I was talking to a friend the other day when we stumbled upon something obvious, but which I had never thought about before. When people usually talk about relationships, business or otherwise, they often refer to the necessity for the parties involved to have shared values. But I think there is a meta-value that is often overlooked: that of valuing those shared values over the differences that are inevitable among any group of people.

Why hadn’t I thought about this before? Well, the answer is simple: I assumed that the presence of shared values would be apparent, and that people would, by default, focus on these over the differences.

I was wrong. Even a cursory look through history would reveal groups of people fighting each other when they had more in common than differences. The English and the Scottish, for example. Or Catholics and protestants. It seems that the more similar people are, the more likely they are to focus on their differences.

I suppose this is part of a struggle for identity. When an individual or a group is developing an identity, it has to do two things: identify its own values, and also identify what differentiates it from other entities. As such, when there is too much similarity between two such entities, the process of identifying the demarcations of identities takes more (almost inordinate) precedence over that of identifying and appreciating values. This would lead to the inordinate focus on whatever differences may be found – no matter how tiny or inconsequential. Sigmund Freud, in his essay “Civilisation and its discontents”, called this the “narcissism of small differences”.

There are many reasons why any group of people may be divided, but this realization provides an interesting framework to understand some of these divisions, especially when it seems like the parties involved agree on many things and should be focusing on those things instead.

This is not to say that there is never any legitimate reason for conflict, or that what unites people should always triumph over what separates them. Sometimes the parties involved share little in terms of values, and there are legitimate reasons for conflict. There is a skill to discerning the degree to which we share common values with the people with whom we are in relationship.

There are two useful takeaways from this. First of all, that we need, as a society develop the judgment and practical wisdom necessary to distinguish between the major and the minor issues that we face. Secondly, any group of people trying to foster unity between its constituents would do well not only to emphasize the common values they share, but also to re-orient themselves to prize the things they have in common over their differences.