Why Can’t We Talk About What Really Divides Us?

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Let's rewind for a moment to a scene many of us have experienced: the family dinner table.

As mum is serving up the meal, your brother's animated about the money he made at his lemonade stand. Your sister lights up talking about the outfit she wore and how it landed her compliments. And you're just trying to explain how that mountain bike ride in the forest made you feel grounded, peaceful—even connected to something deeper.

But as everyone's trying to get their word in, the conversation starts heating up. No one feels fully heard. Then your mum jumps in with that classic line: "Can't we all just be a happy family?"

It sounds simple: "Can't we all just get along?" But underneath this question lies a bigger philosophical question that I feel some of us are trying to answer, but societal ideology has prevented us from asking:

Is unity only possible through sameness? Or can we build a world strong enough to hold many cultures, truths, and priorities—and still function with cohesion?

The Taboo of Difference

We claim to value diversity, but acknowledging it out loud has become taboo. If you name racial or cultural differences, you're accused of being racist. If you reflect on gender dynamics, you're seen as sexist. Ironically, this silencing limits our ability to build a world that supports all people. If we cannot talk about differences, we cannot design a world that respects, leverages, and honours such differences.

On a micro level, I witnessed this tension firsthand while working in education. For a few years, I supported students with learning disabilities, and there was one teenager I worked with who stood out. He had the mental capacity of a much younger child, yet was placed in a classroom for his age group under the banner of diversity and inclusion.

The intention sounded noble. But what actually happened was demoralizing.

When the class moved at his pace, high-performing students disengaged. When the class moved faster, he was left behind. No one's needs were being met. The students who needed support felt like burdens. The students with academic potential were never fully challenged.

Diversity and inclusion, in practice, resulted in friction. And it left me wondering:

Is diversity in close quarters creating genuine inclusion—or are we forcing everyone into a structure that only serves the few, at the cost of the many?

To me, what I saw in that classroom was a microcosm of a much larger pattern. When we assume that putting everyone in the same room creates fairness, we often overlook the significant differences in people's capacities and values. This isn't just about education—it's a societal design flaw.

Macro Framing (The Game Board)

Think of every community—whether it's a culture, religion, or nation—as its own board game. Each one has its own currency (or not), rules, objectives, and strategies. Some prioritize monetary success and dominance. Others emphasize communal ties, oral storytelling, or spiritual attunement. Their "winning conditions" vary widely—and so do the skills and traits they cultivate.

But today, most of the world has been absorbed into a single dominant game board: the political-monetary system. While individual countries may tweak the rules, the core game remains the same. It rewards IQ, academic credentials, financial acumen, and measurable productivity. Traits like intuition, emotional intelligence, or land-based wisdom? They often don't even make it onto the scoreboard.

Now, to be fair, this singular game board does come with benefits. With standardization, it enables efficient global trade and optimization around shared benchmarks—if that's what you value. But focusing on one dominant gameboard also comes at a cost: we've lost not only the insights of other games (cultures, religions, or nations), but also the deeper values they upheld. And when only one game is used to define success, countless are set up to fail.

My grandfather was from Australia, and my mum spent part of her childhood there. One story she told me has always stuck with me. When Europeans first colonized Australia, there was an effort—at least from their perspective—to “support” Aboriginal communities by giving them houses. But these homes were built entirely through the lens of European living, not Aboriginal ways of life.

One Aboriginal family was given such a house. One evening, they brought a kangaroo inside—something perfectly normal in their world—and lit a fire on the floor to cook. In their frame of reference, this made complete sense. But in a wooden house with floorboards, the inevitable happened: the floor collapsed, sending the family and kangaroo tumbling through. They weren’t being careless; they were simply living according to their game board.

It’s a small but telling example: even when the intent is to “help,” we often do it by pulling people into our framework—our political, monetary, and material systems—without ever asking whether that’s what they need, or whether their existing system already works for them.

With this in mind, if you and your lineage have spent your life playing Jenga, and then suddenly you're thrown into a game of chess, don't you think you'd feel pretty lost?

Now, I want to be clear—I don't have the answers. But I do believe we need to start asking different questions. Two of which come to mind:

• Can we have co-existing communities playing different games?
• Can our current implementation of diversity and inclusion really exist?

Let's explore both.

Challenges of Coexistence

One of the biggest challenges to global co-existence is that most people are not choosing to play the dominant game—they're absorbed into it. Once a system becomes dominant, it tends to expand and override the others. You can't have a culture that values money and property living peacefully beside one that doesn't—because eventually, the monetary system will buy up the land, the water, the trees. It doesn't matter if the neighbouring culture doesn't value money. If the land disappears beneath them, their way of life disappears too.

So I find myself wondering:

Is it possible to have parallel cultures with different value systems—tribal, capitalist, spiritual, intuitive—without one being swallowed up by financial or political dominance?

Because right now, our global structure is optimized for one kind of game—one that rewards social conformity, academic achievement, economic productivity, and strategic intelligence. And while those qualities have their place, they don't capture the full spectrum of human potential. Where does that leave cultures rooted in intuition, empathy, or ecological harmony? Their gifts are often dismissed as inefficiencies—because they don't "produce" in the way the system demands.

As the saying goes, "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid." When people are forced to play by rules they never agreed to, they're bound to feel like they're failing—when really, they were never built to play that game in the first place.

Once a culture gets absorbed into the dominant game board, opting out becomes nearly impossible. Even if they try to build a parallel structure, they often face the same outcome: economic integration, land loss, or cultural dilution.

What would it look like to move back to a world with genuine alternatives? To build systems where people thrive based on their natural strengths and values—not their ability to win at a game they never chose?

Reframing Diversity & Inclusion

There's no shortage of positive rhetoric around diversity and inclusion. But when we examine how it plays out in practice, the picture becomes murkier.

When we take wildly different cultures, worldviews, and moral codes and push them into a single, unified system, expecting cohesion, we don't always get it. Sometimes, we get resentment. Sometimes, we get conflict. And nearly always, we lose the uniqueness we set out to promote.

Although the data is complex and often politically charged, one thing feels undeniable: what we value varies widely across cultures. What's legal in one country may be illegal in another. What's tolerated in one community may be considered criminal in another. And this divergence in values often manifests in social outcomes.

Take, for example, the UK. When comparing immigration and police-reported rape offences, a pattern emerges. From 2002 to 2012, both metrics remained relatively stable. But from 2012 onward, immigration increased sharply—peaking in 2023, 130% above the average from 2002 to 2012. Coincidentally (or not), police-reported rape offences also spiked—by over 400% by 2024.

While many factors contribute to crime trends, it's hard to ignore that rising immigration correlates with increases in many violent offences.

Norway offers a similar example:

• In 2007, foreign-born residents made up 13% of the population, but accounted for 47% of partner murders.
• A 2018 study found that 47% of domestic violence cases against children involved parents born abroad.
• A 2008 report noted higher crime rates among immigrants compared to native Norwegians.

Or take the chart below—it shows that countries with more closely aligned cultural values, such as European or other Western nations, tend to experience significantly lower crime rates than those with greater cultural differences.

These statistics aren’t about blaming cultures—they’re about recognizing what happens when fundamentally different value systems collide. When different legal and moral frameworks are forced into one container, friction is inevitable. And this isn’t just about differences between entirely separate religions or cultures. History shows us that even within the same religion, distinct value systems can fracture societies.

Take Northern Ireland’s Troubles: a nearly 30-year conflict between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists—two branches of Christianity that share far more in common than they differ. Yet from 1968 to 1998, over 3,500 people lost their lives, thousands more were injured, and communities were torn apart. If differences between closely related sects can erupt into violence on this scale, it should make us pause before assuming radically different cultural or moral codes can be blended smoothly under a single framework.

With all this in mind, every thriving society needs a common ground—a set of values that everyone, regardless of background, can stand on. Without it, cracks form. Those cracks become divides. And those divides can be exploited faster than we realize. To me, national identity is the ground that keeps the structure from splitting apart.

The Role of National Identity

National identity, to me, functions like an unwritten social contract—a quiet agreement about what binds us together. It’s more than flags or anthems; it’s the shared foundation that helps a society know who it is and where it’s going. When people align on core values—around justice, family, freedom, or responsibility—it creates a kind of social glue. That glue fosters cohesion, trust, and a shared vision for the future. But when those foundational values diverge, especially in multicultural societies, cohesion begins to fray. And where there’s no cohesion, a vacuum forms.

Vacuums don't stay empty.

They're filled by opportunistic leaders, radical ideologies, and divisive narratives. Without a shared cultural bedrock, politics becomes a weapon of division—not a tool for progress.

That said, a strong national identity doesn't mean uniformity. It means we don't have to keep renegotiating our most basic values. We can shift our focus from who we are to where we're going—united by shared purpose, not divided by constant culture clashes.

This also doesn’t mean banning immigration. It means approaching it thoughtfully, with criteria that ensure those who choose to immigrate do so with the intent to assimilate into the nation’s cultural fabric. Assimilation and integration aren’t the same—assimilation involves adopting the host nation’s core values, whereas integration can just mean parallel communities existing side by side without the desire to assimilate. The latter might look diverse on paper, but without shared values, it’s often a recipe for friction.

Now, while rising social tension is often the headline, I think the deeper cost of diversity and inclusion—one we rarely name—is the quiet erasure of the very differences we set out to protect. Think back to art class as a kid, palette in hand. A dab of red, a stroke of blue, a splash of yellow, maybe some green. At first, it looks incredible—so many shades, so much potential. But keep mixing, and you don't get a rainbow. You get brown.

When we try to blend cultures with radically different values into a single system, we don't get a mosaic—we get a blur. What makes each culture distinct starts to dissolve. The wisdom of one group gets flattened to fit into the frameworks of another. The unique "rules" of each cultural game start to vanish, until everyone's playing by the same default settings.

And this, I think, is the heart of what we've gotten wrong about inclusion and diversity. We've confused proximity with harmony. We've tried to mash different cultures together instead of recognizing that maybe they're not meant to be merged. Some people aren't failing the system—they just weren't built for the game they are now a part of.

If we want to honour diversity, maybe the goal isn't to blend it all into one "mixing pot"—but to protect the space where each culture can be appreciated. Perhaps it's not about forcing every culture onto the same board, but rather allowing people to move freely between them.

The Importance of Questioning

While writing this article, I asked ChatGPT for feedback on the article. Its response? "Sorry, but I can't help with that." I then asked, "Why? And it said:

"Your request touches on extremely sensitive and complex social issues, including immigration, race, gender, crime, and national identity, and attempts to correlate them in ways that have historically been used to promote harmful generalizations, discrimination, or biased narratives. Even with disclaimers like 'not implying causation,' comparisons of this nature can easily be misinterpreted or misused, regardless of intent."

That moment said a lot. We pat ourselves on the back for being inclusive and virtuous, yet we're unwilling to engage with difficult conversations or try to understand whether our actions are really making a difference.

Now consider how we assess personality: companies use Myers-Briggs, IQ, or EQ tests to understand their employees' strengths. We use that insight to build complementary teams.

But when it comes to race, religion, or gender, any attempt to explore differences is taboo. One misstep and you're labelled racist or sexist. So we retreat into silence.

There's a crucial difference between using data to understand and using it to discriminate. But fear of the latter has all but eliminated the former. Without inquiry, we're left with surface-level solutions.

We can debate the haves and have-nots all day, but if the real problem is incompatibility, not inequality, no amount of forced diversity and inclusion will bring us any closer to cohesion—only dialogue, curiosity and data.

Looking Forward

What if we stopped treating inclusion as assimilation?

What if we acknowledged that not everyone is meant—or built—to play the dominant game board?

What if we created systems where multiple worldviews could thrive, side by side?

Because ultimately, the way forward isn't silence. It's curiosity. It's empathy. It's designing not just one way to succeed—but many.

That is real diversity: not blending everyone into sameness, but allowing space for everyone to remain beautifully, powerfully distinct.

With this in mind, if we want a truly diverse world, we need to move away from "Can't we all just be a happy family?" and toward "Can we build a home spacious enough for many kinds of families, each with their own way of being?"

Thanks for taking the time to read The Qi of Self-Sovereignty. I hope you found it insightful.

I always welcome feedback and thoughts. So, do not hesitate to respond to the newsletter email, comment on the article or reach out via Twitter.

Seb