The year is 2020 and there are nearly 8 billion people on this planet. Of all these individuals, there are many variations. Some people are tall, while others are short. Some have straight hair while some have curly hair. Some grew up speaking the English language, while others grew up speaking Chinese. Some people love to eat durian with its distinct smell, while others think it’s disgusting. With all these differences it’s easy to feel divided, but we, as human beings, all share something special in common.

You and I are different than animals. While biologically we are similar to them, we share a special capacity that only humans have. We are conscious. We can think, choose, and act. We can imagine the future and recall the past, communicate complex ideas through language, build tools to fit our needs, adapt to hostile environments, and make moral decisions to help or harm others. In other words, we all have a soul.

This connection is forgotten in these modern times. There is a growing global movement that strives to divide all people into separate groups. Instead of perceiving a person as a complex and unique individual, this ideology focuses on the groups that the person is affiliated with, such as their race, gender, and sexual orientation.

In their minds, I am not Aaron McCarter, a fellow human individual with a unique story and mind. I am Aaron McCarter, a straight Asian male, and whatever other groups they want to identify me with. This is a shallow and dangerous way to view people and the world.

It’s shallow due to two reasons. The first reason is that this ideology ignores what matters most—people are fundamentally individuals, not groups. When you perceive someone just by their group affiliations, you effectively ignore their choices and character as an individual. It’s like saying all brown-eyed people think and act the same, which is obviously false. People are much more than the groups they happen to be part of; we are all different from each other and should be perceived as individuals.

The second reason is that this ideology oversimplifies the world. It tries to organize people and problems into neat little boxes. With this facile view, if one group is experiencing inequality of some form, then it means another group is trying to victimize them or the whole system is corrupt. This is a naïve way of thinking. While the world isn’t perfect, blaming all problems on a single cause is lazy and wrong. The world is way more complex than that. Viewing people merely as groups won’t solve anything, but only create more problems.

Group-identity thinking is not only shallow, it’s also dangerous. It’s dangerous for individuals on a small scale, as well as a global scale. Allowing this ideology to thrive could lead to war, genocide, and even the destruction of civilization itself. There are three reasons for this danger.

The first reason is that this ideology promotes discrimination. When you focus on group identity instead of individual identity, you encourage people to divide into groups. This in turn leads to an “us versus them” mentality, which is alarming and perilous. As groups begin to form and become more divided, there is less civil discussion and a greater likelihood for violent conflict. It may even get to a point where one group decides to exterminate the other, as seen with the Nazis against the Jews in the Holocaust, and the Hutu against the Tutsi in the Rwandan Civil War.

This group hate is gaining momentum in America. With the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, there is a growing animosity against White people. This is a dangerous path to take. Blaming one ethnic group for all the problems of society does not solve anything and will only increase division. In addition, by grouping all White people (or police) together as “bad”, you encourage those individuals to form their own groups and defend themselves. This will lead to escalating conflict, first with words and then with violence.

The second reason for danger is that this ideology leads to “groupthink”. This occurs when people stop thinking for themselves and allow their group to think for them. You can see this happen in America. For the majority of Americans who are interested in politics, they are either in the “Democrat” or “Republican” group. Members of each group are pressured to hold certain opinions and beliefs, otherwise they risk being ostracized by other group members. Moreover, each of these groups has its own sources of news which are generally biased (e.g. CNN and WashingtonPost for Democrats, Fox and Breitbart for Republicans). By only watching biased news, people are trained to think the same as their group, rather than thinking independently for themselves.

The danger of groupthink is that it creates a mass of easily manipulated people. Instead of individuals who critically think and form their own opinions, you have millions of people who let their group think for them. All it takes are a few breaking news stories and polarizing tweets from powerful individuals to create chaos and disorder. This could very easily happen, even if it wasn’t intended. In July 2020 a hacker gained access to the Twitter accounts of influential people, such as Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Using these accounts, the hacker could have easily coordinated a message to disrupt the economy and social stability, stirring millions of people into panic. Groupthink must be avoided if at all possible, and this group identity ideology encourages it.

The third and last reason for why this ideology is dangerous is that it may cause the destruction of free civilization as we know it. Our current civilization (in Western countries at least) is based on the sovereignty of the individual. When a person is arrested, it is because of their actions as individual and not because of the faults of the groups they are affiliated with. This group identity ideology aims to change that. In the world they want, you are not an individual and only a part of your group. You are culpable for everything the group is accused of, even if you had not part of it.

This may not seem like a big deal, but the implications are deadly. During the Great Purge of the communist Soviet Union, people in certain groups, such as successful farmers or intellectuals, were arrested even if they did nothing. They were either executed or sentenced to work at a gulag labor camp for years. This also happened in the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China. Millions were either killed or sent to reeducation camps just because they were associated with some group and deemed a threat to the ruling communist party. While this situation may seem unlikely to you, this is what group identity thinking can and will likely lead to.

Human beings are group oriented by nature, but we are first and foremost individuals. This is a reality we must remember going forward. If we allow the group thinking ideology to dominate our culture, we will generate a dangerous and destructive society in which groups are pitted against each other. This is a future we should try to avoid if at all possible.

The year is 2020 and we should look beyond the groups we were born with. Instead, we should think of what unites us all. We are all conscious human beings, individual members of the same family. While we may have our differences, we can work together to live on this planet peacefully and someday expand out into the stars. This can be our future, if we try to make it happen. It starts with you and me.