What if We're Wrong About Each Other?

By Frank Filocomo

Nothing can replace in-person connection.

Lura Forcum, in her new Substack, How to Human, explains how her bimonthly potluck dinners foster interpersonal connections and weak-tie relationships that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, to cultivate digitally:

Every other month, on Sunday evenings, people bring a dish for dinner at my house. Anyone is welcome. It’s not fancy, but the food is good and so is the company.

Forcum, who, along with the State Policy Network's Erin Norman, authored Beyond Polarization, is an advocate for socializing with those outside of your ideological orbit (read my write-up of that report in National Review here).

It's true: we tend to surround ourselves with people who are "politically like-minded" and "on the same page," ideologically speaking. 

There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but, if the goal is the engender a culture of high-trust relationships and communitarian values, we must venture outside of our silos and extend social invitations to others whom we may disagree politically, theologically, or whatever. 

It's also true that, party affiliation aside, we may have more in common with each other than we initially think:

From the article:

It’s easy to attribute all sorts of inaccurate, negative characteristics to other people, especially those who are different from us. But in-person interaction confronts us with the reality that the characteristics we attributed to other people aren’t very accurate. We have to correct our assumptions based on the person in front of us.

So, in the spirit of rising above the current climate of toxic polarization and balkanization, I encourage you to dine and converse with those from outside your orbit; you might be surprised by how in-person connection and meaningful dialectic can make your preconceptions about others fall by the wayside. 

Read more by Lura here.