This week many of us spent hours watching blue pixels on our screens turning red and red pixels turning blue. Not watching waves, or leaves, or hearing the gentle winds of change.
In these blue and red pixels, we saw hope, fear, expectation, exhaustion. The world is transfixed by this two-colour scheme that holds the power to obliterate and change so many destinies.
Blue vs. Red
When listening to pundits they like to have us believe that there are such things as red states and blue states in America (and elsewhere). But using the binary red/blue filter when looking at human beings is a distortion.
A purple world
Purple splits into the fractious red and blue only when you force people and their views through a course, lo-res ‘raster.’ The electoral district map is the artificial reticule that is used to measure and mark the geography. This low-resolution view swaps between clear blue and clear red even if there is only a 0.01% difference in their values.
John Nelson has done excellent work in dispelling the myth that things are so cut and dried. His first visualisation was based on a pixel per vote (Between Obama and Romney in 2012).
When you use a higher re-solution, the red and blue blend into a sea of purple.
Artificial Polarity
Red vs. Blue is a dangerous oversimplification. We have experience in what happens when people are forced through this artificial sorting grate; filtering them into different tribes, based on a hyper emphasis of small variations.
When the Belgian colonists arrived in Rwanda, they drove an arbitrary wall between neighbours. Inventing an ethnic divide, a tribal identification as ‘Hutu’ or ‘Tutsi’ made the difference between access to education, access to government jobs or being condemned to subsistence farming.
This stark emphasis of splitting the colour spectrum along a fissure that was not there, ultimately led to a deeply divided nation ruined in genocide.
"There are no different tribes or race groups in Rwanda. In fact, we can't even talk about Hutu and Tutsi as ethnic groups, as they share the same language and culture. There is some speculation that the words, hundreds of years ago, 'Hutu' and 'Tutsi' referred to occupation. The one group worked more in the fields and the other looked after cows, or to class differences. But there are definitely not tribes or race groups in Rwanda."
Recent research in America indicated that 38% said they would be ‘Very Upset’ or ‘Somewhat upset’ if their child married someone from the opposite political party (It held true for both democrats and republicans). Artificial tribes, denouncing the experience of ‘the other.’
Screen your resolution
When you sit too close to your screen the image breaks down into Red, Green and Blue pixels. When we focus on counting the blue and red pixels we’ll never understand the beautiful scene that emerges when they are all combined.
A pixel mentality destroys the underlying meaning.
The German word for resolution – ‘Auflösung’ – also means ‘to dissolve.’ When blue and red dissolve into purple, they are not denying or rejecting their individual values when purple emerges, they are creating it exactly due to their differences. Purple is their re-solution.
The whole honours the individual by transcending it. And revealing the common source.
‘Resolved’ humanity
We are a single pixel on the screen. A little white dot that contains every breath, memory or ambition that has ever existed. Every nation, identity and culture. One clear pixel, unified in the destiny of our collective efforts to change, survive and thrive.
Respect and mutual appreciation allow the egos to dissolve, to find re-solution. Our colour purple. The mutual, resolved, source where we can produce a whole, beyond our individual colour blinded-ness.
Let’s take that leap.
I’ll be taking part in a Startupnight 2020 panel discussion on 24 November: “New Normal needs New Business.”
You can sign up HERE to view for free.