Common Enemies Make Common Friends

We have all heard the statement “The enemy of my esnemy is my friend”, but is this always the case? Why is it that we must subdivide our relations in this world as black and white? As enemy or friend? We can explain many of these anomalies by the way humans perceive their environment. Lets take a look into some real life examples that illustrated this point.

We humans selectively perceive information from our environment. We tend to over simplify extremely complex phenomena instinctively. Take for example our perception of gravity the average joe six pack just sits and knows if he drops a ball it will go down to Earth. What many people don’t think about is how the Earth’s massive size accounts for a bend in the “fabric” of space-time which results in the effect we perceive as masses coming together (without going to in depth everything has a gravitational field even yourself, though very minimal). In our environment we humans don’t always look into a situation with different points of view to expand our perception. We tend to generalize that people we see as acting rude are rude by nature we don’t account for what the person may be going through at the time ( lets say the person just lost his pet puppy). Another Example of this is in Cuba. Americans see no reason why Cuba disdains America and fail to see Cuba’s point of view were after a revolution they failed to get what they fought for, independence, and instead were bombarded with American influences that went as far as to try and take control of Cuban treasury. So if we make enemies from a misunderstanding then why do we make friends with our enemy’s enemy?

In Math we can see that -1 x -1 = 1 or as a friend once told me “The enemy of your enemy is your friend” were enemy is the negative number and friend is the positive number. The main theme in this concept is that people striving towards a common goal work together. Take religion as an example. Religion is a method of unifying several different people under one or more God(s). So if we see friends as people striving towards the same goal we are then by contrast we should see enemies conflicting with that by striving towards opposite or opposing goals. Lets look at the “spread of Communism.” In American foreign affairs there have been several coups of foreign governments because of the belief they were becoming communist: Guatemala, Chile, Iran, and Vietnam to name a few. By this we see that Americans see Communism as an enemy because it contradicts with American ideals of “Democracy”.

Humans oversimplify complex environments. Life isn’t black and white, there are a variety of hues and colors in our spectrum. Enemies are what we perceive to be people who object to our goals. This here is were one may say that what is right or wrong? Who’s to say? No if humans automatically think they are right they will try to cleanse incorrect answers. In life there is only one correct answer that is: 1+2=3