An American Perspective on the State of Our Condemnation
/“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”
Most political commentary these days seems too contentious to be of much use to anyone seeking valid information or thoughtful critiques about the state of the Union. I have little energy for grievance-addled flame, blame, and shame culture—the stunted grief of an emotionally unstable populace. Like most, I have no desire to be a lightning rod for collective rage even if I am pretty good at grounding myself in the midst of storms.
I would prefer to incite insight.
For better and for worse, I tend to see things as neither this nor that, but somehow, a bit of this, a bit of that, and something altogether beyond. I have more questions than answers. This leaves me a bit of an outlier, occasionally an outcast in an increasingly perceived either/or world.
I have been accused of being too liberal and too conservative, too opinionated and too neutral, too outspoken and too quiet.
And maybe I am.
Yet, there are those who have asked for my thoughts about the politics du jour. For those of you willing and able to read an opinion that might extend beyond your comfort zones, here are some impressions I have of the current political situation in the United States.
The whole truth of any given situation is often fractured beyond our capacity or willingness to grasp it. First, the voluminous amount of information, misinformation, and disinformation is overwhelming, and who has time? Even if we care to take the time to understand various issues, it can be challenging to find valid information.
Second, whom do we trust, and how do we know that we can trust them? It is often hard to find trustworthy sources who are even truth-seeking, let alone truth-telling, especially as we often seem to conflate our beliefs, biases, and inferences as objective facts. On any given topic, much of the information masquerading as well-informed analysis is merely well-insulated or well-funded opinion. Moreover, many people refuse to entertain possibilities beyond their affinity group's positions or sources, as if their one group has a monopoly on the truth.
Third, even if we know some truth, what do we do? Truth is often messy, and it’s difficult to know what to do about it. Thus, in our haste or distaste, we confuse or refuse a truer understanding.
It’s simply easier to reduce a more complex, nuanced reality into either/or, good/evil, yes/no, true/false, right/wrong, all/nothing, us/them binaries. It’s easier to outsource our critical thinking to media pundits, pollsters, and partisans who tell us what we want to hear. It’s easier to believe what we want to believe and who we want to believe. It’s easier to think that we know better because we like us better. It’s easier to attribute all that is evil and wrong about a situation to them. It’s easier to treat others like oversimplified caricatures rather than the multifaceted human beings we all are.
But it’s rarely better. It is rarely truer, kinder, or more helpful.
And here’s why:
When we use this human tendency against each other, it’s far worse. When we let ourselves fall prey to divisive fear-mongering that fosters antipathy, turning family, friends, and neighbors—really any fellow citizen with whom we disagree—into irredeemable others unworthy of consideration or common decency, we have quite literally lost our common sense. When we decide that not only are their beliefs evil and wrong, but they are evil and wrong for believing as they do, we are headed down a very old and dangerous path that leads to a world of suffering for all of us.
Before we go there, let’s consider how we got here.
Partial Truth & Media Mediocracy
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
For as long as the free press has existed, the press has told stories to inform and influence public opinion at the behest of powerful special interests. In the early days of broadcast journalism, the undue influence of propaganda and spin was somewhat checked by an ethos of impartial, factual, contextual news reporting in service of the public interest. News reporters were bound by journalistic ethics and standards in which outright lies, unsourced information, or facts out of context could and did end careers. Broadcast licensees were bound by The Fairness Doctrine requiring that they balance their own interests with those of the public by presenting controversial issues in a manner that fairly reflected differing points of view.
While perceived by some as unfairly favoring a well-informed public at the expense of broadcast licensees’ free speech rights, The Fairness Doctrine, introduced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1949, encouraged more balanced coverage of the issues of the day, and ensured that people who were subjects of editorial news commentary were given opportunities to respond on air. It also granted equal airtime to those seeking public office. In 1959, Congress amended the Communications Act to include the requisite equal airtime for candidates running for political offices, and this remained (U.S.)American communications policy until 1987, when the Reagan administration repealed The Fairness Doctrine.
The repeal opened the public airwaves to much more unfiltered, imbalanced reporting with shock jock personalities and celebrity pundits taking full advantage of the unfettered licenses to promote partial points of view, often blending news of current events with opinionated commentary. Meanwhile, thanks to the Cable Communications Policy Act passed in 1984 the emerging cable television industry was deregulated to allow unrestricted competition with broadcast television, boosting the growth of cable television with round-the-clock news and entertainment. Over time, more liberal perspectives led television news while conservative perspectives dominated talk radio delivering increasingly homogeneous, albeit bifurcated, partisan content to increasingly polarized audiences.
After the Clinton administration passed the Telecommunications Act in 1996 significantly reducing FCC regulations on cross ownership, the media industry consolidated from approximately fifty companies to just a handful of corporate conglomerates nationwide. Although there have been occasional changes to the companies in charge, this consolidation of the media industry remains in effect. These mega-corporations exercise monopolistic control while staying just below the legal threshold for classification as monopolies that would make them liable to anti-trust laws.
While the news has always reflected the interests of those who own and sponsor the news organizations, nowadays the news industry’s commitment to delivering impartial, factual, contextual news that serves the public interest seems positively quaint. When the stations are all owned by the same media-industrial complex, the public is told the news that media-industrial complex wants us to know as long as it is told in a way that we want to hear—regardless of what might be more important, relevant, and interesting to our local communities. This is why late night satirists occasionally create montages of local newscasters from around the country delivering the exact same breaking news with the exact same phrases and sound-bites like Stepford wives to the industry. This is why there are a gazillion channels, and nothing new to watch on television.
At the same time, news programming content is highly divergent depending on who owns the channels. For example, within the conservative news ecosystem, across various programs one will experience consistently conservative opinions and pet topics that are largely divergent from the opinions and pet topics within the more liberal news ecosystem, and vice versa, although as one might expect, the liberal media ecosystem tends to offer more diverse coverage. That said, on any given day, switching between Fox News and MSNBC news channels or streams, for example, is like viewing two entirely different realities even on those increasingly rare occasions that they cover the same topic.
We live in a world in which the news of the day is more performative than informative. News organizations are no longer in the business of reliably reporting news. They sell stories that protect their own interests, and cater to the biases of particular demographic groups, privileging their target audience’s righteousness over truthfulness. Far too often, news programs are like journalistic equivalents of Who’s Line Is It Anyway, shows “where everything's made up and the points don't matter”—as long as the points reinforce the biases of their respective audiences and lead to more ratings and revenues.
Instead of starting with a story and following the facts, you start with what pleases your audience, and work backwards to the story…Left or right, most commercial audiences in America are politically homogenous. This bifurcated system is fundamentally untrustworthy.
When you decide in advance to forgo half of your potential audience to cater to the other half, you’re choosing in advance which facts to emphasize and which to downplay based on considerations other than truth or newsworthiness. This is not journalism. This is political entertainment, and it’s therefore, fundamentally unreliable.
When editors are more concerned with maintaining audience than getting things right, lots of guardrails have been thrown out. Silent edits have become common. Serious allegations are made without calling people for comment. Reporters get to cozy with politicians and either report things without attribution or source the “unnamed people familiar with the matter.” Like scientists, journalists should be able to reproduce each other’s work in the lab. With too many anonymous sources, this is impossible. (Matt Taibbi, The Munk Debates: Should You Trust the Mainstream Media?)
Feeble attempts to at least maintain the appearance of fair and balanced reporting results in offering more gratuitous drama than serious debate. Sophistry and sycophancy seem to have eclipsed whatever journalistic integrity once existed. Even if the topic is worthy of serious discussion, genuine experts share airtime with guest commentators who present contrasting opinions with very few, if any, facts to support their claims.
Granting equal airtime to those who believe the earth is flat and those who know the earth is round just lends credence to incredulous beliefs that are at best merely entertaining, but at worst circulating ignorance. To be sure, there are occasionally outliers whose contrarian perspectives are actually ground-breaking and paradigm-shifting. However, every gadfly is not a Galileo. Ingenuity requires the time-consuming, often heart-breaking hard work of truth-seeking—relentlessly testing and adapting one’s beliefs about ourselves, each other, and the world in service of the truth.
Complicating matters, thanks to the democratization of online media publishing, anyone with a reliable high-speed internet connection can conceivably produce news and attract an audience—and there’s no shortage of voices in the virtual privatized “public square.” A well-crafted, web-based platform gives every Tom, Dick, and Harriet the potential to share their voices widely almost instantly—quite an upgrade from the soapboxes of yesteryears. The proliferation of institutional and independent media channels competing for our attention makes it ever more challenging to discern what is really true even for people inclined to do so.
We seem to be living in a world rife with public figures spreading viral lies to a public lacking the epistemic immunity to infection. Like asymptomatic carriers of a contagion, even the virtuous unwittingly spread misinformation at such an alarming rate that we now have a culture of epidemic ignorance. Moreover, the decentralization of the medium lends itself to bad faith actors intentionally spreading misinformation and disinformation broadly and easily.
“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
In his prescient book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman describes the corrosive influence of television on our politics and public discourse, although it is easy to see this influence in all news media—broadcast, published, and/or streamed:
What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive people of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?
Originally published in 1985, Postman’s critique is arguably more relevant than ever. When professionals—journalists, public officials, industry experts—entrusted to provide the public with accurate information about what’s happening repeatedly fail to do so, we begin to seek other sources to understand what’s happening in our world. Far too often, in our feeble attempts to do our own research, we trust independent reporters or influencers using Tiktok, YouTube, or any number of emerging media platforms to present hot takes on current events whose only credentials are being one of us or not one of them.
As a growing number of us get more of our news online, institutional news increasingly follows the audience as much as it influences it. News organizations pay attention to what their respective audiences are paying attention to online, as well as what these audiences are saying about it, and then prioritize those stories that appeal to their audiences’ prevailing points of view. When news organizations tell us the stories that we want to hear, we reward them with more of our attention in an endless cycle of confirmation bias that frequently precludes a clearer understanding of issues and events—the self-reinforcing feedback loop known as “audience capture.”
And deep down most of us know this. A recent Gallup Poll from 2022 reveals that only 34% of Americans have a great deal or fair amount of trust and confidence that media—newspapers, TV, and radio—are reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly.
It’s just easier to sleep at night with bedtime stories that reassure us that people like us are the good, reasonable folks in the know on the right side of whatever is happening in our topsy-turvy world. It’s just easier to inhabit partial truths, logical fallacies, or utter fantasies than deal with the whole truth of what’s real.
Except it isn’t. And the longer we slumber through our lives, the ruder our awakening.
Questions of how to get valid information about matters of public interest, or how to address media concentrations of wealth and power that threaten a functional democratic republic persist, but continuing to allow ourselves to be unduly influenced by partial perspectives serving special interests is irresponsible. If those monopolizing the public airwaves and quasi-public virtual byways are not inclined to seek and speak truth aloud, we the people must find and champion truth no matter who’s speaking it, lest we cede our country to those content to continue ripping it apart.
We must wake up, wise up, and rise up. We must recognize that we rarely have all the salient facts about any given situation. Just because we see or hear it on the news, doesn’t mean it’s true, and even if it’s true, it’s probably partial. And sometimes, it’s completely false.
Moreover, even if there is actually group consensus, and the opinion of the majority is widely held or supported, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the consensus is based in fact—think Copernican Revolution, or Victorian notion that children are little adults. Sometimes, the wisdom of crowds is the ignorance of mobs.
If we are not already doing so, we need to get into the habit of reality-testing our worldviews by multi-sourcing and double-checking our sources of information as best we can, at least asking some basic questions like who authored or created the piece? Is there an actual author or content creator who can be contacted? Is this the original document, newscast, or media-clip, or second or third-hand commentary or editorializing about an original published or broadcast elsewhere? If the source of our information is referencing other articles, studies, or research, are references or links to the primary sources provided? Is there a website? Is it a legitimate website URL for a legitimate individual company or media outlet, or a scam website leveraging the brand of a legitimate company or publication by changing a few letters in the website address? What is the context of the information presented?
We must prioritize reflection over reflexivity, enquiry over certainty, critical thinking over unthinking criticism, and responsiveness over reactivity. We must learn to discern fact from fiction, healthy skepticism from fanatical conspiracism.
Social Bonds & Social Media Bondage
“When speech got digitized, the public square got privatized, and the First Amendment got euthanized.”
Most of us have woken up to the reality that the world-wide-web supporting our everyday interactions is one designed to ensnare our attention for commercial and political gain. It is a world in which our every move is surveilled by organizations intent on manipulating us to think and do things that are usually against our best interests while maintaining the illusions that we’re choosing for ourselves. Whenever we’re online, someone is paying attention to what and how we’re paying attention. Our screens are like one-way mirrors designed to portray our reflections, but conceal who’s on the other side gleaning personal information about us from our web-searches, purchasing decisions, phone conversations, entertainment streams, subscriptions, app downloads, contact lists, email exchanges, social media posts, keyboard strokes, clicks and shares.
Every bit of data is turned into a predictive profile that can be sold to those who want to sell us goods or services that may not necessarily be good for us, or of service to us. These media companies don’t just prioritize profits over people. We the people have become the commodity. The often illegible terms and conditions of accessing our technology is the disregard of our humanity, invasion of our privacy, and monetization of us as people.
We may have the illusion of free speech, influence, and mobilization, but the reality is that most of our online interactions are subject to massive, covert influence by unknown parties who use data-driven psychographics to design psychoactive campaigns that manipulate our perception and modify our behaviour to their advantage. We are subject to undue influence of dark money, astroturfing, regulatory capture, bots, deep fakes, fake accounts, face capture, etc. Moreover, the algorithms automating institutional intelligence-gathering and decision-making about us—e.g. determining our creditworthiness or employability—are subject to the conscious and unconscious biases of the coders, creating automated systems of bias at mass scale—often with unforeseeable, undesirable consequences.
We are thus encouraged to peruse, produce, and publish all the “content” we want to the extent to which we agree to be trackable and hackable. We subscribe to the false security of insular belonging within pay-to-play, virtually-gated communities. We are herded into affinity groups, and lulled into personalized reality bubbles that reinforce our preferred identities and realities. We are goaded into arguments, and lured into relationships with people who don’t even exist. Increasingly, we live in segregated echo chambers without our full awareness or informed consent, seeing only the content that those in charge of the algorithms deem appropriate for our consumption, often a steady stream of amplified emotional reactivity and confirmation bias that distorts our understanding of what’s really happening in the world.
“Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”
Social media, in particular, makes money by selling our data to advertisers, so the more time we spend on their platforms, the more data they can collect about us. The more data they can collect, the more money they make. Posts that elicit outrage get more attention, generating twice as many clicks and shares—so there is a profit incentive to spread viral outrage via addictive platforms whatever the cost to individual and societal well-being. Moreover, rumors or lies spread much faster than truths, so proliferating falsehood is profitable.
Far too often, virtuousness via viciousness is the new power play, but getting to the heart of matters requires heart-to-heart connection. Real virtue and intelligent understanding is predicated on cultivating what British economic theorist and philosopher E.F. Schumacher called the Eye of the Heart in A Guide for the Perplexed (public library), writing: “The power of ‘the Eye of the Heart,’ which produces insight, is vastly superior to the power of thought, which produces opinions.”
When we crowd-source our opinions, we preclude the necessary reflection and mutual understanding that only comes from being in deep relationship with ourselves and one another. We rob ourselves of the experience of insight, which requires seeing beyond the surfaces of things. We mistake cults of personality for cultures of mutuality, and end up in cults of longing instead of a cultures of belonging in which we are genuinely valued for who we are as human beings rather than treated as human resources for economic profit and political gain.
As Philip K. Dick presciently observed in a 1978 speech titled How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (public library):
Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides… Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.
Attention grabs are the new land grabs in this attention economy funhouse. Like the old Wild West, the virtual realm has yet to establish ethics and laws protecting individuals who venture online, despite the fact that most of us must choose to inhabit this territory to participate in our socioeconomic system. We increasingly depend on an opaque technological infrastructure that capitalizes our attention and personal data without adequate ethical norms or legal protections from exploitation.
We have the right to privacy. Yet, we the people do not own much of our data, know who has access to our data, or how it is being used, so we can’t participate as equal stakeholders in the attention economy—online or offline. More importantly, without legally enforceable privacy and data property rights, our data can and will be used against us. Sure, we can do small things to mitigate our vulnerability—use encryption software, select search engines that are more protective of our privacy, adjust our privacy settings, or exit social media entirely. We can ignore clickbait posts and data-mining personality tests/games—refuse to click, share, comment, or provide any feedback. We can use faraday enclosures and engage in cash transactions as much as possible. However, in the absence of a more significant systemic change, if we’re online, we are vulnerable.
Predatory Polarization: Divide and Conquer Politics
Likewise, we have the right to speak freely. Yet, the public’s ability to speak publicly online is at the mercy of the institutions that own the ways and means of our online conversations and gatherings. The virtual public square has been effectively privatized by those with the technology to sort, surveil, and silence public speech.
As the Cambridge Analytica, Edward Snowden, and Twitter Files stories illustrate, we are increasingly subject to content moderation, distortion, and manipulation in service of corporate and governmental interests. Savvy politicians, security state operatives, political strategists, and corporate lobbyists craft sophisticated data-driven media campaigns to gain and maintain public support for their candidates, issues, and agendas, often without the fully informed consent of the governed necessary for a well-functioning democracy.
Most of the debates in which we citizens participate are merely public perception manipulations designed to distract and divide us from more substantive issues. They are the protests and counter-protests deemed permissible by powerful special interests, covertly and overtly manufactured consent or dissent within the citizenry around acceptable issues. Fostering "us/them," “either/or” civil unrest instead of civil discourse about all manner of topics keeps average citizens within the discussible frame designed to give us the illusion of voice and choice about matters of lesser consequence.
It is not that the issues within the discussible frame aren't worth our attention. It's simply that most of the argumentation, and subsequent victories and losses that occur within that frame are less critical to our well-being than those about which we argue, especially when much of the arguing is ineffective. It's like arguing about whether it's better to drink Pepsi or Coke while those encouraging that debate are quietly polluting our aquifers and taking over rights to potable water, as well as a host of other rights that prevent real self-sufficiency and consensual governance of, by, and for the People.
It might be better to refrain from consuming carbonated sugar water altogether and pay attention to preserving our water supply. After all, resistance requires subsistence. If our very existence is dependent on the powers that be, resistance is impoverished at best, and impossible at worst.
Not all politicians are ill-intentioned, but we the people need to understand that even the most sincere, well-intentioned politicians can and do adopt such strategies. Politicians are human, and even the best of us will sometimes rationalize unethical means to justify our ends, especially if everyone else is doing it. We have created a political system in which integrity and humility are usually unrewarded, so politicians are under increasing pressure to tow party lines, and tell everyone what they want to hear to be elected.
We keep believing them and electing them. As we the people fight over wedge issues within the discussible frame, the status quo persists without any real consequence or challenge. That’s on us.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Select any topic igniting public debate, and you will likely observe this pattern: a maelstrom of speculation eventually converging into one or two official storylines complete with expert punditry presenting repetitive talking points and carefully curated facts designed for memetic adoption. Typically, the story will split along primary party lines, each party spinning a version of the story to reflect their interests, exaggerating, minimizing, or dismissing various claims to persuade the public to share their respective points of view.
These official “mainstream” narratives—often blends of factual and fictional—are countered by unofficial alternative narratives—also blends of factual and fictional. Valid research findings are obscured by motivated “scientific research” conducted by “industry experts”—unreliable studies conducted by researchers and pollsters funded by vested interests who stand to gain from public support or opposition to particular policies and products.
“Journalists and politicians have become ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that misleads the public.”
Partial truths are acknowledged. Larger truths are ignored. Cherrypicked or “alternative” facts are presented. Facts out of context abound. Salacious or spurious claims are emphasized to distract the public’s attention from more legitimate questions and concerns. Unquashable truths that threaten the official narratives are denounced as falsehoods, disinformation, or crackpot conspiracy theories in an attempt to persuade the public to believe the narratives that best serve the establishment agendas.
Linking inconvenient, unpalatable facts to outrageous fictions sow divisions that prevent us from coming together around a more unifying truth that integrates valid points from competing narratives in service of the common good.
Meanwhile, actual crackpot conspiracy theories spark and spread like wildfires, difficult to extinguish or contain. These baseless, unsourced, or non-independently-verified claims are rife with motivated reasoning and confirmation bias—presenting only those facts that support their point of view, and ignoring evidence or other credible theories that contradicts their conclusions.
As facts are misconstrued, denounced, and denied, it becomes harder to discern what is true and whom to trust. Unable to tolerate the complexity and ambiguity of competing narratives, people polarize into competing factions based on truthy fictions. Conflating likemindedness with fair-mindedness, people convince themselves that they/we and their/our particular in-group are the sole arbiters of truth—that their/our version of events is real, regardless of any facts to the contrary. They/we begin to distrust the intentions of others who hold different points of view. Anyone who questions their/our interpretation of reality is suspect.
In some cases, they/we become so partial to their partial perspectives that they/we not only refuse to consider any factual elements contrary to their/our preferred narratives, but also refuse to consider others who disagree as fellow human beings worthy of communication and consideration. Family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues with different points of view are increasingly estranged from one another, each perceiving the other as unhinged threats so divorced from “reality” that they/we are no longer welcome in each other’s lives.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Human beings are social animals with an innate conformity bias. We instinctively need to belong to our group. When we deviate from our group, we trigger primitive alarms within us and between us.
“Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.”
Conformity bias is often exploited by those who would like to sway public opinion to organize around a less-than-popular candidate or political perspective. Preying on our need to belong, we are offered misleading “common sense” claims that appeal to some moral sentiment without valid argument. Often, a minority point of view is presented as the majority opinion in an attempt to normalize a more extreme position, or shift the Overton Window of what’s socially acceptable or societally desirable—and manipulating the public to conform to what appears to be the popular consensus on an issue by self-silencing, peer pressure, and in more extreme cases, group retribution, such as collective shaming or shunning.
Public figures, such as politicians, journalists, executives, educators, entertainers, or podcasters who don’t get with the program and tow the prevailing affinity group or party lines, are vilified, discredited, marginalized, censored, and banished from public participation in “civil” society. Historically, dissidents were literally jailed, tortured, exiled, and murdered, and although these things arguably still occur, today dissidents are more likely to be virtually “other-ed,” shadow-banned, cancelled, doxed, demonetized, and/or de-platformed out of public discourse, relegated to yesterday’s news, preferably out of sight, out of mind, and out of work as quickly as possible.
Sometimes information deemed disinformation is actually false, but often, disinformation is self-servingly defined as information which is not necessarily inaccurate or misleading, but rather information that is unpalatable to us. Instead of engaging in constructive civil discourse, people attempt to censor, silence, and exile those expressing valid alternative points of view, blurring the lines between objectively false and objectionably true, or reasonable good faith questioning and questionable bad faith reasoning.
These days, even healthy skepticism is dismissed as fanatical conspiricism. For example, merely asking questions or expressing reservations about the efficacy and safety of mRNA vaccines often results in being labeled an “anti-vaxer” or “conspiracy theorist” subject to social media bans and de-platforming. Instead of discussing or debating reasonable concerns, those challenging the prevailing or preferred narrative are dismissed as peddling misinformation or conspiracy theories. Likewise, in some circles, simply questioning what actually happened on January 6th is often characterized as a persecutory partisan witch-hunt. While conspiracism on these topics exist in abundance, not every person asking questions is a morally bankrupt conspiracist or nefarious agent provocateur, and not every question is worthless or pointless.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
To be sure, falsehoods and falsity have terrible effects on society, but suppressing the expression or enquiry of ideas—even those we may consider to be noxious ideology—doesn’t eradicate this. It simply drives it underground, breeding resentful idealogical rigidity and superficial “go along to get along” conformity, which lacking genuine commitment usually erupts in the public square as civil unrest. While we don’t need to hand a microphone to those spouting ideas we find noxious, shielding people from ideas that we think are harmful through censorship is more detrimental to the body politic than exposing these ideas to rigorous critique and better arguments.
We already have laws prohibiting speech that leads to imminent harm, but in recent years, there has been a cultural scope creep around what constitutes harm. Increasingly, harm is misconstrued as a subjective sense of feeling offended rather than any objectively legal offense, conflating personal discomfort with personal injury. Cries to punish these arguably subjective offenses has led to arguably subjective content moderation policies and social ostracizing that lead people to self-censor, self-segregate, and recuse themselves from public conversations that would actually better serve public interests.
When average citizens become reluctant to say what we really think in public for fear of retribution, we contribute to group think, moral panics, and collective delusions with devastating societal costs and consequences—such as the Salem Witchcraft Trials, McCarthyism, the Holocaust, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or the 2008 financial collapse.
In a healthy democratic society, disputes are resolved through civil discourse. We have conversations in which we discuss and debate perspectives with valid information in good faith, and if we injure each other with our words, we have legal recourse. When we censor ourselves and each other, we are no longer free to resolve our differences through civil discourse, sacrificing admirable persuasion for ignoble coercion. Suppressed people feeling embattled and embittered ultimately act out their unseen, unheard issues through civil unrest and/or outright violence.
Peer Beyond the Either/Or Frame
“The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.”
If you want to know where the real power rests—and the real leverage: look past the either/or, us/them, good/bad, true/false framing. Peer beyond the usual talking points from the usual suspects with all the simplistic sound-bytes or memes. Read beyond the front-page news and click-bait headlines. Notice who holds the spotlight. Look for the concentrations of wealth and who profits most.
Explore multiple points of view.
The invitation and challenge for each of us is to stay open to the idea that even those criticizing our cherished beliefs about reality might have something valuable to teach us about reality because none of us has the whole truth no matter how much we may think that we do. This doesn't mean that all perspectives are equally valid, but it does mean that each perspective likely has some valid points (or pointers to a more complete truth).
Step outside your comfort zone. Get to know others who don’t share your point of view. Talk with “those” people instead of just talking about them. Switch the channels on your devices. Seek valid information from sources deemed credible by more than just your favorite public figures and personal connections. Look beyond party affiliations and affinity groups. Make a point of reading posts and articles that make you cringe and roll your eyes precisely because you cringe and roll your eyes.
Almost every single time I do this, I have learned something about how the "other" in my mind perceives the world. Sometimes, this practice has reinforced my own perspective. Many times, this practice has broadened and deepened my perspective. Sometimes, I have changed my mind completely.
If our perspectives are never challenged, we never see beyond our own incomplete points of view. It's like looking at a particular constellation through a telescope, and assuming that we see the whole galaxy. Sometimes, we need to adjust our gaze to orient ourselves. Sometimes, we need to try a different lens or look through our neighbor’s telescope. We need to look beyond our preferred constellation of truth to see all the other constellations of truth. Sometimes, we need to set aside our telescopes and gaze at the whole sky.
An inability to listen to other points of view is a symptom that one is mistaking a partial perspective for the whole truth. Certainty is the security blanket of a frightened ego.
In other words, if we really want to unfuck the world, we have to lose the self-righteous attitude (h/t Katie Goodman), and begin to have an honest, multi-perspectival conversation that moves us through the pain (the truth that hurts) beyond our partial points of view toward a more mutual and complete understanding (the truth that sets us free).
Seek common ground.
Align with those who pledge allegiance to country and democracy rather than party--whose actions demonstrate a commitment to preserving those unalienable rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence, and civil liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.
While attempts to meet in the middle are not inherently virtuous, conflating common ground with middle ground is a sure way to perpetuate the divisiveness we experience in opposing points of view.
Common ground is not the same as middle ground.
Middle ground is the territory between two competing, often disparate positions. Far too often, it is the place where compromise is far too compromising to be of much value to anyone. It is often the place of simmering resentment, and inevitable future conflict.
Common ground is the area of shared interests and understanding that lies beyond our differences—that which we have in common that is the foundation for more meaningful agreements and commitments. It is the much more challenging territory of consensus rather than concession.
The Japanese gardening art of shakkei or "borrowed scenery" is the practice of incorporating or highlighting the beautiful elements of distant vistas into one's garden design. I love this way of seeing and enhancing the relationships between beautiful aspects of the larger landscape.
Sometimes, when other people's perspectives feel distant, strange, or even ugly, I try to apply this idea of borrowed scenery, seeking out the beautiful aspects of the landscape between us. I don't always succeed, but I find that even consciously acknowledging that there's a relationship to a common ground significantly shifts my experience for the better.
Pay special attention to the civil voices who are ignored, censored, and silenced by the powerful on both sides of the political coin. Look at who is allowed to say what, how, where, and when. Then, look beyond what they say. Look at what they do. Wonder and discover why.
Exercise humility.
Then, exercise some humility, and listen with your heart. Because no one person or party has a monopoly on the truth, and multiple points of view often reveal better maps of the territory. Even if each other's map appears to be outdated, short-sighted, incomplete, and/or dead-ass wrong, we're not gonna' find our way to some promised land or a more perfect union shredding each other's maps and refusing to explore other ways of seeing the world.
People who are truly wise have a liberating capacity to grasp and release their assumptions and preferences, recognizing their knowing as merely a conceptual map that is currently serving their navigation of a much richer territory. They are willing to set their own map aside to use other conceptual maps to explore the same territory without ceding or leading with their own knowing.
They don't just argue. They converse. They observe. They enquire. They wonder. They listen. They consider. They learn. They invite. They bemuse. They dance. And they do so with charming, disarming humility.
We must understand that human beings have a remarkable capacity to believe what we want to believe even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Yet, sincerity is not verity. It is entirely possible to sincerely believe things that are completely untrue.
The good news is that being sincerely wrong about a subject is correctable—if we’re willing to exercise a little humility and learn from one another.
Speak from your heart.
Speak from your heart as inspired. Speak the truths self-evident beyond self-righteousness. Speak the truths that seem most of service to all affected. This is the beneficent power of and for that renders those who seek morally bankrupt power over impotent. This is the art of speaking your piece to hold your peace, and keep the peace.
So many of us suffer in silence in our darkest hours, longing for comfort but afraid to reveal our darkness to a world that revels in artificial light. Even in the best of times, we would rather stare at screens in isolation than keep keep company with stars. We have been conditioned to believe that individual misfortune and malady are private matters best left unmentioned lest we be punished, shunned, and shamed by a culture that prefers bright, frothy shallows over mysterious depths.
We keep our personal darkness hidden. We mistake vulnerability for weakness, often preferring the pain of suffering in silence to the loneliness of being rejected, judged or misunderstood by those unwilling or unable to navigate, or even acknowledge, the darker territory of our existence. Isolation is infinitely preferable to pat solutions and false communion. Yet, we live in a world where purveyors of doom and gloom, both real and imagined, deny genuine grief while weaponizing grievance.
Perhaps this is why it is only when disaster strikes and human suffering is laid bare for the world to see that we set aside our petty grievances to offer one another the greater humanity that is sadly lacking in our day-to-day existence. It is only when the line between life and death becomes starkly visible that we realize our infinite kinship. In these circumstances, the everyday excuses for othering “others” become irrelevant, or really, inexcusable. We extend our hearts, hands, and homes to one another in a way that somehow ordinarily escapes us.
And yet, beyond the convenient fictions of “you” and “me,” or “us” and “them” that preserve our personal comfort at the expense of our greater humanity, is the invincible truth that we are always in all ways in this together.
Sometimes, we need to hear the sound of our own voices to see what we can't see silently alone. Most of us need to be heard rather than told. We need to be witnessed rather than judged. We need to be accompanied rather than led. Sometimes, what we think are wrong turns and dead ends take us exactly where we need to be. Sometimes, the willingness to be lost or explore an unfamiliar path is how we find our way together.
After all, condemnation is just a nation condemned.
And I don't know about you, but I've found that humble pie is easier to swallow with a pint or two of kindness.