How are we so divided, part 1

This is part two of a four part series. Here are links to parts one, three, and four.

I wrote about why we’re so divided, and while I don’t think my insights were groundbreaking or even all that interesting, I do think it’s important to highlight the internal pull that keeps us attached to the status quo. There’s something about the status quo that feeds our essential needs for belonging and connection, and the contemporary media landscape offers very low-hanging fruit. The things we do in our echo chambers – posting content for likes, repping “the resistance” with volleys of pithy sarcasm, and even just passively consuming partisan news – connect with the pleasure centers of our brains on a primal, chemical level. Righteous outrage feels good.

We don’t engage in this stuff because we genuinely believe we’re making a difference or fulfilling some duty to the world. Most often we are merely performing in a bubble of people who already agree with us. But we happily burn our free time on it because it’s gratifying (and all the platforms that produce and publish content understand this and know precisely how to tap into our monkey brains).

That’s why we are so divided.

Now, turning to the question of how we are so divided, I have started this post a few different ways and abandoned it each time. I keep second-guessing myself as various doubts swirl in my brain…

Is this mainly a Gen X problem?

Who is the “we” that I think I’m addressing here? Almost invariably, when some Q nut crosses my radar, he or she is around my age. Almost all the angry Karens on video harassing people in public seem to be Gen X too. As well, all the addled weirdos screeching in town halls and school board meetings about CRT or “groomers.”

Gen X is not okay.

I can think of a few reasons why my fellow Gen Xers might be particularly vulnerable to the delusions of our time and also more fanatical about preaching their nutty gospels. For one thing, we are at prime midlife crisis age, and so we find ourselves reassessing our lives, searching for meaning and fulfillment (and financial security, physical health, etc) with new urgency and angst. This, plus hormonal fluctuations of menopause and manopause, probably make us behave more hysterically than we might otherwise. Another possible factor is that although we are just as extremely online as the younger generations, we weren’t raised on the Internet like they were. So maybe we’re less equipped to understand and withstand things like clickbait, weaponized propaganda, filter bubbles, etc.

Or is this mainly a me problem?

Relative to the general population, or at least relative to the people I interact with in my regular life, I recognize that I am an outlier in terms of my media and Internet habits. I am both more extremely online and more obsessively tuned in to politics than most other people I know. I imagine myself to be writing this little series for people like me – people with similar media consumption habits who feel the same weariness and anguish as me about our divided society. But how big a tribe is that? And who am I to pontificate on these things for them? For us? Is there anything I could say here that they don’t already understand?

And isn’t the solution obvious?

This is another thing I kept running into. The deeper I dove into the question of how we are so divided, the clearer and more simple the solution became. And then I started to wonder, what’s the point? The solution is so simple that it seems ridiculous to spend so many words to get there. I could just… tweet it out.

Where I press ahead anyway…

It’s worth pausing here to note that the question of “how” we are so divided can be interpreted at least two different ways. It can refer to the character and nature of our divisions – what division looks like, where it manifests, and how it affects us. And it can refer to the mechanisms that cultivate, incentivize, or otherwise drive divisions. I’m writing this in two parts in order to focus on the first of these interpretations here.

How do we actually know that we’re so divided?

It’s obvious that we are, but what is the evidence? Where does it show up? As I’ve written and thought about this stuff, I started to see how often I focus on issues related to news media and the Internet. It’s clear that our divisions manifest acutely in these spaces, but at some point it occurred to me that our divisions exist almost exclusively in these spaces. Even the conflicts that flare up between people in the real physical world are often just extensions of virtual fights, triggered by signals that we encounter mostly online – MAGA hats,  BLM iconography, etc. That’s not to deny real, serious problems that exist in the world, but there’s a kind of toxic, ideology-driven conflict that is mainly a virtual phenomenon.

To wit: I was on vacation in Maui this past summer with my family, and one day for fun as I sat people-watching, I began to categorize my fellow vacationers into made-up buckets like “bumbling husband” and “teen movie villain” based on their looks and general vibe. One category I came up with was “probably MAGA,” for all the big caucasian dudes sporting Oakley shades and talking with a loud Texas twang. These are stock characters I despise online, and vice versa, but confronted with these sunburned hulks in real life, in a neutral and friendly setting, of course I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I was perfectly content to joke with them good-naturedly at the edge of the pool while our sons tossed a Nerf football back and forth. We might not agree about much, but given mutual benefit of the doubt and some basic common ground (e.g. devotion to family), it turns out that anonymous strangers are still mostly pretty decent to each other in real life.

It’s tempting therefore to blame the purveyors of media and technology for our troubles. Maybe the problem is that Facebook and YouTube haven’t taken a firm stand against misinformation, propaganda, and hate speech. Or maybe the problem is all the bots and paid trolls who are diligently stoking the ire of each tribe. Or maybe the problem is right-wing news and its brand of nakedly partisan fear-mongering. We’re drowning in a river of hate and lies and ignorance, and we want to believe the river is the problem.

One way to think about it is in terms of supply and demand, where this stuff represents the supply side of the propaganda and hate industry. And the supply only exists because there’s such a demand for it (as we’ve already covered). This stuff mainly lives in virtual space, however, because that’s the substrate where it can take particularly toxic forms.

Given all this, it’s tempting to look for ways to limit the supply, or reshape the landscape. Surely the solution lies there, so we push for government-led reforms, or tech solutions like better filtering and labeling, or market solutions like fact-checking and brand boycotts. This is a slow road strewn with obstacles, and that’s not to mention the obvious downsides and chilling side effects of many government and tech solutions that come to mind.

No, what we really need to fix is ourselves, to address the demand side of the equation. The simplest and easiest way to begin is to simply unplug, disconnect from the current of outrage. That’s it. That’s the tweet.

More on that later, because I still want to write a bit on the other interpretation of how – the specific mechanisms and behaviors that drive division. Stay tuned.