I certainly don’t mean to say people should shed their ideas, or that we should be starlings that flock together.
But I do think it’s important to see humanity as one species, one people, who have most things in common and thrive by working together constructively.
That’s why I feel it’s important to seek to understand the people who see the world differently than you, rather than just exist in blind opposition to them.
When we let our ideology define who we are it becomes a religion, and world history has plenty of examples of people taking religious ideology as a reason to blindly oppose and eventually wage literal war on “the other.”
Meanwhile, healthy mutual tolerance comes from seeking to understand and then arranging life in such a way that each person can have their own ideas and worldview without needing to quash the others.
To me that feels like just a description of liberal philosophy, so it’s surprising I most often have this conversation with friends leaning far left who are so angry they are thinking more in terms of how to wage a war than how to find a workable mutual tolerance.