Why is everything ‘us vs them’ and becoming more polarised by the day?
Binaries are a very useful tool for understanding the world. Arguably, human beings are predisposed to seeing the world through the binary lens since most of our choices are binary. Yes or no. Do this or don’t do that. We learn this from the cradle. However, this prism of a binary choice is all too easily exploited by those who would prefer it if we were expending our energies fighting constructed battles between ourselves rather than looking at the bigger picture. A bigger picture that involves increasing controls over our lives in order to serve the interests of the so-called elite few.
If I disagree with someone about something, there is sometimes an emotional attachment to this disagreement. I am human. I feel it. Especially if I’ve had an otherwise difficult day. But I remind myself that one disagreement on one issue, or even several, does not make that person my enemy. Instead, all our positions on issues, including my own, are borne out of personal experience and innate predispositions because of things like personality. We should not blame each other. Instead we should try to understand, to empathise.
It is not a coincidence that personality, a very complex multi-faceted aspect of humanity, is so elaborate and nuanced and hard to categorise and yet is arguably more meaningful to us as individuals than any kind of identifier like race, sex, social class or sexuality. Our own individual personalities drive us in all sorts of ways until we allow ourselves to ‘identify’ hard with some aspect of ourselves. Once that identification has been set up, it can then be used to atomise us further and produce yet another binary of opposition. It leads to suppression of all other aspects of a person’s individual makeup as less important, and actually, leads to unhappiness. But that’s besides the point. Individual happiness is not the goal here. The goals are to sell us stuff, control us and have us fighting amongst ourselves. It’s hard to set up a binary for personality but yet there have even been attempts in recent times for prime exploitation, divide and rule, purposes, such as whether or not one falls on the extrovert or introvert side of the spectrum. During this crisis, introverts have been pitted against extroverts and vice versa, since the insular, home-loving, crowd avoiding quiet people of our society have done rather better under circumstances that force us to be insular, home-loving and crowd-avoiding. Were introverts really at home fist pumping the air and feeling glee at the suffering of people who would rather be at a party than playing an RPG? Who knows. Either way, it’s yet another ‘in-group/out-group’ struggle that we, as understandably traumatised human beings, could have done without.
To compound the problem yet further, the confusion built in to the rapidly evolving tech of the modern age has been written about again and again. Our brains are not designed for the level of decision making and choices we must make in a day. Our attentions are constantly pulled away from where we are and what we are doing, or even HOW we are, by the screaming demands of technology. We are bombarded with angry disagreements on all forms of media in the things we carry in our pockets. We are constantly assailed with exhortations to buy the things we don’t need based on a search or a throwaway conversation we had at breakfast that has somehow emerged as a popup on the article we got sucked into reading while looking at social media for a thing we can no longer remember. We have become slaves to the very things that were supposed to liberate us. It puts us into a state of fog and irritability that makes us more malleable and easily manipulated. And since behavioural psychology has been used for decades in both the corporate world and the world of government, and put on steroids in recent times, it is not surprising that we are an exhausted people. That more than once we have fallen for stuff that given a decent amount of time to step back from all of the white noise and hysteria, time to do a little research of our own, to have conversations without fear of social opprobrium and censorship, we would have seen through the naked attempts to steer us into courses of action that do not benefit us at all.
Of course, where there is a legitimate binary, the waters have been muddied yet further by suggesting that science and the understanding of millennia of existence on this blue green planet has got it all wrong and that certain things, until recently held immutable, are now to be understood as ‘fluid’ and part of a ‘spectrum’. Once again, this is a narrative bolstered in all forms of media, and now reinforced in law and governance, by the moneyed and powerful. Who stands to gain from this cognitive dissonance inducing gaslighting? It isn’t us and it certainly isn’t our children. And yet debates around this are also stifled, censored, moralised and those who question it are similarly pilloried.
It is not an inevitability that the existence of the latest ‘hot’ binary choice like whether to receive the Covid vaccine should become emblematic of opposition, yet it has unequivocally been set up in this way, and it is very clear which side the technocrats are on and thus the ‘acceptable’ one. The frames on social media, the pictures of plastered arms, masked selfies outside medical centres, breathless posts about ‘bravery’ and furious diatribes about selfish anti-vaxxers. Even Harry Potter style ‘house badges’ of Team Moderna, Team Pfizer etc. The other side, feeling utterly beleaguered, reacts with accusations of stupidity and sheep-like mentalities, and both sides dig into their trenches a little deeper. We must question why politicians and the tech companies are not merely ignoring the damage to society this causes, but are absolutely encouraging it. Who does it benefit really?
We are absolutely steered into tribes by social media, bolstered by the rhetoric of politicians, corporations, and mass media. Okay, so we have an innate tendency to want to join teams, a tendency to tribalism even. This is a natural if often not terribly helpful trait in human beings. We also have a liking for simple answers to complex problems. If that is then coupled with a ‘with me or against me’ mentality, history should teach us that bad things happen. These tendencies have been exploited to a ridiculous degree in recent times. This exploitation is not the doing of ordinary people. It is the doing of those who currently have the money and power and who wish to retain and increase both. Let’s not let them. Let’s remember the nuance, the shades of grey, the compassion for our fellow human beings and take it back.
LoveTruthHonesty 