Parenting & Family Quote by Samuel West

West is sneaking a civic manifesto into a soft, actorly observation about kids at play. He starts with the lure: children "love the idea" of multiplicity - different words, different worlds - because novelty is pleasurable, but also because it grants power. Naming things differently is a kind of backstage access to reality. Once you realize that language is a set of choices, not a single natural law, the door opens to empathy and to skepticism about anyone claiming their version is the only one.

The hinge is pretend. West treats role-play not as escapism but as training: a rehearsal space where identity becomes flexible. That’s an actor’s bias, yes, but it’s also a cultural argument about how prejudice forms. Hate often feeds on distance and on lazy categories; pretending to be "other people" forces a child to do the one thing bigotry tries to avoid - inhabit motive. Even briefly, even imperfectly, you have to ask: What does this person want? What scares them? What do they know that I don’t?

The line "the harder it is" is doing work, too. West isn’t selling a fairy-tale cure; he’s describing a friction that makes cruelty less convenient. The subtext is an indictment of adult life: we educate children out of play, out of languages, out of viewpoint-switching, then act surprised when misunderstanding hardens into ideology. In a moment shaped by culture-war simplifications and algorithmic sorting, his point lands as both hopeful and pointed: empathy isn’t a trait you either have or don’t; it’s a practice you can lose.