The sickness of xenophobia

"[Herodotus] understood that to know ourselves we have to know Others, who act as the mirror in which we see ourselves reflected; he knew that to understand ourselves better we have to understand Others, to compare ourselves with them, to measure ourselves against them. As a citizen of the world, he did not believe that we should isolate ourselves from Others, or slam the gates in their faces. Xenophobia, Herodotus implied, is a sickness of people who are scared, suffering an inferiority complex, terrified by the prospect of seeing themselves in the mirror of the culture of Others. And his entire book is a solid construction of mirrors in which we keep getting a better and clearer view of, above all, Greece and the Greeks."

--Ryszard Kapuściński, The Other (New York : Verso, 2008), pg. 19.

This quote brings to mind Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo's descriptions of a string of exotic Asian cities turn out to be the layers of a vision of his native city in Italy.