Cluster-phobia

"Our friends, neighbors, colleagues, family - if all the people in our inner circle resemble us, it means we are surrounded with our mirror image. It's not healthy for a human being to spend too much time staring at his own reflection. Communities of the like-minded is one of the greatest dangers of today's globalized world. We form clusters based on similarity and then we form stereotypes about other clusters."

http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction.html

I need to post this TED talk here so that every time I look back over this blog, I might watch it again. This woman has just rocked my world, because until now I have thought that I'm a broad-minded individual who appreciates diversity. But after listening to her speak I've realized that most of my friends are like me: we have the same views on religion, politics, and other spheres that tend to group people into divisive clusters. My friendships here in Korea haven't been quite as clusterrific as the ones in Chicago or Bloomington, but that's because they were initially formed on survivalist instincts.

I am now more grateful for my friends and family who are unlike me, and I encourage those who are reading this to ponder what I am calling "clusterphobia." Many people have claustrophobia, and can you blame them? Shouldn't we be afraid of enclosed spaces that make us feel suffocated?

It doesn't appear that "cluster" and the Latin root "claustrum" have the same etymology (although that kind of linguistic consonance would have been sweet!), but enclosing ourselves in a community of like-minded individuals can be just as scary and inhibiting, especially when we are oblivious to how it's preventing us from thinking and imagining freely. I think we should all be afraid of the damaging effects of our clusters and instead challenge ourselves to look for the aspects of our humanity that connect us. Yeah, we may disagree on what happens to us after death, but can we at least acknowledge that we all are united in searching for that answer? And we disagree on how to govern ourselves, but don't we also idolize many historical figures who had different viewpoints from our own?

These our just my thoughts, and I in no way expect you to agree with them. But please do share your own, because I now have a severe case of clusterphobia.