We are divided. We are angry, and scared. We see enemies everywhere, and every facet of our lives seems the frontline of a battle for the very soul of our society.
Every interaction is the hill upon which our values live and die. ‘The Other Side’ are trying to destroy everything we care about. The only way to stop them is to fight.
Right?
We’ve created phantoms.
In the Middle Ages people feared supernatural creatures. These were stories they told each other to explain things they didn’t understand.
Today, even in the Information Age, we still have our own folklore. Our own monsters that terrify us.
What is it that we don’t understand today?
It’s each other.
Our biases and the flaws in the ways we reason have seen us transform everyone with a differing opinion into monsters. Misunderstanding, fallacy, misinformation and a lack of shared experience has led us to create phantoms that terrify us.
Because the truth is that the people we’re so scared of often don’t exist.
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The truth about ‘The Other Side’
In order to understand why we’re so divided currently, and why our approach to protecting the causes, values and people we care about isn’t working, we need to understand three key things, all of which are backed by research:
1. The people with the most extreme views talk loudest.
And science shows that the more we see claims, the more we A) believe them to be true and B) believe that they are commonplace views. So a relatively small number of hardline politicians, activists on social media, and extreme news commentators are making it seem like everyone agrees the ‘Other Side’ is awful and out to get you.
It’s false.
2. We over-estimate how extreme ‘The Other Side’s’ views really are
If you believe the extremists, everyone on the right is a Nazi who would chop up and sell their own grandmothers to generate more funds to invest in fossil fuels and lobbying to re-legalise slavery.
And everyone on the left is so obsessed with pronouns and the feelings of cows that they’d happily tear down our society, rob us of our livelihoods and send us back to the Stone Age just to reduce our carbon footprint – as long as Frank and Ian can share a cave.
It’s false.
Research shows that people overestimate how extreme the ‘Other Side’s’ views are by a significant margin. The extremists we’re terrified of…are much fewer in number than we believe.
3. There is no ‘Other Side’
Those extremists from point 1 would have you believe that there are two ways of being: right and left. That people in these groups move in lockstep. That every viewpoint on every topic is uniform and unyielding.
That there is an enormous chasm between what you believe and what they believe.
It’s false.
Most of us belong to the ‘Silent Majority’. A group of people with largely similar, but nuanced, views, who are tired of the vitriol, the self-righteousness, the ‘with us or against us’ narratives. The scaremongering.
The truth is, you’d agree with the majority of people on the ‘Other Side’ a lot more than you’d expect, if you talked to them.
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The ‘Other Side’ hasn’t grown more extreme – we just understand them less.
Polarisation is normal. Affective polarisation is damaging.
Politics used to be one aspect of a person – now it’s how we define everyone and every action. We take it all back to the source, using a slippery slope of logic to convince ourselves that their belief in their views is actively harming the world and everything we care about.
And the more we allow our negative feelings about ‘The Other Side’ to grow, the more we convince ourselves we know them. We seek out their opinion less – in fact, we actively try to avoid them.
The less we get to see their perspective, the less we understand where they’re coming from.
It creates a knowledge gap – and we fill that knowledge gap with assumptions and prejudice.
We decide what the ‘Other Side’ believes in, and why they believe it – and then we judge them for it. And they do the same to us.
Two sides, both assuming they know what the other side wants and believes in. Both getting it wrong, and creating phantoms to terrify themselves into retreating further into their own echo chambers. Safe behind the fortifications of in-group validation and the shield of our own self-righteousness.
The way we’ve been going about furthering our causes isn’t working. Look at the world around you. What you care about feels under threat. The ‘Other Side’ have never seemed more scary. We can’t understand how anyone could support such terrible views.
And they feel exactly the same about us.
No matter how extreme, how illogical, how bigoted you think your political opponents, they think exactly the same about you. Because we’re all falling foul of those misconceptions and psychological pitfalls mentioned above. And many more besides.
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If we want a better world, we have to do something uncomfortable.
It’s time for a reset. We can only combat our blind spots by turning towards them. That’s going to be uncomfortable, because it means relearning a skill previous generations always had: being able to tolerate different points of view.
To be clear: if your first thought is ‘I’m not making friends with Nazis’, read the section above again. No one is advocating being friends with Nazis, or taking terrorists out for ice cream.
What we’re advocating for is the desperate need to recognise that not everyone with Conservative views is a Nazi and not everyone on the left is some kind of domestic terrorist.
And if we give ourselves the chance, we’ll rediscover just how similar we are.
Doing so will be difficult, because it means ignoring the phantoms in our heads and understanding other peoples’ points of view. Understanding is not the same as agreeing or condoning.
But it’s time we stop telling ourselves we know why the ‘Other Side’ thinks and behaves the way they they do. Because if we don’t, the rift between us will still grow.
And the only people who profit from that are the extremists. The very people we’re trying to stop. To do so, we have to be less extreme ourselves. Open ourselves up to nuance. Think critically. Seek out alternate viewpoints. Learn to understand.
This will be a challenge, but we can do it together. The first step is to build communities of peoples who are committed to diffusing the tensions that are driving us apart. Sign up to my newsletter below so we can find each other and get started.