There are very few things my football coach and philosophy professor agreed on. One of them is this: find the threat, and you’ll find the future.
The biggest threat of an opposing team's offense is not so much their fastest player, their star quarterback, or their shifty running back. Rather, the biggest threat are the gaps in our defense that will be exposed during the game. The future success of the team is to be aware enough of our weaknesses to acknowledge them and focus on their development.
The threat to our ideologies is not necessarily opposing ideologies. Ideologies are easily fortified. Rather, the biggest threat is the potential discomfort of uncovering how tenuous (or prejudice, narrow, circumstantial, blind, etc.) our own ideology is. The future work worth doing is entering that discomfort and reckoning with the unhealth.
Whether it's football or life, our future work is to find our own weaknesses—not that group’s or those people's problems—and begin by stepping into the discomfort.
