SOLIDARITY IS NOT PITY. IT IS RESPONSIBILITY.

Opinion by Ligia Koijen Ramos | CEO of In2motivation 

A few years ago, in an apparently banal conversation, I noticed something I have never managed to forget. Someone was talking about helping another person and said, proudly, that they had done everything they could. The sentence is beautiful. Socially impeccable.

But, while listening to it, I thought: what does it actually mean to do everything we can? Does it mean doing what does not make us too uncomfortable? Giving what we have left over? Getting close without ever getting close enough to feel the reality of the other person alter our own life?

Perhaps that was when I began to distrust a certain idea of solidarity.

Not solidarity as a human gesture, but solidarity transformed into moral performance. The kind that needs a photograph in order to exist, someone vulnerable on the other side to confirm our own goodness. Solidarity that helps without asking. That decides without listening. That offers what it wants to offer rather than what the other person needs. And that, many times, keeps the other person at a distance so that we can continue to “help them” without them ever ceasing to be “those who need help”.

For me, solidarity begins precisely when that distance disappears.

It does not mean imagining that we are all the same. We are not. We have different bodies, different histories, different abilities, different money, different networks, different opportunities and different levels of power that are profoundly unequal. Pretending that inequality does not exist is not humanity. It is a comfortable form of blindness.

Solidarity is recognising that difference without turning anyone into an inferior.

And this is where, for me, the word comes very close to responsibility rather than charity.

Charity can exist from above downwards. Solidarity cannot. There is no solidarity that interests me if it begins with: “What can I do for you because I feel sorry for you?” The question has to be: “What is happening to you, what do you need, and what part of this reality also concerns me?”

This difference may seem small in language. In life, it is enormous.

Our brain loves categories. It is one of the ways through which it reduces complexity and anticipates the world. We create “us” and “them”, familiar and strange, safe and threatening. These processes do not automatically make us bad people; they are part of the way the brain organises information. The problem begins when we confuse a quick categorisation with a truth about someone’s value.

When a person becomes “the homeless person”, “the refugee”, “the autistic person”, “the widow”, “the poor person”, “the sick person”, “the victim”, we stop easily encountering a person and begin relating to a category.

And categories do not have desires. People do.

Categories do not have contradictions. People do.

Categories do not force us to meet anyone. They allow us to construct a quick story about someone without listening to their story.

Perhaps that is why I distrust solidarity that does not include curiosity. Good intentions are not enough. We can hurt someone with excellent intentions. We can take away someone’s autonomy while telling ourselves that we are protecting them. We can silence someone while claiming to give them a voice. We can decide for someone while repeating that we are defending their rights.

Good intentions do not absolve us from impact.

This principle runs through practically everything I believe about communication, leadership, neurodivergence, education and human relationships.

It is not enough to want to do good. We need to observe the effect of what we do. We need to calibrate. We need to be willing to discover that our solution does not work. And then do something that our ego does not always appreciate: change.

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming, I learned early on to observe the response instead of falling in love with the intention or the message. If I communicate and the other person does not understand me, I can insist that I was perfectly clear. Or I can recognise that the communication is not what I explain or what I say; it also includes what happens in the system between us.

In solidarity, the same applies.

If my help humiliates, controls, infantilises or creates dependency unnecessarily, I cannot hide forever behind the phrase “but I only wanted to help”.

Philosophy adds another layer. It forces us to ask not only what we do, but who we become through what we do. Solidarity is not measured by the number of campaigns we organise in December. It is measured by the way we treat people when no one is watching. It is measured by the architecture of our systems. By the school. By work. By public health. By the way we distribute access, power, time and possibility.

It is relatively easy to be supportive during a visible emergency. Much more difficult is to build conditions so that some emergencies cease to be inevitable.

And this is one of my greatest concerns: we often confuse solidarity with reaction.

We wait for someone to fall before offering a hand. But we rarely ask who designed the floor.

We run campaigns for exhausted families, but we do not discuss the systems that leave those families exhausted for years. We celebrate the inclusion of a disabled person, but we maintain environments built for a single type of body, brain and communication. We talk about mental health and then create working cultures where exhaustion is treated as proof of commitment. We give children systems in which belonging depends too often on behaving within an extremely narrow idea of normality.

Then we appear with solidarity to repair what our normality helped to produce.

That is not enough.

For this reason, I often speak of belonging rather than inclusion. Inclusion can mean that someone has built the house and then, generously, opens the door to let in someone who was outside. Belonging forces a different question: who participated in building the house? Who decided where the doors would be? Who defined what was necessary in order to enter?

This is particularly evident when I think about neurodivergence.

For far too long, helping neurodivergent people meant trying to bring their behaviour closer to what was considered normal. The intention might have been integration. The result, many times, was to demand unilateral adaptation. The person learned to tolerate environments that harmed them, to hide natural forms of regulation, to communicate in ways that cost them immense energy and to appear comfortable so that others could continue to feel comfortable.

I do not consider that solidarity.

Solidarity is also redesigning the environment.

And asking whether the other person really needs to be “fixed”. If the meeting needs that structure. If talking is the only legitimate form of communication. If looking into someone’s eyes is necessary to demonstrate attention. If a child needs to learn to tolerate everything or whether adults can learn to create intelligent conditions. It is understanding that accessibility is not a favour done to a minority. It is the quality of human design.

The same principle applies to leadership.

An organisation is not supportive because it makes an annual donation while exploiting people’s emotional availability every day. It is not humane because it writes “people first” on the wall. It is not responsible because it creates a mental-health week after eleven months of practices that damage relationships, destroy trust and reward silence.

Corporate solidarity, if we want to use the expression, begins much earlier.

It begins with the decision a leader makes when no one else is in the room.

In the way power is used.

In the courage to turn vulnerability into strategic information rather than weakness.

In the possibility of saying “I don’t know” without losing status.

In the way a company reacts when someone needs something that was not foreseen in the manual.

That is when values stop being words.

I have a perhaps somewhat romantic view of humanity: I do not believe that being human means always being gentle, available, balanced or altruistic. We are contradictory. We can love and be angry. We can want to help and be tired. We can be generous one day and profoundly self-centred in our own suffering the next. For me, humanity is not moral perfection. It is the capacity to recognise our influence within the system and take responsibility for it.

And that is why I also dislike guilt as the engine of solidarity.

Guilt can produce movement, but it rarely produces relationships. Many campaigns depend on showing suffering, increasing discomfort and offering a quick action to relieve that discomfort. The person donates, shares, signs, posts. The discomfort decreases. And life continues.

I prefer hope with responsibility.

Hope not as naïve optimism. Hope as the perception of possibility. If something can be different, then there is room for action. And if there is room for action, the question stops being “whose fault is it?” and becomes “what can we do now with what we know?”

That question interests me much more.

It also does not mean that solidarity requires permanent self-sacrifice. That is another dangerous distortion. There are people who have been taught to prove love by disappearing themselves. To care until exhaustion. To say yes when they no longer have a body, time or resources to continue. That is not a sustainable model of human relationships.

A system in which one person can only survive because another destroys themselves is not supportive. It is a badly designed system.

And this is where the vision becomes simple. Solidarity is not proving that we are good. It is deciding that another person’s dignity enters into our decisions. It is asking before assuming. It is dividing the weight when the weight has become too heavy for one person alone.

I do not want a solidarity of saviours. I want a solidarity of relationship and responsibility.

Perhaps the question is this: when someone crosses our life, do they find more space to exist, or less?