Chapter 7. LEARN FROM DIFFICULT BEHAVIORS

If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot, many plots. But the more you invent enemy plots, to exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love with them, and you pattern your own on their model. You attribute to the others what you're doing yourself, and since what you're doing yourself is hateful, the others become hateful. But since the others, as a rule, would like to do the same hateful thing that you're doing, they collaborate with you, hinting that—yes—what you attribute to them is actually what they have always desired.

——Umberto Eco

In this passage, novelist and semiologist Umberto Eco reveals an essential yet hidden truth about our conflicts: we create our opponents in our own image, and are created by them in return. When we are in conflict and feel hatred, fear, guilt, or grief, we may externalize these feelings and attribute them to our opponents as intentions, assigning to them the actions, purposes, and motivations we imagine are responsible for what we have experienced.