To the Brink: America’s Battle with Polarization, Distrust & the Profit Motive
“As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become.”
― Matt Taibbi, Hate Inc
Foreword
So, here we are, stuck in one of the most troubling time periods in the history of the modern world. Democracies across the world are stalling out as autocracies continue their death-march forward from the rear. Unfortunately, in America, we were not spared this trend. We currently find ourselves with levels of political polarization and tribalism that rival that of the civil war. Distrust and disinformation is in full abundance while we simultaneously find ourselves at historic deficits in the objectivity and ‘living in a shared reality’ departments. Everyone’s been sliced, diced, wrapped and walled off into their preferred closed-off information-ecosystems- but hey at least you can get that Amazon package you ordered in less than 8 hours.
The collective whole wound up, angry, on edge and certain they know who to blame. Those damn libs! Or those god-damned conservatives! They’re tearing this damn country apart and coming for everything I love! This couldn’t be further from the truth. There are some nefarious forces pulling this country apart and driving our divisions but they fly under the radar- out of site and out of mind.
If this is news to you, I just want to take a moment to say: welcome to the party, pal.
It might be time to take a moment to assess the situation honestly and identify these bad actors and give them the time in the spotlight they so desperately deserve- so maybe put that witty Twitter insult on ice for a few minutes and take a wee-journey with me.
Rome wasn’t built in a day & it wasn’t destroyed in one either. Likewise we didn’t get here overnight but rather through decades of people being constantly wound up with culture wars, over the top rhetoric and having their perceptions of reality warped through very deliberate curations & presentations of facts by savvy & unscrupulous news media conglomerates, social media companies and a (disheartening amount of) politicians.
Come Sail-Away (if Only For a Moment)
Allow me to dawn my magician cap for a second. Relax, close your eyes (well actually maybe keep one eye open unless you want to call me up and I’ll read the rest of this to you). Allow me to take you to a faraway land- a land of sunshine and rainbows- where people still respected each other enough to live in reality. Diversity of opinion was celebrated. Debate encouraged. You didn’t always get along but the veracity of statements were measured on their merits as opposed to purely off of who was saying them.
At the end of the day, truth held up above all else because the people understood the value of living in reality as opposed to a feel-good, fantasy land with super heroes and super villains. It’s a place where if you were caught lying or talking out of your ass on issues without any understanding you would not be rewarded but rather shamed. From that shame you’d feel some sense of embarrassment that would make you want to correct that behavior going forward. It’s also a place where people get on twitter to live tweet their favorite shows, make stupid jokes and share ideas instead of doing battle with total strangers for hours. Facebook well… uh… that’s still a cesspool. Now, snap out of it- open your eye!
Some bad news. I’m sorry- if you’re sitting there yearning for this utopia. No one likes a tease, I know. While I wish I could pull it out of a hat for both of our sakes; I was never quite good at magic. We’ll leave that to Houdini. I don’t know where this land exists, if it does at all anymore, but its certainly not America in 2021. I guess we’ll have to settle for our own Idiocracy-like, dystopian satire that seems to be based around polarization, distrust and the profit motive- amongst a few others.
But a boy can dream!
A Total Free-for-All
I’m sure you’ve noticed this alarming trend of people just making it all up as they go with no shame, no intellectual curiosity or allegiance to reality. People more worried about repeating the tribal line than thinking for themselves. Sometimes it feels like there is a better chance of finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow than finding someone who will admit they’re wrong. My peeps the goal isn’t to always be right its to get the best possible information so you can make the best possible decisions for your life. Don’t get caught in the weeds.
I mean the mental gymnastics that some people go through just to avoid confronting reality is mind boggling- special shout out to the Qanon community; if you keep holding your breath, I’m sure your dreams will come true. Not that long ago, enough people still recognized that you were entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. Doesn’t mean everyone held hands and sang kumbaya but enough people understood the value of holding yourself accountable to reality. The alternative of course being becoming one of those loonies you meet where you need to take a pause and ask yourself: “Jesus Christ; what planet is this person living on?”.
For a long time there was an unspoken agreement- a stitching that helped keep societies together- to at least operate from reality. It was a self-regulated way to keep people honest. You could disagree, sometimes ferociously, but it was better to take your medicine and adjust to reality as opposed to listening to the local snake-oil salesman who tells you exactly what you want to hear- even to your detriment. That was the least the least we owed ourselves & each other but we’ve lost that. It feels like we are at a fork in the road: loop back to reality or continue this long monotonous death march.
The saddest part of it all is we didn’t all agree to turn our backs on reality. Rather it was taken away from us slowly and steadily as the trust we had for one another was purposely eroded. I know right now a lot of people are very angry, distrusting and annoyed with ‘the other side of the aisle’. Even though in some cases that anger, distrust and annoyance can be justified its more symptom than cause. You shouldn’t get mad at the sun when you forget your lotion- well you can but you’re just going to need to get used to getting burnt.
In a weird way, through a confluence of factors, we’ve quite literally been programmed to hate ‘the other’ while being shielded from potential faults of our own side. This is dangerous because it creates blind spots and vulnerabilities in our thinking that can be exploited if you don’t at the very least apply some skepticism and primary source style fact checking to your ‘own side’. Once accountability is gone it creates a vacuum that is quickly filled by dogmatism. With accountability it incentivizes the truth- even the hard ones. Dogmatism is incredibly dangerous because it lowers our capacity to think critically and objectively which hinders our abilities to solve even the simplest of problems- all while rewarding bad behaviors.
Remember how hard it was for people to believe Galileo that the sun was the center of the universe? In retrospect- talk about low-hanging fruit. A lay-up. An easy one. Unfortunately for Galileo, they literally refused to even look into the telescope-a simple action that would have proved his theory- opting instead to threaten execution and house arrest for his heretical beliefs. I share this not to illicit tears for a man long gone but instead offer a cautionary tale. What could we be missing? Now, there’s a lot of momentum behind this kind of programming we’ve be subjugated to so its going to require a conscious effort to break. But like in the Matrix, the first step is awareness.
Losing Our Shared Reality
“Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when we can instead show people idiots drinking donkey semen for money?
― Matt Taibbi, Hate Inc
How often have you caught yourself wondering: wow, how does this person believe this? The answer: very carefully. Like with most problems in America its wise to follow the money: there is a very strong profit incentive to tell people exactly what they want to hear, never challenge them and reinforce divisive narratives. The aforementioned ‘Legion of Doom’ have sliced, diced and walled us into these ever shrinking niches.
After all, these forces often only care about getting your money and keeping your attention. With the primary goal to sell things to us or to quite literally sell us- yes you- to the highest bidder. Your data, your habits, your patterns are 21st century gold. All this works great when you’re trying to get the perfect pair of underwear through some weird Instagram ad or get a million retweets for ‘owning a lib’ but not so much when you’re trying to actually understand your neighbor.
That’s not to say they only care about getting your money. Sometimes the goal is to get you to feel a certain way, think a certain thought or just to all together distract you from the bigger picture. That’s why its always important to consider motive. Fox News prefers to sell fear while MSNBC sticks with outrage. At this point the cable news companies are just packaging products that they know their viewers want to see & hear as opposed reporting on object news. The social media companies just want to keep you locked into whatever head space you are at and then reinforce it and amplify it. The politicians often play to the lowest common denominator which often turns out to be fear, pandering or virtue signaling. They finance their campaigns or secure future employment by playing ball. All for their own gain. Would you trust someone who is always peddling you fear? Stressing you out? Telling you contradictory information? Think. What’s their angle?
There is often an overlapping interest in maintaining the status quo by dividing people through misrepresentation of facts or specifically curating information in order to embolden division and confusion. Part of the goal is to prevent consensus so nothing major happens that will structurally uproot any of these forces. Exactly why it feels like nothing ever seems to get done. They recognize the way our society is structured and have become much attuned at finding and exploiting the loop holes to preserve power, profit and maintain control. Sometimes they’re in cahoots, sometimes they’re in competition with each other but they always benefit from the system staying the way it is. This idea isn’t new if you’re familiar with Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent or even newer Matt Taibbi’s Fairness Doctrine (repealed requirement of showing equal time for both sides of an argument) & the Communication Act (allowed media consolidation from 55 companies down to 5)- essentially handicapping competition, concentrating power, incentivizing sensationalism and amplifying all divisions. 6 corporate boardrooms control nearly 90% of all media assets in the United States. That’s not even to single out media companies specifically because a theme in America over the last 3 decades has been consolidation but you can see how this could potentially be a problem.
Couple that with corporate America’s embrace of Friedman’s ‘Shareholder Capitalism’ ideology (a doctrine that stated the only responsibility a corporation has is increasing shareholder value absolving themselves of any moral or ethical responsibilities- yes literally) since the early 70’s and you have a recipe for disaster. You’re essentially rationalizing any behavior if it can be squared with being good for a specific companies shareholder base which creates total free for all. Think maybe a social media company or mobile app developer literally hiring the worlds best neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists to clinically addict your brain to a service they are offering. That’s what happens when the only goal is sustainable shareholder growth.
Don’t take my word for it though; former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook & leader in the Meme Stock Rebellion Chamath Palihapitiya summarizes it just fine:
“I feel tremendous guilt. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works” (more on that later).
The feedback loops cement us into our views, amplify our divisions and lock our eyeballs into just more and more content- all while walling us off into these micro-targeted niches that get created by advanced A.I. algorithms. The silo of all siloes. A recipe for disaster.
And, if you were hoping that the government would step in to stop this, 50 years of consistent and widespread lobbying would beg to differ. This all isn’t a groundbreaking tactic either. Corporations (oil, tobacco, pharma, chemical companies) have a long history of obscuring debate, muddying the waters and exploiting human nature for their own ends. Just check out Merchants of Doubt. In this case, it’s just a different type of obfuscation: keeping us at each others throats with an epic culture war for the ages. Nothing is off limits.
That’s one of the things people fail to appreciate about corporations. Their influence is uniquely disproportionate, in the way they can impact outcomes. They have a lot of rights and interests like people do but they never die. Meaning of course they can play the long game; over decades, slowly inching forward until they get what they want. New executives and directors come and go but the underlying objective remains the same: increase shareholder value at whatever cost. Imagine spending your whole life advocating for yourself and your interests.
Now imagine that same scenario but you never die, you have teams of professionals- that replenish indefinitely- working to achieve your interests daily and you have access to 100’s of millions of dollar in capital to throw around where ever you like. They look at it as an investment and a very profitable one. If they invest consistent time and spend a few million dollars lobbying congress they can see multiples on that money in return. Not exactly a fair fight.
They’ve built these bubbles around us and work every day at reinforcing them to their own benefit. All of this weakens our societal ties. We decouple. People diverge into their own corners instead of recognizing it as a shared space- another almost equal amount of people become totally apathetic and tune out completely (shout out to the third of America that doesn’t vote). Hello, 2021. They’ve gotten so good- too good- at what they do that we’ve almost come to a complete, grinding halt, unable to agree on even the most obvious of things. Might be that time in the movie where the “good” and “bad” guy take a timeout on their personal brawl to turn their eyes towards the actual villains.
Villain 1: News Media
Have you tuned into Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, Tucker Carlson or Lara Ingraham lately? Talk about some bizarre and gross performance art- god damn. Watch each one & you’re going to get a different presentation of reality tailored to make you feel a certain way, with their own unique set of heroes & villains. Sorry guys- the news should be a little dry. However, segments run like highly curated soliloquies targeted directly at our amygdalas. It’s totally overwhelming to the senses to be bombarded with this array of intense emotions on a daily basis without reprieve. It’s no wonder some people are starting to behave less & less like humans and more like saltwater crocodiles (worth a Google if you’re not familiar). Unfortunately for us, we haven’t entirely evolved away our reptilian brain yet.
The goal is to push people to the extreme end of whatever emotion they are trying to illicit to keep you on the hook day in and day out. Hell, I dipped my toe into 15 minutes of Laura Ingraham last week and had to lock all my doors and windows before going to sleep- horrifying. I don’t know exactly who ‘they’ are but apparently ‘they’re’ coming for me & everything I love! I even tried to calm myself down by turning on CNN but watching Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo love-bomb each other on the top of the hour transition just made me want to vomit. Luckily, I was able to catch the rerun of Rachel Maddow to knock myself out- works better than Zzz-quil. Listening to her drone on for a 35 minute lecture before she even makes her first point is like counting sheep.
With the news media, they want you in a mania, at the edge of your seat wondering what horrible thing is going to happen next. Sharing pure fact and allowing for honest discussions of the issues of our times isn’t good for the bottom line. Quick! You have 90 seconds; look in the camera and tell us all exactly how you’re going to solve the climate crisis & fix the Middle East!
Take Donald Trump as a classic example of the tactics- full disclosure: don’t like the guy, didn’t vote for him (ever) and I think he’s a malignant narcissist. During the 2016 campaign they gave his campaign almost 2 billion dollars of free air time. All of his rallies were aired. Sometimes for hours in anticipation of a rally they’d just park the live camera on the “Trump” branded jet. Both preferring to operate life like a reality TV show, this was truly a match made in heaven.
Once he got elected though and that shock set in, it was just rolling 24 hour coverage of everything he said, tweeted, thought, could have thought, may think in the future, etc. I can very vividly remember turning on the news one night to see universal primetime coverage of the fact the president left the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to his foot. Surely an editorial low. But do you really think they were that upset he won?
The game isn’t about engaging with substantive issues it’s about finding a polarizing issue and running with it. They desensitized us to the point where we couldn’t even uniformly agree it was dangerous a bunch of people with zip ties, tasers and bear spray broke down the capitol doors looking to hang the sitting Vice President. And no, this wasn’t a Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers LARP gone horribly wrong. These people had been manipulated to think they were battling evil forces set on the destruction of this country. Another kind of thing that starts happening when everyone has their own siloed off reality.
No shame in milking profits on both sides of a ‘crisis’ they created. The weather forecast? Doom & gloom all day. Things getting better? To paraphrase your favorite film mobsters: fuhgeddaboudit! The glass is always half empty. It’s crisis culture at its best. Don’t even get me started on the constant breaking news- meant to keep you in a rolling state of angst. Honey, if every 5 minutes you have breaking news- you got nothing.
Remember their decisions only get weighed against what it means for their bottom lines. They do better when we are all at each others throats. Get those eyeballs, sell those ad spots, at any cost; after all. Talk about disingenuous. It’s not hard to see why most American’s have turned to alternative sources for their information.
Villain 2: Social Media Companies
The social media companies are similar but much more artful. The cable news companies got slapped with the hilarious moniker of “fake news” largely because of their low-brow performance art and often cringey pandering; the social media companies, one the other hand, use some of the most advanced algorithms in the world to figure you out better than you know you. Their whole goal is to alter your behaviors without you recognizing someone is altering your behavior. By this I mean: they try to hijack your brain by getting you addicted to using the applications as much as possible with as few breaks as possible.
All those notifications, messages, likes, never ending rabbit holes of content are meant to flood your brain with dopamine and form very strong habits (great link to some Harvard research). Habits meant to keep your eyeballs locked into their apps at all costs so they can sell ad spots and all your data to the highest bidder. The platforms literally leverage the same science used in slot machines and work in the same way drugs interact with your brain. This phenomena isn’t confined only to social media unfortunately. To offer a personal anecdote: once someone told me the quickest way to make a million bucks was to design a gaming app for you phone. At the time, I didn’t get it. Now I do. Unfortunately dopamine driven loops are tech industry standard when designing any consumer faced product.
The technical term is ‘dopamine driven feedback loops‘. Imagine a hamster trapped running on a wheel. Now imagine you’re the hamster. Take Tik-Tok, for example, affectionately known as the crack social media company on Wall Street because it was designed to be the most addicting. Open that app up and you are automatically hammered with never ending videos and notifications. The goal of the app is to help anyone become famous as fast as possible. The key metric they pitch in corporate boardrooms is the speed at which the application can get a user to 1 million followers. Creating an incentive to constantly make the feedback loop stronger and faster.
One of these costs is the radicalization of its users. I’m not saying everyone goes towards the extremes of their respective spectrums but at the very minimum it locks and cements people into the positions they already held. Any idea or belief you have these algorithms are designed to only give you information that will reinforce them. Which will amplify any type of disagreement or difference we may have with each other- while removing any exposure to people or ideas that contradict. You need to know it’s not by accident.
These algorithms were designed specifically to hijack any vulnerability the brain has and exploit it. Imagine the world’s premiere neuroscientists coming together to design a drug specifically to addict you. Now remove the word drug and replace it with algorithm. Scary. I think it’s also very important to point out – all of this without your consent which in a way is even more despicable. The lack of respect: I’m going to specifically design something that alters people brains, package it as a free service and they don’t ever need to know. Classic honey pot strategy.
Villain 3: (Spineless) Politicians
Only fitting to save the best for last; everyone’s favorite: the spineless politician. Take a bow. None of this would be possible if not for your incompetence and indifference to the people you get paid to represent. Sure there are people out there fighting the good fight but there is an alarming growth in the kind of guys and gals who are less interested in getting things done and more interested in getting retweets and landing cheap shots. Look no further than- perhaps America’s most hated- Ted Cruz. Its tough to put into words why a guy like that is so despicable but I heard something once and it just clicked: Ted’s the kind of guy who’s always looking for the camera. The paparazzi stalk celebrities and Ted Cruz stalks the paparazzi. For Ted and people like him, politics is just kabuki theatre. A total soap opera.
As our country gets further polarized, the lines of reality blurred, the decay of trust between citizens, there are still politicians willing to seize on those toxic trends and leverage them for their own gain. You know what they say in Washington: never let a good crisis go to waste. Like modern day charlatans and snake-oil salesmen, they purposely prey on people’s fears & vulnerabilities to get what they want.
If that means labeling 81 million people radical, socialist’s hell bent on destroying everything you love, they will. How about labeling 74 million people racist, white nationalists who lack any semblance of humanity? You bet your ass they will. Now taking a principled stand against corporate America on a controversial issue? You’re just going to hear the those tires squeal as they peel out of the parking lot- never to be seen again. It turns out its easier to lie to and spook their constituents into believing the biggest problem this country faces is other citizens who are unlike them instead of climate change, reviving our dying middle class, fixing our crumbling infrastructure, fixing our terrible schooling system, investing in marginalized communities, taking on corruption or countering an emerging China.
Unfortunately the people who were supposed to protect us from these manipulations and exploitations have largely been co-opted by this system. Haven’t you ever wondered why even things with 70, 80, hell 90 percent public approval can’t get passed? The deep south isn’t to blame or the newly reinforced safe spaces on college campuses- it’s the people signing those checks that keep the lights on at campaign headquarters. Many politicians nowadays get into the public life with their eye on the exit to a cushy private gig. If you want that six figure job that requires no work you’re going to need to play ball.The structure needs to be adjusted and incentives removed.
Implications
Regrettably but unsurprisingly, people don’t trust each other anymore & turns out trust is important; unfortunately for us. It’s hard to blame them either when you take a step back and take into account the volume of misinformation and disinformation that we get bombarded with nowadays. You wish you could just take a headline at face value but it seems wise to stop and consider ulterior motives. I think people really sincerely want the truth and they want to trust. Desperately so, if I’m speaking for myself. But when the incentive structures and systems are at a place where the incentive is to drive everyone away from a baseline reality and towards segmented spin zones chaos and distrust thrives.
With trust comes a certain level of accountability to the truth because when you trust you’re not assuming the worst. You grant people the idea that like you they want to live in a healthy, happy society where their kids and loved ones have a fair shot. Everyone has some skin in the game for making this thing work. It’s sort of like the vision of the ideal free market: rational actors coming together and using the best information to make the best possible decisions- where value is created for everyone along the chain. Now it’s like we don’t owe anyone anything anymore because they’re on a different ‘team’, they’re ‘evil’, they’re trying to ‘destroy the world’. Everyone took their ball and went home, unwilling to budge even an inch.
Look- it’s not an easy problem to fix; if you’re waiting for some rousing speech where I share the silver bullet fix or link 5 super, quirky-random solutions you’d find in a Buzzfeed article- I’m sorry- this isn’t that kind of story & I’m not that kind of millennial. Quite frankly, I think we’ve all been lectured enough lately by people that proclaim to have all the answers. Individually, everyone’s going to have to do some soul searching on this one.
Maybe, ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in. Reflect. Do you want to be constantly walking on eggshells- afraid to let your thoughts slip out- worried about a cancellation worthy mishap? Do you always want to have the tribal war paint dawned, ready to spend hours on twitter eviscerating total strangers? Would you rather own someone or take a step toward fixing a problem? Do you want to look down on or assume the worst of total strangers? I don’t. It’s exhausting. If this gets fixed it’ll be a bottom up versus a top down kind of thing and ultimately the choice will be ours which is kind of scary right now if I’m being honest.
If you have 2:34 seconds and can stomach 60’s anti-war, psychedelic rock take a listen to “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield. I definitely don’t consider myself a hippie but it’s eerily apropos to our times. If you don’t dare listen, I’ll paraphrase a nugget: theres something happening here… there’s battle lines being drawn… nobodies right if everybody’s wrong…People mostly saying hoo-ray for their side… Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep, starts when you’re always afraid… stop, take a look around.
History may be more cyclical than we appreciate. Take that as you may.
Brighter Times Ahead? That’s up to you.
Dad rock aside, let’s try to end on an optimistic note. Think back to Schoolhouse Rock for a minute. Hey, spare me the cringe! Don’t you try to act like you don’t remember- yeah you- we were all forced to watch it religiously from elementary school until high school. I know you remember. Consider the American melting pot analogy. An idea that was hammered into our head so hard that we probably went numb to its meaning. But we’ll circle back. It’s a very basic idea that if you spend enough time with x, y, z group of people you learn pretty quickly we’re all the same animal- it’s the fear of the unknown that wedges us apart.
I don’t know if people remember that anymore. What makes us strong is our diversity. The American melting pot works so well because you have all these people, from all over the world, with seemingly disparate backgrounds, beliefs and experiences coming together to form a cohesive, strong and creative society that is ( my pessimists would argue: ‘was’- I do not agree but we’ll leave that one for another day) the envy of the world.
As Martin Luther King once aptly said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. A statement he lived through good work and good trouble. A society where people are judged off of the contents off their character & size of their heart is something worth fighting for. That is the melting pot at its best. This was a profound lesson that we used to approach with more reverence and humility.
Turns out the secret sauce wasn’t something magical in the water- it was that once people got integrated together we started to realize pretty quickly we’re all in this together: oh ‘you’re’ just like me- you just want to have a healthy, happy family, you want to laugh with your friends about goofy shit, you want to go to that concert and let it all hang out for a few hours, you want to hit the courts and play some pickup on your day off, etc . We bonded over sharing funny stories, a few drinks, some self-deprecating jokes, playing a pick-up game with 10 total strangers. Some things should be totally apolitical. Who would’ve thought? It’s those kind of universal human experiences that bring us together. Now we are having less and less universal experiences and more and more highly segmented ones that specifically highlight divisions.
Now that’s not to say that it’s perfect or there aren’t many bumps along the way, it’s a process after all, but if we’re willing to put in the hard work the fruits of the labor are well worth it. Sometimes things can be difficult. That’s life- its not all supposed to be easy. You need your valleys for your peaks. Approach people with empathy, spend some actual time with them (in real life) and carve them out some space to articulate where they are coming from & the experiences they bring to the table and things somehow find a way to work. That’s the way you trust. You have a mutual interest in living in the same reality because you realize whether we like it or not we’re quite literally all in this together.
Life can be messy but it also can be beautiful. Just because it feels ever so messy right now doesn’t mean that beauty isn’t right around the corner. Try waving to a baby at the grocery store that always helps me put things into perspective. Throughout history we’ve navigated through these seemingly bleak & increasingly rough patches before. We had the Civil War, Square Deal trust busting at the turn of the 20th century, a few Red Scares and frankly many others. Now just like the people who overcame those times we are going to have to ask ourselves that tough question: ‘Here’s where we are. What’s next?’ Maybe past can be prologue? Time will tell. But ultimately its up to you.
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