The first is honesty. There can be no healing or reconciliation without honesty, at a personal or national level. In South Africa the remarkable progress towards a more just society has gone along with a willingness to face the past. A Council, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has been conducting a painful process of national self-examination. People have been willing to come forward, from all sides, to acknowledge their part in the fears and terror that fuelled hatred and repression.
Reconciliation begins with honesty about the past and the truth about oneself.
Secondly - truth. In an uncertain world it is comforting to adopt a viewpoint that can claim to be absolutely and fully the truth. Such a stance brings security, but at the cost of real truth. So often, fragments of the truth are grasped and made into a whole. This is the basis of fundamentalisms of whatever kind, in the name of which much evil is done.