10d (edited) • General discussion
Can we understand a person we never met?
The short course “The World as a Village of 100 People” is structured around four weekends each with their own theme. Last time I wrote about week one - Orientation. We looked at and discussed the data, the statistics, the cold architecture of global inequality. This week we moved into something harder to measure: Imagination.
CAN WE UNDERSTAND A PERSON WE NEVER MET?
It sounds like such a simple question, but it isn’t.
Most of us move through life in circles of sameness. We build relationships with people who share our education level, our income bracket, our ethnicity, our worldview. Even when we think we’re being open, the algorithms of social media are quietly doing the opposite. They push us deeper into our own corner, reinforcing what we already believe, showing us more of what we already see.
The concept of ubuntu — I am because we are — tells us that we are incomplete without the other. A person is a person through other people. But which people? And how do we reach the ones we never encounter? Because even our imagination has its limits. It is shaped by what we have lived, what we have read, what we have been allowed to see. We don’t imagine freely, we imagine from somewhere. And that somewhere is always, unavoidably, ourselves.
This is where the course introduced an idea that stayed with me long after the session ended. Most non-fiction is written in first or third person. "I experienced this." "She lived through that." The reader remains at a safe distance. Moved, perhaps, but separate. Second person is much rarer, and for good reason: it is uncomfortable. “You wake up before dawn.” “You fold a torn page carefully into the seam of your pants because you have no bag, no shelf, no box of your own.”
Suddenly there is no distance. The grammar has placed you inside someone else’s life before you decided whether you were ready to go there. It doesn’t ask permission. It just takes you. But here is the question that unsettled me: is that understanding, or is it a literary trick? The immersion feels real. The empathy feels genuine. And yet, circumstances haven’t changed. Only the reader’s comfort has.
I know this from experience, because this is exactly what happened to me during the course. Our homework was to take a villager profile — a statistical composite — and imagine a person behind it. Mine was a boy, aged between five and nine, living in rural poverty. Literate. No internet. No adequate sanitation. Life expectancy of 68.
My imagination named him Hassan. I placed him in the Middle East. I gave him a grandmother who once dreamed of becoming a writer. An uncle called Ammou whose delivery truck I could almost hear rumbling down a dusty road. A best friend named Abdul, with whom he shared the secret of a torn page of unknown origin. A fragment of a larger story, edges ragged, words half-missing, that the two of them spent their days turning into worlds. I gave him a sister, Aisha, who doesn’t go to school. Who waits for him every afternoon, eyes bright, because he brings the story home to her. Because that is what he does. Hassan is a storyteller; not despite his circumstances, but because of them.
Writing Hassan felt meaningful. It felt like understanding. And yet, Aisha still doesn’t go to school. Grandma still swallowed her dream. Uncle Ammou still holds a family together on a truck driver’s wage. I wrote a story that tried to honour their dignity but it changed nothing about the circumstances of the Hassans and Aishas in the real world.
This is where the Inner Development Goals become relevant. The IDG framework argues that inner capacities like humility, curiosity, and perspective-taking, are prerequisites for addressing global challenges. And I believe that. The imagination that built Hassan wasn’t a feeling, it was a discipline. It took asking questions about what I didn’t know, sitting with uncertainty, making deliberate choices rather than projecting my own experience onto someone else’s life. That kind of imagination, practiced with humility and curiosity, is where genuine understanding begins. It is not nothing. It matters that we try to reach across the distance rather than stay comfortably inside our own circles.
But, and this is the tension I carry with me from everything I’ve learned since leaving the corporate world, inner development is necessary but not sufficient. Humility alone doesn’t build a school for Aisha. Curiosity alone doesn’t extend Hassan’s life expectancy beyond 68. Perspective-taking alone doesn’t dismantle the systems that made their circumstances what they are.
The right kind of imagination, practiced with humility and curiosity, is where understanding begins. The question is: what do we do next with that understanding?
Next weekend the course moves into Transformation. I don’t know yet what that will bring. But I’m arriving with that question in my pocket.
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Can we understand a person we never met?
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