Consumerism favours the culture of the disposable, excessive extroversion, and superficiality. Data manipulation, the shadow of information technology, harms individual and collective lives. In a world filled with prejudice, intolerance, violence and social inequality, nature is neglected putting our survival at risk. The lack of appreciation for subjectivity and self-knowledge and the demand for greater performance foster physical and emotional problems expressed through anxiety, depression, anguish and burnout.

It is thus urgent to develop a pattern of consciousness that allows us to overcome polarization and cope with the opposites by the means of dialogue and an appreciation of the dialectical and symmetrical relationship between the polarities. Carlos Byington, in his symbolic psychology, named this the archetypal pattern of alterity, and considered it the basis of solidarity, respect for difference, democracy and sustainability.