Most people are more alike than they realize.

When everything is going great, the alike things kind of fade out of our awareness as unimportant.

Daniel Gilbert describes our brains as "percentage-of-change detectors".

But then those small differences tend to balloon and self-segregate into deepening fault lines of competitive world views.

Like the Robbers Cave Experiment, where kids were split into two groups randomly and then a bitter, self-escalating rivalry emerged.

Even in non-charged contexts, our minor differences can escalate into significant conflicts.

This happens more easily if everything starts out calm and undangerous.

In environments where things are existentially scary and we're united in a common enemy, we can see how we're actually more alike than different.

Especially when everyone is more alike to each other than to the enemy.

In those cases, we focus on how we're the same, not how we're different.

Unfortunately, this works based on an us-vs-them dynamic (that is at least turned outward).

But us-vs-them dynamics are fundamentally toxic. They show up organically in nearly every context.