We Have Forgotten How to See One Another

The imagination has a curious double life. It allows us to invent symphonies and constitutions. It also allows us to invent enemies.

That may sound like a contradiction, but it is simply a truth about being human. The same faculty that helps us envision a better future can also persuade us that people we barely know are dangerous, selfish, or beyond understanding.

Long before we refuse to listen to another person, we begin imagining them incorrectly. We all do it.

We make assumptions from appearance, accent, education, occupation, neighborhood, politics, religion, or age. We encounter someone for a moment and unconsciously begin writing a story about who they are and what they believe.

Most of the time, we are only partially right.

Sometimes we are spectacularly wrong.

Yet those stories become the lens through which every future encounter is interpreted.

A human being slowly disappears behind a category.

The teacher becomes “the liberal.” The rancher becomes “the conservative.” The immigrant becomes “immigration.” The billionaire becomes “the elite.” The journalist becomes “the media.” The artist becomes “the arts.”

Once a person has become an abstraction, almost any story can be told about them.

That matters because democracy asks something remarkable of us. It asks millions of people who will never know one another personally to build a shared future together. We do not have to agree on everything, but we do need to resist reducing one another to stereotypes.

Democracy depends upon our ability to imagine that another person’s inner life is as rich, complicated, and human as our own.

Recent research suggests we may be worse at this than we realize. Studying a large community of young adults, researchers identified what they call an empathy perception gap: people consistently underestimated how caring and empathetic those around them were.

Those mistaken assumptions made people less willing to trust others, less willing to reach out, and less willing to form new relationships. In other words, one of the barriers to social connection was not the absence of empathy. It was a failure to recognize it in one another, even among people who saw each other every day.

I find that surprisingly hopeful. If empathy had vanished, we would have little to build upon.

But if empathy is present and simply overlooked, then perhaps our challenge is not to become different people. Perhaps it is to learn to see one another more clearly.

This is where creative practice offers an unexpected lesson. Every artist begins by paying attention.

A novelist refuses to leave a character as a stereotype. An actor searches for the humanity inside someone whose choices may be difficult to understand. A photographer waits for the moment that reveals a life rather than a label. A composer listens. An architect imagines people sharing a space that does not yet exist.

These are not merely artistic habits. They are habits of perception. They remind us that another human being is always more complicated than our first impression.

That may be one of the quiet gifts the arts offer a democracy. They cultivate the discipline of looking again, listening longer, and resisting the easy story.

Res Creativa exists because we believe those capacities matter far beyond the studio, rehearsal hall, or writing desk. They belong wherever people are trying to solve problems together.

Perhaps we have not forgotten how to care.

Perhaps we have forgotten how to see.

A version of this post was originally published on Substack, Aug. 16, 2026

Banner image: Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the film To Kill a Mockingbird, (1962), Universal Pictures/eBay, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain