Unwind
To escape the trap we're in, we need to calm down and stop scaring ourselves, and each other.
I think we need to take a deep breath and relax. I know that’s hard to do. People are scared, and it’s hard to relax when you’re scared. I’m not saying there’s nothing to be afraid of. I do think this is a dangerous time. But I am saying that our fear is the thing that we should be most afraid of. As a country, we’re behaving badly. We should stop, but that isn't easy when we feel this way. Our fear isn’t necessary. It’s based on distorted thinking. If we can take a deep breath, if we can calm down, then we can start to see clearly again. When we do, we’ll be able to start making things better. This is a change that each of us, as individuals, have the power to effect. It’s something we can do that will make a positive difference. You don’t have to put out the fires in our cities, you don’t have to take the guns out of people’s hands, you just have to stop feeding the fear. In the future we’ll talk about how we can change more than just ourselves. But we should put our oxygen masks on first before assisting others.
It’s possible that this sounds crazy to you. It’s possible that you’re saying to yourself
Calm down? How can you ask me to calm down! Can you not see that terrible things are being done by terrible people? Can you not see that these miscreants are acting in bad faith? Any compromise with their disingenuous facade of a civilized position would be to cater to the worst impulses of the worst kind of people! This is not a situation that calls for compromise!
Believe me, I hear what you’re saying. If there weren’t persuasive arguments for that position, we wouldn’t all be stressing out about this stuff so much. I’m not going to argue that there aren’t any miscreants out there. I won’t tell you that bad things don’t happen in the world. That’s not what I mean when I say that our fear is based on distorted thinking. What I am saying is that we mislead ourselves by focusing disproportionately on the bad stuff. The other thing I’m saying is that, when we get so worked up over these things, whatever they may be, we end up making them worse.
Let’s talk about that first. People aren’t going to relax if they think that their fearful vigilance is necessary to hold terrible things at bay. But is fearful vigilance working? We were fearful of Trump in 2016. I don’t think that any prior presidential candidate was more uniformly lambasted by the media and the chattering classes than Trump. But he won, in spite of 61% of voters saying they had an unfavorable impression of him in exit polls. That means a lot of people voted for Trump even though they didn’t like him. They elected him out of a fear of the Democrats that was, at least in part, a reflection of the left’s frightened response to Trump.
How has that gone for them? The mainstream media has moved substantially to the left. The social justice left, as manifested by #MeToo and #BLM and call-out culture, has grown rapidly in influence. And why did all of that happen? Because the left was scared of Trump and the people who put him in power. And if the Trump voters were scared before, they must be soiling themselves now, in the era of antifa riots and widespread calls for the abolition of the police. Lest the left-most among you pause to relish the moment, stop and reflect that that older, milder, fear was enough to elect President Trump. What will this new, much greater, fear beget?
We have to stop this cycle: fear, begetting animosity, begetting fear. It’s retributive radicalization. Each fearful action unleashes an even worse reaction. A blood feud like this can only be ended by unilateral forgiveness. That’s the hard part. These instincts that we’re allowing to control us run deep in human nature. It feels good to hate people who scare you. Revenge is very psychologically rewarding. I’m asking you not to scratch that itch. We need to offer love and understanding, even when we’re frightened. Because that’s the only way to de-escalate. And we must de-escalate.
A cycle of fear, hatred, and violence like we’re entering into will be a disaster for us all. Neither side has any hope of purging the other by force. We live together, or die together. Some of you might be saying to yourselves, “there’re some people whose moral sentiments differ so greatly from my own that I’m not sure we can coexist”. But before you commit yourself fully to that conviction, remember that this cycle is radicalizing us all. If we relax a little, wind things down a bit, the people you’re thinking of may turn out not to be so committed to their extreme positions. Maybe they’re just scared. Or maybe their views aren’t, in fact, as extreme as you think they are. You should at least double check that first.
That’s where distorted thinking comes in. We feel threatened by our political opponents. We don’t like them; they don’t like us. We’re motivated to find reasons to justify our loathing of them, and ways to invalidate their negative opinions of us. The one thing we can all agree on is that a lot of people are acting irrationally. Some people seem to be living in a pseudo-reality pieced together from narrowly construed self-serving “facts”. What we don’t agree on, is exactly who those people are. I think it’s all of us. If we take a step back from the situation, relax our white knuckle grip on our political identities, we’ll see a more truthful picture. And I’m confident that the true picture is less grim than the one painted by our distorted, motivated, beliefs.
How can I be so sure that things look better through a truer lens? Because the thing that’s making us scared and angry is the way we perceive our political enemies, and that’s exactly what we’re negatively distorting. Removing our filters will let in contrary evidence, evidence that they’re not so bad after all, evidence that maybe we really can get along. In order to collect that evidence, we need to humanize those we disagree with enough to listen to what they have to say with an open mind. In order to do that, we need to let down our guard. When we perceive them as a threat, we don’t open ourselves to the possibility of persuasion. Mental receptivity is a kind of relaxation. We need to listen generously, with positive assumptions about where people are coming from. Rather than being censorious about their terminology or starting position, we need to meet them where they’re at and show them, in an unthreatening way, what we really feel and believe. With calm and clarity, we can disengage from our collective societal tantrum and understand the feelings behind the hostile words.
When we only talk to people who think like us, our way of thinking becomes more similar to one another, and more divergent from everyone else. Our views become more extreme the more we talk to like-minded people. When we talk to people who are angry, we become more angry. Our filter bubbles on the internet, in which we’re fed a stream of like minds and confirmatory evidence for whatever we prefer to believe, exacerbate the problem. Even in the physical world, we’re segregated geographically: people in big cities are mostly on the left.
People used to have more face to face human interactions. They had more socioeconomically diverse connections. That mixing probably reduced ideological divergence. There were far fewer outlets for communicating with a broad audience. The outlets that did exist tended to be in an ongoing dialog with one another, and mostly one-way, radiating out to ordinary people from a select group of intellectuals. A well informed person could stay abreast of most of what was going on. That’s not true any more. Information seeps unevenly and unpredictably through our porous information environment. Our major media outlets have increasingly abandoned neutral objectivity as a value. So even if you want to form a balanced perspective, it’s not easy to construct the whole picture. But we should try. We should look for the best that anyone has to say against the positions we take. We should quell our defensive instincts and listen calmly, with an ear for what’s interesting, even agreeable, in it, rather than poised to strike at the first weakness we spot. Every bit of common ground we can discover is precious: facts that we agree on, values we share. Even knowing where our opinions differ makes a positive contribution to our ability to empathize and compromise.
Inside our filter bubbles we see a flattering view of ourselves, and the worst of those on the other side. It ought to be obvious to us that this is the case. Writers want readers. Publications want clicks and subscribers. Political writers consider their audience: “what will engage them? What will make them click on this? What will keep them reading?” There are some easy answers here. Engage them with emotions. Tell them something that makes them feel hopeful that their side will triumph in the end. Shock them with some new example of the perfidy of their sworn enemies. Comfort them by confirming what they already believe. Pundits and bloggers know that if they challenge our beliefs, tell us things are more complicated than we realize, indicate that people we dislike might not be as wrong or deplorable as we think, they’re setting themselves up for failure, or, at least, making their jobs unnecessarily difficult. Editors preferentially accept content that confirms their audience’s beliefs for the same reason.
Even when some thoughtful nuanced piece makes it through those filters, it still has to survive the evolutionary competition of the online marketplace. Content goes viral because it’s useful, cute, inspirational, or outrageous, almost never because it’s challenging or socially beneficial. Every major website or news aggregator prioritizes content that’s trending. If it doesn’t generate more clicks than the competition, you probably won’t see it. Even more troubling, they personalize the content they show you to maximize the likelihood that it will appeal to you specifically on the basis of your past choices. They construct a reality suited to your motivated beliefs. All of this combines to create a media environment tailored to our biases like a glove to a hand. The fact that everything we see seems to support one obvious narrative makes it almost incomprehensible to us that other people don’t see the world the same way we do. We forget that the world inside their phones looks completely different from the one in ours.
If you lean right, you might think the left are all politically correct authoritarians who want to rewrite history, monopolize our institutions, eliminate free speech, and bring about a Marxist-Leninist renaissance. If you lean left, it may seem to you that the right are a bunch of greedy, ignorant, gun slinging, Jim Crow pining, woman hating, defenders of entrenched power structures. These hyperbolic representations, each contain a grain of truth. But they’re Frankenstein monsters, stitched together from all of the worst possible evidence that one side can muster about the other: skewed historical outlooks, policy misrepresentations, out of context quotes, unjustified extrapolations, or wild-eyed kooks singled out from the opposing ranks.
The world is full of strange and exceptional characters, from radically misinformed eccentrics to borderline and antisocial personalities. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 4.5% of the population, 15 million people, have serious mental illnesses. Such individuals are likely overrepresented in fringe groups across the political spectrum. By collecting the most alarming samples from amongst them, we can assemble an endless freak show of frightening political novelties. We’d be disgusted if someone singled people like this out for ridicule for the purpose of entertainment, but, for the purposes of politics, it’s open season. Prejudice, stereotyping, bigotry, and chauvinism that we would never allow ourselves to fall into under other circumstances are given free reign over our minds in the political context.
If you were in a classroom with twenty people, and there was one person in the corner who periodically contributed weird off-color comments and tangential references to things that were almost certainly untrue, you’d likely nod perplexedly for a moment, and then move on. You certainly wouldn’t declare them the new subject of the class, and then spend every day listening to their quirky rants while half the class gleefully egged them on and the other booed and hissed and shouted them down. That would be unproductive and inhumane. But it’s not an entirely inaccurate model of our political milieu. The people we put on the national stage are avatars for the current moment in American politics. If we want to see something better, we need to be better.
We have to recenter the mainstream on all sides of our national conversation. Be mindful of the emotions that political content is evoking from you. When something upsets you, let that be a signal. Pause. Take a deep breath. Engage critically with what you’re being told. Is this an extraordinary case? Is that representative of what these people believe? Is it an accurate interpretation of what they mean? Contextualize it. Go find what the other side is saying about the topic. Read what you find with an earnest desire to understand what makes them feel and think the way that they do.
In some domains it may take some effort to find content that you can stomach. It’s okay if some things are just too much for you. As we’ve been discussing, a lot of content out there just exists to rile up some particular base. Stuff like that makes little effort to persuade. It’s all slogans and ideology that speaks only to the converted. If there’s anything in it for the opposition, it’s probably just a bunch of slings and arrows.
Our bubbles have drifted wide apart. There’s not much overlap left. But there are definitely concerned, well-intentioned, reasonable people on most sides. Seek them out. In general, make positive assumptions about the other side. Don’t let their most alarming members serve as representatives for everyone else. Instead, focus on the best they have to offer. Sure, that replaces one biased filter with another, but it’s one that will counterbalance your natural tendency, fostered by our toxic political environment, to always see the worst. When you approach the world with curiosity rather than anger, when you discover people who disagree with you, but who speak sense, your fear will be diminished and relaxation will come easier. You’ll be charting a course onto the path of reconciliation and rehabilitation that our nation needs to follow if we want to steer around the meltdown that awaits us on our current heading. You’ll open the door to mutual understanding, compassion, and, hopefully soon, cooperation.
Thanks for being here subscribers! I’d love your thoughts, criticisms, etc. (hank.politicaltherapy@gmail.com) Especially let me know about things you see in the world that seem relevant to the mission of restoring political sanity. Maybe I’m being overdramatic: is our current direction just fine? What do you see that concerns you, or that’s encouraging? Is there another solution I’m not seeing? Much more to come. Thanks again!
I love this story...almost enough to make me a Lutheran. What do you think?https://www.npr.org/2020/09/09/911005948/black-pastor-wants-his-mostly-white-congregation-to-understand-racial-justice
Well thought out. I appreciate your perspective.