Why don’t we all get along?

Yael Mirzaei

Conflicts around the world, no matter how different they seem, share one underlying truth: we struggle to accept each other.

Palestinians and Israelis remain locked in mistrust. Shia and Sunni groups still battle over legitimacy. The Rohingya flee the land that once sustained them. Civil wars erupt in Sudan. Rebels rise in Yemen.

Everywhere, humanity is fractured along lines of belonging.

Political scientist Samuel Huntington observed this pattern. In The Clash of Civilizations, he argued that future conflicts would not be ideological or economic, but cultural, shaped by identity and civilisation. People align themselves less by class or ideology and more by culture, religion, sexuality and shared history.

But in our globalised era, these lines are blurred. Cultural identity has merged with political and economic power.

Social media, nationalism and globalisation have also contributed to the fusion of what used to be separate entities, ie culture and politics. Culture has become political, and the political has become deeply personal.

So, in a world where our identities are so entangled with systems of power, how do we learn to coexist? How do we learn to simply get along?

To understand how, we must first ask: Why are we unable to get along?

Primitive brains in a modern world

Our brains are ancient hardware running modern software. We still think with the same survival circuitry that once kept early humans alive in tribes. Recognising who belonged and who didn’t was a matter of life or death. We needed to recognise friend from foe.

That wiring still governs us today. We instinctively trust those who look, think or sound like us and fear those who don’t.

The problem isn’t hatred. It’s that biology hasn’t caught up with modern reality. Our brains were evolved to guard against predators – not to negotiate peace treaties.

We now live in a world teeming with differences, but our emotional software continues to fear differences.

Humanity has tried to transcend this. After centuries of war, we built systems like the UN, the EU and the ideals of globalisation to try to bind the world through cooperation and trade.

To some extent, they worked: poverty fell, education spread and cultures connected like never before.

Yet the very forces that made us interconnected also deepened our divisions. Today, the UN wrestles with power imbalances. Globalisation is widening the gap between the rich and poor. Nationalism is re-emerging as a backlash to feeling ‘invisible’ in a borderless world.

These systems were designed for unity but are still run by humans ruled by fear, ego and the tribal instinct.

Ego and the addiction to identity

Liberal democracy celebrates individuality and self-expression. Every human being needs a story about who they are – a coherent sense of self.

But the ego depends on boundaries: knowing ‘this is me’ and ‘that is not me’. This craving for identity makes us fragile.

When we meet someone radically different, it shakes our story. So we defend it by judging or excluding. We define ourselves by contrast: I’m rational, not emotional. I’m open-minded, unlike them. We discriminate, not always out of hate, but insecurity.

‘Otherness’ reminds us that the self is fluid, not fixed – and that’s terrifying!

The grey zone: fear of ambiguity

Humans crave clarity. Ambiguity feels dangerous because it confuses our mental map of the world. We simplify things into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘us’ and ‘them’.

In an age of endless information, our brains struggle to hold nuance. That’s why mixed identities, multiculturalism and fluid gender expressions unsettle some people. They reduce and challenge the old familiar narratives that made the world feel stable.

We fear what we can’t categorise, not because it’s bad, but because it forces us to confront uncertainty.

Fear of loss

Much prejudice stems from the fear of loss – of status, resources or meaning. Even the perception of scarcity triggers defensiveness. We think someone else’s gain means our loss.

This is why populism thrives in times of economic anxiety: when people feel powerless, they search for someone to blame. “They’re taking our jobs,” “They’re changing our culture.”

These claims echo the same primal scarcity reflex. When the mind feels poor, it becomes territorial. Fear makes us protect what we have, even if it means dehumanising someone else.

Illusion of moral superiority

Humans don’t only compete for resources – we compete for righteousness. Every tribe, religion and ideology believes it’s on the right side of history.

But that conviction can become its own prejudice.

The most dangerous hatred often hides behind virtue. We condemn the intolerant, unaware that our contempt mirrors theirs.

Nietzsche called this resentment: turning weakness into moral superiority. Modern discourse is full of people shouting, “We’re the good ones,” while demonising everyone else.

Discrimination now wears the mask of moral clarity.

Projection of the shadow

Psychotherapist Carl Jung wrote that each of us carries a “shadow” – the parts of ourselves we reject or deny. When we refuse to face them, we project them onto others. We see in them what we cannot accept in ourselves.

That’s why hatred feels righteous: it’s self-loathing turned outward. It’s not just individuals but entire societies that do this. We demonise nations, religions or ideologies for traits we secretly fear within. The enemy is often the part of ourselves we’ve exiled.

Problem of overexposure

In the past, humans lived in small, tight-knit communities.

Now, globalisation and digital media have blown those walls apart. We see everyone, everywhere, all the time. News, suffering, outrage – it floods us daily.

But our empathy hasn’t evolved to cope with this scale. Constant exposure to conflict and pain leads to empathy fatigue. We scroll past suffering, tune out, and retreat into online echo chambers that feel safe and familiar.

Ironically, being connected to the entire world has made us more fragmented than ever. The human mind wasn’t built for infinity. It was built for community.

Existential fear of dissolution

Perhaps we fail to get along because true empathy demands surrender. To really understand someone, we must let their perspective alter ours – a kind of ego death. The more we understand others, the less distinct we feel. That’s terrifying.

It’s easier to stay within the walls of nationality, religion and ideology than to risk losing the comfort of ‘being someone’. Most people are not ready to accept that to love a ‘difference’ fully is to risk dissolving into it.

So, if these are the reasons why individuals clash, we must wonder how civilisations clash?

Civilisations clash because they are mirrors of the individual human.

Civilisations are human psychology magnified – collective egos written across continents. What we call a clash of civilisations is really the inner conflict of the human mind multiplied by millions.

Nations behave like people: defensive, proud, terrified of dissolution. Religions mirror our search for meaning. Economies reflect our fear of scarcity. Politics channels our hunger for recognition.

Civilisations don’t clash because they’re incompatible. They clash because they inherit our deepest flaws.

Each clings to its story as the ego clings to its self-image – fragile, righteous and unable to exist without an enemy.

Conflict becomes a defence mechanism, preserving identity by defining what it is not.

That’s why global peace feels elusive. It demands that individuals look inward without fear or projection – something that they struggle with the most.

Like people, civilisations prefer certainty to self-awareness. They would rather clash than dissolve.

And understanding that, we should now return to the question: How do we learn to simply get along?

The answer is simple. We do it by transcending our primitive instinct. If our divisions are born from instinct, our survival depends on transcending them.

The human brain has evolved far slower than the world it created – but we are not prisoners of biology. Human nature is fluid and adaptable. It can reshape itself through awareness and choice.

Breaking from our primitive reflexes begins with consciousness – the pause before reacting, the decision to understand before judging.

Evolution isn’t just genetic; it’s psychological. The difference between stagnation and progress lies in our ability to question our impulses.

When we recognise that much of what divides us – race, borders, even ‘civilisation’ – is socially constructed, we begin to see that these walls are human-made, and therefore, breakable.

We have built systems that reward argument, competition and outrage. Yet the same capacity for conflict is also our capacity for connection.

We already know how to disagree. Perhaps the next stage of evolution is learning how to coexist.

If humans can construct ideologies, nations and religions, surely we can construct empathy too.

Maybe the real question isn’t why we can’t get along – but what will it take for us to want to?

Yael Mirzaei is the pseudonym of a writer from the Malaysian Philosophy Society.

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