Why Do We Understand Each Other Less?

Never in the history of humanity have we had access to so much information about one another. And never have we misunderstood one another so thoroughly.

Every day, reports, numbers, images and analyses flood our smartphones. We travel, we exchange, we see with our own eyes. The volume of information is unprecedented, and yet the incomprehension between Europe and China, as between so many other societies, keeps growing. More knowledge does not produce more closeness. Sometimes it seems to achieve the opposite. Why?

Scratching the surface

The reason lies deeper than bad will or insufficient knowledge. Already in the 1960s, communication science showed that the simple model of a sender transmitting information to a receiver does not capture reality. Information, even facts, is never passed on neutrally and never understood identically. Yet the belief persists that different societies essentially grasp the same facts in the same way. This assumption is false. Every society inserts information into its own order of reality.

Every human being and every society needs a stable sense of who they are and how the world works. Someone entering a dark cave for the first time feels fear. Someone who has already seen it with light feels safer. This feeling is not mere opinion, it is the precondition for orientation and action. When new information threatens that fundamental sense of security, it is rarely examined with cool detachment. It is reinterpreted, deflected or arranged so that psychological safety remains intact.

Nowhere is this clearer than in politics. When a European absorbs the definition of communism shaped by historical and personal experience, that definition sinks deep. One believes one has known all one’s life what communism means, a concept that does not work. Every subsequent piece of information is sorted according to that definition. When communism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) turns out to be something quite different, namely successful, it simply does not feel like communism. One tries to force it into other existing emotional categories.

Communication and new information are therefore less an exchange of facts than a continuous confirmation of one’s own order of reality. Suddenly accepting, after decades, that communism in China is successful and perhaps the more effective model of governance would painfully assault the learned and emotionally anchored reality. In extreme cases, people lose their bearings, their sense that anything still coheres. Depression, anger or anxiety follow.

And the more emotional the world situation becomes through chaos and crisis, the harder it is for this kind of “deviant” information to find fertile ground. The willingness to take it in shrinks, and people cling more desperately to existing definitions. For instance, when “the good” suddenly do “evil,” or “the evil” suddenly appear as “the good:” this presents a “contradiction” of sorts, one that produces only further confusion.

Every civilization has its own way of telling stories and turning information into meaning. The European tradition leans toward linear, causal narratives. The individual stands at the center, and everything must have a concrete, “logical” outcome. Either it is day or it is night. There is little room for what lies between. Definitions remain rigid. This produces great stability, because the world of belief stays the same for decades, the same definitions, the same feelings for words.

Chinese narrative culture thinks more strongly in terms of networks of relationships and historical embedding. Not the isolated subject that stands in the foreground, but what is coherent, actionable and compatible with the longer arc of history in a given moment. Contradictions are accepted with clarity. China united socialism and the concept of a free market economy, resulting in a socialist market economy that combines market dynamism with state guidance. For many Europeans, blending both is unthinkable, like mixing fire with water. For the Chinese, steeped in Marxist dialectics, it is ordinary daily life to find practical solutions and solve real world problems with it.

An ongoing process of adaptation

“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is, in this logic of contradiction, an ongoing process of adaptation. If one does not live it every day, it is cognitively almost impossible to grasp. The great difficulty is that today’s China has no precedent. No nation has ever lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty, realized colossal infrastructure projects and simultaneously helped build the world through initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative, which boosts connectivity along and beyond the ancient Silk Road routes. Every attempt to fit facts about China into existing emotional worlds collides with the mental overload of abandoning old concepts and acknowledging the victory of the PRC, or the victory of communism.

Other traditions reveal similar differences. In many African ways of thinking, the philosophy of Ubuntu stands at the center, “I am because we are.” In Arab-Islamic narratives, revelation and the embedding of the individual in a greater order play a decisive role. There is therefore no objectively neutral, universally shared way of transforming information into reality.

These differences carry the feelings of entire generations within them. China’s handling of external narratives, for example, is still strongly shaped by the legacy of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45). The emotional echo remains tangible, and much that concerns Japan continues to be framed by that historical trauma, especially since Japan largely continues to deny its cruel past.

Today digital platforms further intensify this emotional sensitivity. They favor content that generates emotional security and belonging, and they form closed narrative spaces. Information then serves less the joint examination of the outside world than the confirmation of one’s own fundamental order. There were times of greater common ground, for instance during World War II, when the experience of occupation and resistance raised similar existential questions. Today, Europe and China inhabit denser, more self-referential narrative worlds. What lies close to one’s own assumptions and historical feelings is absorbed. What lies far away is reinterpreted or read in separated ways of understanding.

A new form of understanding

Genuine understanding therefore does not begin with the demand that we share the same gaze. It begins with the recognition that societies possess different ways of telling stories and turning information into meaning. Truth here does not mean first and foremost correspondence with an external fact, but inner coherence within a historically grown order. As long as we pretend there is only one single, easily accessible reality that merely needs enough information, we will continue talking past one another.

Europe, China and the world at large need a form of understanding that does not deny this difference. That requires not another flood of information, but attention to the inner logic of the other way of narrating. One must ask what story a piece of information triggers in another space, and recognize one’s own narrative world for what it is: a powerful yet limited edifice of meaning, security and enduring historical emotion.

The author is a promoter of China-Germany exchange in the fields of business, academia and politics. He is pursuing a Ph.D. at Peking University’s New Media Research Institute.