The yogic tradition understood this with remarkable precision. The concept of saṅga, the company we keep and the environment we inhabit, is not treated as peripheral to practice. It is foundational.
You cannot spend years immersed in violence, contempt, fear, or cynicism without those qualities leaving an impression on the mind. Likewise, proximity to wisdom, integrity, kindness, and restraint gradually shapes us in the direction of those qualities. We are, in ways both visible and invisible, always becoming what we repeatedly behold.
This is what makes the dehumanization of others so spiritually destructive. It harms not only those who are targeted, but also those who participate in it.
When leaders suggest that superiority can be built through hatred, people begin constructing walls of division in an attempt to feel safe, significant, or seen. Fear becomes tribalism. Tribalism becomes ideology. Ideology becomes permission to treat another human being as less than human.
Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner demonstrated how easily this process begins. Their research showed that simply assigning people to different groups can generate bias against those perceived as outsiders. We do not need generations of conflict to begin treating others as enemies. We need only a story that convinces us our well-being depends on someone else’s diminishment.
Once we begin defending the glass castle built from ego, identity, and the illusion of power, we often protect it even when it harms us.
History demonstrates this repeatedly. People will defend systems that diminish their own humanity if those systems also provide someone else to blame.
The Sanskrit word avidyā, often translated as ignorance, is described in the Yoga Sutras as the root of suffering. Yet this is not the ignorance that comes from lacking information. It is the deeper confusion that arises when we mistake what is constructed for what is real.
It is the confusion between genuine strength and the performance of strength. Between true belonging and the temporary comfort of shared contempt. Between wisdom and certainty.
Modern cognitive science describes something similar through the concept of identity-protective cognition: the tendency to reject information that threatens our existing sense of self. We are not merely attached to our beliefs. We are attached to the identity those beliefs help us maintain.
When we mistake the glass castle for solid ground, we will sacrifice almost anything to keep it standing.
Yet yoga insists that avidyā can be seen through. What has been conditioned can be examined. What has been unconsciously inherited can be questioned. The veil can thin. The patterns that shape us can become visible.
