I remember reading Marx's Manifesto (translated into English) and Hitler's Mein Kampf and Mao's Little Red Book (also translated) because it was historical, it was relevant, it was insightful to understand the core systems/concepts behind political/economic/social thought processes that were on the global stage. If you can't be bother to try to understand how another person, another society sees itself, sees how things work in the world, then why should they be bothered to try to understand how you see things? And if neither of you are going to take those basic first steps (to see and understand how you are similar AND where you are different) then you will always fear, misunderstand and distrust them, even when they are not being hostile. It's not so much a matter of "know your enemy, know thyself" (which is important), as much as it is to understand that while we like to imagine the world as opposing forces (hot/cold, up/down, right/wrong, 1/0, etc.) that there are places and times when things are not just "this OR that" but "this, and this, and this, and this, and this, ..." and they aren't digital, they are analog and biological. And so, nothing is so carved in stone and even stone is not permanent. Marx had insights. Some brilliant, some flawed. To treat any document as "truth" is to then label all other documents (especially those that disagree or raise different points) as "lies". That is the trap of treating everything as binary, as polar, as opposites. Nature does polarize, but we do it even more, in our desire to recognize patterns and try to use them to predict the future.