A Ramble on Polarization
No answers, but maybe some better questions, and a direction
How can two people—both believing themselves critical thinkers, both believing themselves well-read—hold such diametrically opposed positions? I find myself grappling with this question often, in the hyper-polarization of life today. The question seeks to uncover what’s driving this phenomenon, with an implied belief that if we could but understand the source of our dysfunction, then we could work to resolve it. Increasingly, I suspect this is the wrong question, directing our thinking towards the safety of old ideas instead of the uncertainty of new ideas. Nevertheless, let’s go on a journey from this question and see where we end up.
Partly, we’ve lost the capacity for nuance. Nuance doesn’t fit easily into 240 characters or single-screen memes or cable news soundbites. Where and when we lost this capacity, I can’t say with any certainty. Maybe we never had it. Despite the dig at social media above, I don’t think that’s where this trend towards terseness started. Social media just capitalized and accelerated the shift. Nuance requires time. How much time depends on how close to the “mainstream” you want to tread and still be discernibly different. This urge to collapse the complexity of life into as few buckets as possible is as much a pandemic to our thinking as COVID-19 has been to our living. Nuance also requires shared experiences. The greater the distance between our experiences, the greater the urge to reduce those experiences to stereotypes or to dismiss them as anomalies.
(Accordingly, this essay is nuanced. So, read carefully and try to resist the urge to accept or reject it without considering it critically. Assume there’s some nuance that you’re missing. Can you find it?)
So, we lack time. Why? Arguably, the technology of modern life has given us more time. That’s true, but only in comparison to the culture and expectations of the past. When viewed in the context of modern life, technology eats time, turning it into waste. Hyper-emotional stimulation is the Olive Garden breadsticks of the modern media diet. At some level, we know we shouldn’t pop one more breadstick into our mouths, but it’s just so warm and soft and chewy…and so we do, the dopamine hit “tasting” even better than the butter.
When I was a kid—growing up in the “before times” of broadcast television, landlines, and door to door encyclopedia sales—I was limited in the content I could passively consume. Which isn’t to say I couldn’t spend a day sitting on the couch watching TV when home sick from school. Maybe even two days. But after that…reruns of the Brady Bunch or the Partridge Family or Bewitched could only hold my attention for so long. That forced me to turn to books.
Books are wonderful for nuance. Even books for kids. I remember making weekly pilgrimages to my local library for new books to read. The library sponsored some sort of “reading contest” each summer for who could read the most books. I don’t think there was even a prize beyond your name on a poster at the end of the summer. Maybe we got a free book? When I started working, I would still read, but not nearly as much, and what reading I did do was “news” or “work-related”. Because that’s what adults are “supposed to read”. Now, post-retirement, that love of reading has returned. So I wonder: how much of our adult behavior is socialized from the adults of our childhood? How much of our adult behavior is socialized by the media we consume? While it’s tempting to scapegoat socialization for our polarization, it’s at most the means and not the source.
As Time for Timer1 told me as a kid, “You are what you eat from your head down to your feet.” In that 80s PSA, the focus was on food and eating a balanced diet, but this aphorism is true for all forms of consumption—what we read, what we watch, what and whom we listen to. If we consume mental and emotional “junk food” is it any wonder we struggle? It’s certainly easier to encounter misinformation and disinformation, today, than before the Internet, when traditional media publishers would act as gatekeepers to limit their reach. When the mob of the Internet broke through those gates, however, generations of people were overrun, people with little capacity for examining the credibility, purpose, and motivation of authors behind the content they consumed.
Though well-intentioned, those gatekeepers embodied a paradigm that concentrated the capacity to discern misinformation into a select cadre of experts. In this way, media publishers fell into the trap of all who see the world through an Arrest Disorder2 lens—they largely kept misinformation from proliferating, but they created a dependency relationship along with it. It was their judgement that discerned what was “worthy”. And, in the end, the mob can never be contained, only delayed; durable restraint is always internally driven, never externally. To be clear, when someone has no capacity for making good judgements on their own, there’s real value in deferring to the judgement of someone with greater experience. Deference, however, is key; that is how everyone retains agency.
How do we move forward when this unchosen—and likely unconscious—dependency on others to manage our experiences already exists? Simply getting rid of the gatekeeper doesn’t work out, as Google learned when it got rid of managers in a 2002 experiment3. Google’s conclusion from this experiment was that managers are absolutely necessary. Given the capability of their engineers at that moment, they were right. If it were possible to re-establish our media gatekeepers, it might help blunt some of the effects while we seek to develop new capacity to be discerning in our media consumption. I suspect, however, that the castle walls have already been torn down, leaving no gates left to keep.
What’s left? Fact-checking? Fighting misinformation with information rarely leads to success4. People committed to misinformation don’t trust the fact-checkers. It’s this distrust that explains why purely functional and rational responses don’t change people’s thinking. What’s required is a growth in their Being, not in their knowledge. And that journey—like all journeys of change—is one we must choose for ourselves.5
Where does that leave us? If we want to wean ourselves from our addiction to these metaphorical breadsticks, it’s not enough to just “want to stop”. We must each examine the effects such consumption is producing (or not producing) for us and for those that we care about and for those systems that we find ourselves nested within. It’s the shift in perspective that JFK offered in his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. It’s not an easy question to answer. But it points in the right direction. It’s the rare person that changes only for themselves. We choose to change because we are called to change—called by those people and places, those cohorts and communities that we care deeply about. In these moments of change, we see ourselves not so much as unworthy—we are always worthy—but as lacking capability, capability to show up for these others and contribute to their increasing vitality. That caring isn’t enough on its own. But it’s a start—a doorway—to the change we so desperately need.
So where have we ended up on our quest for the source of polarization we experience today? Well, to paraphrase Tayor Swift: “It’s me. Hi! I’m the source it’s me.” I often find this to be true, when I start to think holistically and systemically about an issue. From a linear analysis I see these external “others” as the source for whatever is stressing me out. I think: “If they’d change, then everything would be better.” What I too often fail to notice is that causation is a two-way street. Yes, when others drop a pebble, those ripples will find their way to me. That’s the part that we all see first. But it takes some introspection to see that the ripple effects of my own pebble drops will find their way to them, that my actions could be (are!) contributing to their actions that are stressing me out. We’re connected, and the waves we send out can interfere constructively or destructively with theirs. It’s at once humbling and hopeful. Humbling, because I can see my, at least partial, culpability in whatever I’m viewing as a “problem”. But hopeful, too, because now I see that I’m not dependent on others to change things for my (our!) benefit; I can effect change by changing the waves I’m sending out or by modulating how those incoming waves land on me.
Oh, I hear the protest forming on your lips: “Screw them. They’re the [insert favorite pejorative]. Why am I the one who has to change? Why do I have to do all the work here?” It’s a valid protest. And I’m not suggesting that we must bear the entire burden, but our portion is also not zero. As an almost 30-year martial arts practitioner, I offer you a martial metaphor courtesy of a colleague6: When someone punches you in the face, repeatedly, it’s great that you want them to stop punching you in the face. No one wants to be punched in the face. And generally, the world would be a better place if there were less face punching going on. However, if your entire strategy consists of asking and waiting for the other person to stop punching you in the face, how do you think that’s going to work out for you? Might you, and I’m just spit-balling here, want to do something to avoid getting punched in the face? And you have choices about how to go about that. You might walk away (breaking the connection between you and them, as much as you can). You might just step to the side and see if they tire themselves out and stop (patiently accepting the status quo while minimizing its power over you). You might actively deflect the attack in a way that leaves them, at least momentarily, destabilized, and unable to continue attacking effectively (steadily eroding the structural support powering the attack). You might deflect the attack in a way that causes them to rapidly validate that gravity still works as the ground rushes up to meet them (precisely destroying structural support, like removing the keystone from an arch). My point is you have choices. (We have choices.) Which specific choices will depend on you—your energy level, your capability, your creativity, your own (support) structure. You won’t have access to all your potential choices in every situation. You’ll be restrained by context, yes, but also by what your Being is capable of initiating or managing in that moment. With regular work on Being development, you’ll find that the situational context restrains you less and that you can access more of your choices, more often.
Is that an answer? Not really, but it is a direction. If I had to assess the status quo, I’d say that a bunch of folks are still routinely getting punched in the face. Some of them are punching right back, hoping to last longer than the other guy. Some of them tried that for a while and, if they’re able, have walked away, letting someone else get punched in the face instead of them. I’m not judging anyone their choices in those moments. None of these are “wrong” (or “right” either). But each choice has its ripple effects, and I think we’d make more progress—that is, produce more beneficial effects for ourselves and for others and for the systems that nest us both—if we had more choices available to us. That requires work. Individual work and collective work. What work? That’s for you (and me) to figure out. As much as I’d love to just provide an answer, that’s not how Being development works. But I will offer two suggestions for how you might begin. First, we are all, at some level, aware of our own “buttons”—of what sets us off. Maybe start there. Alternatively (or additionally), consider the premise that your Being attracts your Life.7 Thus, until and unless you change your Being, you will continue to attract the same Life. But if you can discern your patterns of Living, you might see the path your Being needs to take next. How ever you proceed, let’s get to it, shall we? I, for one, have had my fill of knuckle sandwiches.
Sanford, Carol. The Regenerative Economic Shaper Perspective Paper — Part 2.
Kranhold, Kathryn. Social Media in 2020: A Year of Misinformation and Disinformation.
Although, if you want to head down the amazing rabbit hole of rationality, then there’s no better source than Eliezer Yudkowsy’s LessWrong site. Specifically, his essay on Belief in Belief.
As always, I love hearing what reading this stirs up in you, what it evokes. Thanks for reading!
Let me know if you got this, as my phone is acting up.