First, a word from our sources on the term, “Othering:” “The term Othering describes the reductive action of labeling a person as someone who belongs to a subordinate social category defined as the Other. The practice of Othering is the exclusion of persons who do not fit the norm of the social group, which is a version of the Self. Likewise, in the field of human geography, the action term to Other identifies and excludes a person from the social group, placing him or her at the margins of society, where the social norms do not apply to and for the person labelled as the Other.”
In self-protection disciplines, as well as other professions such as the military, we use Othering in order to suppress our natural human behaviors to not cause grave harm or death to our tribe, so to speak. Inherently humans to survive need to collect together as like-minded folks so we become stronger and those groups can only function well in small numbers such as social groups that make us tribal-like.
Only by a process as described herein can a human cause sufficient damage or death to another human when said target is not a member of that person’s family or tribe, a collective of families who band together to survive through better conditions and resources, etc.
We classify that “other person” as “not one of us.” This can be critical in some modern professions such as the military who have to go face-to-face with other military folks not one of our military groups. In this profession we are mandated by our tribe leaders, in modern society that would be the governing body of that social collective, to dominate, hurt, damage and kill the other guys so we can achieve our objectives, often about some form of survival. For instance, our society needs oil based products to achieve our goals in survival and when others have what we need one avenue of attaining that resource is through force and othering them makes it easier to send off our military to cause harm and death on them.
“Group cohesion was crucially important in the early days of human civilization, and required strong demarcation between our allies and our enemies.”
In regard to self-protection by any means, emphasis here in martial disciplines like karate, there is an attitude born from this drive to other, others, i.e., “‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ is a simple heuristic people often use to decide whether someone is part of their tribe or not. If you are, then you can be expected to toe the line in certain ways if you don’t want to be ejected; if you’re not, you can be dismissed and hated as an ‘other’, the enemy.”
We who train to self-protect need to understand this need to other, in one regard there are those who we encounter that are strangers to us and that compounds things toward aggression and violence until they become one of us or that we reject, in some way be it by leaving, avoidance, or through proper self-protection actions. Strangers are “others” simply by the fact that they are unknown to us.
We have the ability through communications to establish the social status of a stranger where we may find connections, similarities in culture, beliefs, and other factors so they become one of us, even peripherally. This makes it less likely we cause friction toward some aggressive acts.
One of many lessons folks learn in self-protection to achieve and maintain security and safety of oneself and those who are “one of us” is that de-escalation means taking an attitude that the “other person” may have hidden qualities that we can seek to find then use that to create a connection that allows us to avoid violence and aggression. Understanding the Othering thing means we have tools at our disposal that will allow is to see and feel a possible “way out” for us by connecting and removing the feeling that a person is “an other” bringing them closer to being “one of us.”
If we can achieve this, then we can avoid conflict with violence resulting in all the ramifications that are found within these pages providing them and us with security, safety, health and survival. We provide ourselves solutions, when appropriate, and give the previous “other person” face-saving ways to remain intact in all ways.
It is a common goal of people who teach self-protection that we must not FORGET, “If we’re experiencing guilt about our treatment of some person, or group, or class, and having trouble reconciling that guilt with our notion of ourselves as good people, our brains are extremely adept at resolving the situation by Othering the people we feel that we’ve wronged. If we de-humanize someone, and distance our empathy with them, then we won’t have to feel bad about the shabby way we’ve treated them.”
Recognizing our very human conditions and behaviors both conscious and sub-conscious as driven by past experiences, social conditions with coping skills and nature’s way to survival even tho not as necessary in modern societies where that conditioning has yet to evolve to meet modern standards and practices will go a long way to allow training and practices to achieve avoidance/de-escalation from the brink of violence from aggressive tendencies to either get what we want or to attain some resource we need.
Let us not forget, “how readily we can be swept up in a group identity, learning to embrace only those of our tribe and reject the ‘others’, even when the difference is entirely arbitrary and meaningless.” If we cannot achieve this understanding and then use it to train and practice to overcome the tendency then we fail to teach self-protection of the modern man.
Learn to recognize when we other, others, and then train to avoid Othering except when necessary to step into the application of violence to remain safe, secure and healthy. This balance between self, Othering and connecting others to self is a difficult path to follow and takes a great deal of effort especially to turn it off when needed but more so to “turn Othering back on” to achieve self-defense defense.
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