Stories that kill

By Jason Lim

When someone asks me what my race is in the U.S., I reply that I am an Asian American. When someone asks my Indian-American friend what his race is, he also says that he's an Asian American. We are both be correct in the U.S.

However, when we are asked the same question in Singapore, for example, we might not answer it in the same way. I might reply that I am a Korean while he might reply that he's an Indian. Nothing has changed about us. The location and the cultural boundaries that define our physical looks have changed, so our internal stories about who we are adapt to the local cultural taxonomy.

I bring this up because I have been involved in examining the potential racial bias in facial recognition algorithms, and the following question always strikes me: what does it mean for an algorithm to be biased against Asian Americans when both my Indian friend and I self-identity as such? This same question applies to any other racial groups. Follow that question deep enough, and you will realize that all sociocultural, or even supposedly biological, belongings are essentially stories about ourselves that we create in the context of larger, surrounding stories.

Essentially, stories are all we are. Stories are the foundational particles and waves of our lives and world. They don't exist independent of one another and come together to form something substantive. They come together first and substantiate later as a result of their coming together.

The theory of narrative identity claims that "individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of the self that provides the individual with a sense of unity and purpose in life." Exactly! We are internal stories that rhyme and undulate with the times as we come into contact with other stories that are sometimes harmonious or cacophonous with our own.

When the old Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world tried to guess what the next conflict fault lines would be. Among them, we had Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" and Samuel Huffington's "Clash of Civilizations" in which he divided the world into various cultural and civilizational zones.

Despite having been over 30 years since the fall, the jury is still out on whether these prophesies are correct. Events, not necessarily history, over the last twenty years seemed to both support and contradict these educated guesses. When the verdict finally comes in, it will take a while, and I won't be around to hear it.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, however, got me thinking about what defines these cultures, civilizations or even political ideologies along which conflicts are supposed to rise. If we are to take sides against one another based on these boundaries and features, I would like to know what these are made up of.

What's the nature of the substance that make up these civilizations, cultures, or any other self-defining group identities that are strong enough for us to overcome our common human bondage and kill or maim each other. Asking this question in Korea is all the more poignant because Korea has directly experienced in her modern era a fratricidal war that killed over three million people in three years. Same culture. Same civilization. Same look. Same relatives, even. But still we killed.

Listening to Putin's grandiose, jingoistic and almost religious accounting of the reasons behind his war against Ukraine was both enlightening and depressingly familiar. It wasn't unlike the rhetoric we hear from other autocrats around the world who rule by gestating the deep-seated ethnocentric resentment always pregnant in the dark psychological chasm between what had been and what could be again, colored by romantic idealism of the past glory and future grandeur.

These leaders weaponize history for their own power and sense of grandiosity. So trite, yet so repeatedly effective. We were great once. We can be great again. It's our rightful place in the world. I can take you there if only you help me fight against these "others" who are keeping us down unfairly.

It reminded me once again that history is really a story that enough people have been conditioned to believe about their particular group identity or geographical location to have the power to bring people together for a common cause. In fact, that's what these civilizations, cultures and ideologies are made up of: stories that, in the wrong hands, have the power to kill

As we have seen over the last week, some stories have killed. Young Russian boys who have nothing against Ukrainian boys, girls, children, mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers are now killing and being killed for the sake of one man's need to validate his story.

Fortunately, stories also obey the third law of thermodynamics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every story that kills, there is a story that saves. Let us be active witnesses to those stories that save us ― from ourselves.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.