THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY

On mixing, creativity, and the cost of sameness.

Culture ・ By Denis O'Dwyer

There is a concept in Jungian psychology called the inferior function: the least developed of our psychological modes, the one we most neglect, the one that makes us uncomfortable. Jung believed that this function, precisely because it sits outside the reach of ego control, contains our most potent creative energy. It is wild because it has not been trained out of us. It is powerful because it has not been spent.

I keep coming back to this idea. Not in any formal sense, not in a consulting room, but in the emergency department at 2am, in the sauna after a long shift, walking Melbourne streets before anyone else is awake. Jung was pointing at something larger than psychology. He was describing a principle that holds everywhere: what we push to the margins is often what we most need.

I love Melbourne the way you love something you chose rather than inherited. It is a city that does not brand alternative points of view as contrarian. It celebrates them as art. Walk through Fitzroy on a Tuesday morning and you will pass a Sri Lankan café, a Sudanese barber, a Korean ceramics studio, and a pub that has been serving the same regulars since 1963. Melbourne’s flat sprawl, its hodge-podge tram lines joining each part of the city to every other, ensures a kind of promiscuous connectivity. People live beside people of other castes, creeds, denominations, and are reminded, quietly and daily, that those people are not so different from themselves.

This is not sentimentality. It is structural, with real functional consequences. The same logic that makes a diversified financial portfolio more resilient makes a diversified city more generative. Security comes from spread, not concentration. Options multiply. Things become possible that a monoculture would never produce.

“Only the best ideas and concepts last, as they have been fittest to survive, and most are the result of connecting dots that, at first glance, don’t seem joinable.”

Gutenberg did not invent printing from nothing. He combined his knowledge of wine presses with his knowledge of coin-stamping to produce something neither technology had been built to do. It was not a discovery so much as a collision: two separate competencies meeting at an angle, producing a third thing entirely. A man who only knew about wine, or only about coins, would not have got there.

I see this in medicine. The most interesting clinicians I have worked with are not necessarily the most encyclopaedic. They are the ones who come in sideways: the emergency physician who trained as an engineer first, the intensivist who spent a year working in West Africa, the paediatrician who plays jazz on weekends. That laterality of experience gives them a range that the monocultural specialist, however brilliant, simply does not have. They see colours others miss.

When we mix, we allow for the creation of new colours. If we rely on the same ones to give us something different, we remain colourblind. And this colourblindness, this insistence on purity, on staying within the lines of tribe or tradition or discipline, leads eventually to something worse than stagnation. It leads to a kind of violence. An eye for an eye is the logic of a closed system.

Jung understood this. His entire theoretical system is, at its core, an argument against psychic monoculture. Individuation, the central project of Jungian psychology, is not the refinement of what you already are. It is the integration of what you have refused to be. The shadow, the anima, the inferior function: these are all names for the parts of the self that have been exiled in the name of coherence. The price of that exile is a contracted life. The reward of integration is something closer to wholeness.

He also understood that this process requires contact. “The meeting of two personalities,” he wrote, “is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” Transformation is not possible in isolation. You cannot become more whole by surrounding yourself with reflections of what you already are. You need friction. You need the genuinely foreign.

I facilitate a men’s group on Wednesday mornings. We meet before the working day begins, in the particular honesty that exists before anyone has had to perform anything yet. What strikes me every time is how much energy comes loose when men who would not otherwise occupy the same room are given space, time, interest, and something genuinely rare in adult male life: love. Not sentiment. Not mutual back-slapping. The kind of love that makes room for the parts of a person that have not been allowed to speak.

When that happens, something shifts. A person stops performing competence and starts expressing themselves. They become what I can only describe as a kinetic force. They move. They change things. Not because they were told to, but because the conditions for it were finally present.

Tradition and family values can be respected and celebrated. Continuity matters. But there is a difference between honouring where you came from and using it as a wall against everything outside it. When tradition curls inward, when it becomes consanguinity, a closing of ranks, a maintenance of wealth and status through sameness, it stops being culture and starts being calcification. Culture is born out of freedom: the ability to express yourself, to say what you actually think, to bring what is genuinely yours into contact with what is genuinely someone else’s.

That contact is where everything interesting happens. Not in the centre of what we know, but at the edges, at the borders between disciplines, cities, people, selves. The inferior function. The unfamiliar street. The stranger across the table who turns out, on closer inspection, to be a version of you that circumstances arranged differently.

Diversity is not a concession. It is the mechanism. It is how the new enters the world.