Introduction

Human beings are bestowed with strengths, and the communities we make up are the sum of all our individual strengths. However, when one individual lacks strength in an aspect that another takes for granted, we tend to forget that each of us is blessed with different and sometimes complementary strengths. Where one is lacking or inadequate in ability, another might naturally find a task easier to accomplish. In this way, the involved parties recognize and efficiently utilize each others' strengths for a mutually beneficial situation.

This concept can be related to the economic theory of comparative advantage (Ricardo 1817), which argues that net benefits can be gained among trading countries when one specializes in a good in which it has a comparative advantage (the ability to produce a good using fewer resources than another country), and then trades that good for a good in which another country enjoys comparative advantage. This draws on the individual strengths of each country and leads to a win-win situation. It is necessary to encourage societies to recognize each other's differences as complementary and to see strength in diversity. However, the inability to recognize these complementary strengths – poverty of awareness – is the reason why disability issues do not get adequate attention in government policies around the work.

When we begin to focus on what someone lacks instead of what someone has, our thoughts are steered in a negative direction that causes us to forget that human beings are, by nature, mutually interdependent. Diversity is natural among human beings. Hence, the assumption that all human beings are similar and have the same facility for carrying out various activities is a rejection of the notion of human diversity and individual difference. It could be argued that the difference in our ability to perform an activity stems from an individual lack (whether physical, mental, or emotional), but such an argument ignores the reality that an individual functions within a society or state institutions, and that this ‘lack’ might be imposed from the outside.