Polarization: or How We Came to Distort Reality so Thoroughly

I like to talk politics.  And I’m really not so concerned about “winning an argument” or crushing someone’s position just to satisfy myself. No, I’m more interested in how they think. Sometimes, dare I say much of the time, listening to some argue politics is just appalling. Their command of data and facts, along with reasoning processes that accompany such facts are just debilitating.

So how is it that your cranky old uncle at Thanksgiving can ruin the day with his cockamamie opinions; how is it that the nice kid you socialize with can actually believe that Hillary Clinton has secrets in her home basement; or, can you really prove to me that the government is trying to vaccinate people so I can control them.

How people configure a set of ideas that are bound together by some mechanism or functional interdependence is the real question.  Examining someone’s beliefs or ideological system always unearths a specified attitude or belief that goes with a collection of others.  We assume that a person, for example, who holds a conservative position in one capacity will hold additional beliefs and attitudes in the same conservative capacity.

For example, if a person strongly believes in lower taxes they are probably conservative and believe in fewer government programs supported by those taxes. Such a conservative probably believes in strong protections for the American values system and is thereby supportive of the military and military interventions. Our hypothetical political character opposes federal aid to education, a state-controlled economy, and union organization.

The person who supports this reasonably coherent political position has been labeled an “ideologue.” But the question that is difficult pertains to how these ideas are packaged together and considered to represent an orderly and defensible ideological system. Such a system, as briefly described above, is a fairly consistent conservative position that is recognizable and defensible. But what happens when that collection of ideas gets contaminated by nonlogical, or empirically indefensible, or deeply personal and subjective ideas that are seeking to find a different order, one organized more by personal emotions or feelings rather than issue-based analysis.

One of the problems of contemporary debate over controversial issues is the attachment of emotions to the various planks in the system described above. So, one person might hold and represent the conservative position above but “hate” the other person and feel that they are personally morally degenerate or intellectually dishonest.  They then turn any engagement about the issues into a personal and emotional clash that has little to do with the issue and much to do with the polarization that results.

The result is increased attention to other groups that individuals identify with. These are ethnic, religious, or political groups and they are typically associated with intense emotions and strong feelings of defensiveness. The participants in the conflict move away from issue-based matters and are more drawn to emotional bonds which are characterized by deep psychological reactions to threat and the various meaning distortions that accompany group identity.

This results in a downward spiraling of emotions that feeds the divisions between groups. We can see the consequences of this in the current state of American politics – polarization.