This is part one of a four part series. Here are links to parts two, three, and four.
Often when people ask “why” questions, the thing they are really trying to get at is how. Or both why and how. Sometimes the line between these two questions and their answers is very blurry, and I’ll take a swing at both, starting with the first one: why are we so divided?
Do most Americans want to live in a less polarized, less divided society?
I sense that most of us do, but then I also see a lot of behavior that suggests the opposite – like the obvious pleasure a lot of people take in ‘owning’ their ideological opponents online and posting dank memes for clicks and likes.
Maybe these opposing energies are not mutually exclusive. I admit I’m not immune to the thrill of watching someone’s bad take get dunked on, or watching the likes tick up on my own attempts at cleverness on Twitter. It’s gratifying in the moment, but it feels cheap, like tasty but empty calories. Even while I’m enjoying it, I am aware that I’m not listening to my better angels. I’m pretty sure I would trade these guilty pleasures to live in a society that engages in honest discourse, where people make earnest efforts to understand other viewpoints and give each other the benefit of the doubt.
It’s important to examine these base pleasures in ourselves and understand why we might unconsciously cultivate divisions, because this is the most basic obstacle to fixing it. We won’t resolve any of this, and indeed we’ll sabotage any progress, if we fundamentally prefer the pleasures we get from the status quo.
I think what we’re actually craving is something essential, and the cheap calories we get from the status quo are better than nothing. I think we tolerate and even cultivate divisions partly because divisions create enemies, and fighting enemies for a cause provides us with a sense of meaning and purpose. To feel a sense of purpose is to feel we matter, we’re connected, we belong somewhere. Meaning and purpose get us out of bed in the morning. Too few of us get sufficient fulfillment from our jobs or even our families, and without it we risk deep boredom, depression, and despair. There’s a painful vacuum in many people, waiting to be filled. Fighting enemies for a cause is not the only way to find purpose and fill that emptiness, but it’s a relatively cheap an easy source compared to others we could search for.
Why now?
Is any of this new? Presumably, we’ve always had these kinds of psychic vulnerabilities, the need for meaning and purpose, etc, so is there anything about the current state of the world that exacerbates the conditions we’re talking about here? My personal experience of present day life is that it causes a lot of psychic pain. It’s hard to know where to begin to elaborate on that, because there are so many aspects of contemporary life that I find psychically painful: Cognitive dissonance. Information overload. Isolation. Financial pressures. Relentless, accelerating change. Increasingly unstable-feeling reality. And then on top of (and also probably because of) all these factors, people are extremely pessimistic about the future. We see multiple interconnected crises looming, and we are desperate to understand what’s happening or at least to find some kind of inner peace. And since most of us don’t lack for our most basic survival needs (for now), we have plenty of mental space to ruminate on causes and fixes. And ruminate we do. The problem is we’re not very good at it.
Finally, I can’t wrap this up without joining the crowd of people who point to social media as an obvious contributing factor. Partly it is the form itself. Short tweets, comments, and video clips are more conducive to hot takes and off-the-cuff remarks than to real discourse. Character limits and scrolling habits encourage us to boil down our ideas, to remove nuance, to drop the mic and move on. And then the algorithms incentivize whatever is most inflammatory and provocative, content that triggers chemical responses in us that are not necessarily pleasurable but are nonetheless addictive.
I’ll leave it here for now. Talking about the effects of social media starts to take us into questions of how rather than why, and that’s what I’ll write about next.