The Problem of Polarisation (Part 1)
The last few years have made it abundantly clear that we live in a polarised world. We’ve seen a lot of “us vs. them” rhetoric flying around social and traditional media and, at times, it feels as though it drowns out more balanced voices that call to celebrate, rather than vindicate, our differences.
For example, we see it quite acutely with debates around whether what is happening in Palestine at the moment constitutes genocide or not — one can (and perhaps should) argue that debating such a label is moot when juxtaposed against the massive human cost of the conflict; regardless of the label, such a large humanitarian crisis should ring at least a few alarm bells.
As with most things in a polarised world, there are (at least) 2 sides to this story as well. I’ll take a moment here to say Hamas’ initial attack on Oct. 7th took too many lives and should be condemned — I still see this initial attack as reckless, even if Hamas officials find it justified. At the same time, I often default here to something Trevor Noah said during another Palestine-Israel conflict from 2021 — “If you are in a fight where the other person cannot beat you, how hard should you retaliate when they try to hurt you?”. Recent incendiary statements by Israeli officials (of their currently far-right government) makes one wonder how much of a consideration this is.
But I digress. This isn’t a post on Palestine or Israel (I am not nearly informed enough to give a holistic opinion on that). The conflict certainly got me thinking about these questions; like, “How do we justify continuing conflicts as the human costs rise so dramatically?”, “Why is it so easy to hate a different community?”, “Why does it feel like different lives are valued at different levels?” etc. But perhaps the question that inspired this post was “How can there be such wide disparities in the narratives surrounding a single event?”
I believe that this polarisation comes down to a few missing skills that people can employ when dealing with information. Whether these skills went missing in recent generations or if people never adequately possessed them is a different question — although, I am partial to the argument that we never had them and current events just exposed those fault lines more prominently.
Let’s talk about polarisation
One thing to discuss is polarisation itself. As alluded to above, I do believe, to a certain extent, it’s an easier impulse for people to become polarised — being social creatures that value “belonging to the tribe” for our survival, we naturally are suspect of “rival” tribes. I’d argue that, in a globalised world, where working together provides more fruits than not doing so, such a worldview is now outdated and no longer serves us. You can think of it as a collective or social version of the “armour” that Dr. Brené Brown refers to in some of her work.
On top of that, there are also potentially malicious uses for polarisation. It’s no secret that polarisation is a “useful” tool in politics to segment the populace and garner votes from “your side”. Social media platforms are also wired to optimise for engagement, something that naturally increases with negative emotions, like anger, possibly contributing to a more polarised worldview.
In short, power and profit are 2 things to be gained from a polarised populace and could incentivize more malicious uses for deliberately polarising or, at the very least, sabotaging efforts to depolarize groups.
All of this put together may make it seem like an impossible situation. One in which politics, profit and our own psychology are working against us to fuel a world in which we fit neatly into our little corners and divide ourselves into distinct groups.
But, fret not friend, for there are a few tools and skills that can be cultivated to combat each of these.
In particular, these skills help us with the “our own psychology” part of the problem and, oftentimes, that’s sufficient to see through the rest of it. So, let’s get into it…
… But not right now 😅. This post got quite long altogether, so I moved the rest to a follow up post.
If you’re seeing this paragraph, good news! You are from the future when Part 2 has already been published. Check it out here.
