuse to let them be bigger than our subjective, objectified view of them.
- Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, The Power of an Open Question