GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

In a time of increasing polarization, amplified by social media and exacerbated by malicious actors, we all need to deepen our understanding of just what we are into. Polarization, as I described in a previous blog on this subject, is best understood as an artifact of people binding their identities to explanatory narratives that validate their experience of the world, especially those experiences that activate their deepest fears. Binding to narrative per se is fundamental to both psychological and social stability, and in that context, it is natural and healthy. But when the narrative is being deliberately corrupted in order to manipulate public opinion, it fosters increasingly antagonistic relationships, dehumanizing the antagonists and inflaming the protagonists, both of which encourage us to treat fellow human beings as targets for marginalization, incarceration, or elimination.

In contemporary culture, there are two framing narratives that are driving this kind of polarization (and let me give shout out to Tangle for calling them to my attention):

1. Civilization vs the Barbarians. In this narrative, “we” are the defenders of what is good, noble, and sacred in human culture, and “they” are agents of evil, degradation, and blasphemy. Thus, “we” can consider ourselves exempt from ethical accountability in our actions against them because “they” are threatening the very foundation of ethics itself.
2. Oppressed vs the Oppressors. In this narrative, “we” are the victims of political, social, and economic exploitation by “them,” an overclass that has acquired a disproportionate share of power, wealth, and entitlements illegitimately at our expense. Thus, “we” can consider ourselves exempt from ethical accountability in our actions against them because “they” have unethically disenfranchised us.

Both narratives can be legitimate under extreme conditions, but each also lends itself to inflammatory purposes as well. Historically, the role of news reporting has been to help us distinguish between these two states. What is disgraceful about today’s media is that major broadcast networks, as well as previously highly respected publications, have not just abandoned this role but are actively engaged in subverting it. Let’s look a little more closely at what they are up to.

Civilization vs the Barbarians

This is the narrative framework that underlies Israel’s stance about its war with Hamas. It is also the one the US used to justify its post-9/11 actions against both Iraq and Isis. In both instances, provoked by starkly violent surprise attacks against purely civilian targets, outrage and righteous indignation fueled a demand for massive retaliation. There was simply no room for acknowledging any mitigating circumstances, any possible responsibility for creating the conditions that might have led to the terrorist attacks, or any accountability for subsequent acts of retributive retaliation regardless of how appalling they, in turn, might have been.

Now, given the extremity of the provocations, it is hard to see how any of this could have been avoided. But the civilization-vs-barbarians narrative is being used much more broadly in contemporary political discourse to address concerns that are much less extreme, including the following:

• Right-wing outrage over illegal immigration
• Left-wing outrage over anti-abortion legislation
• Right-wing outrage over students demonstrating over the war in Gaza
• Left-wing outrage over climate change deriders
• Right-wing outrage over DEI initiatives
• Left-wing outrage over 2020 election deniers.
• Right-wing outrage over atheism
• Left-wing outrage over book-banning

The key term here, in case you missed it, is outrage. Outrage uses righteousness to legitimize an explosion of anger against a community-sanctioned target. But the roots of that anger are not in the object of its attention. They are in the subject that has been carrying that burden around internally and who has now found a socially acceptable way to release it. And don’t think this applies just to “other people.” No one (except maybe a saint) is exempt here. You and I are as subject to the power of narratives as anyone else—it is only the trigger narratives themselves that separate us.

Look back over the bullet points above. Each of them is encased in a narrative, be it based on fact or urban legend. We should not be naïve about the power of these narratives to shape public opinion and influence elections. Psychologically, they play upon some of our deepest fears and then offer us a protective shield that is both internally coherent and externally impenetrable. That’s what makes the civilization-vs-barbarians narrative such a powerful political tool.

Oppressed vs the Oppressors

This is the narrative framework that underlies US college student protests in support of the Palestinians and against Israel’s sustained offensive in the Gaza Strip, as well as NATO support for the Ukraine and US support for Taiwan. Inside the US, it underpins support for the homeless, defunding of the police, and decriminalization of drug use. In each case, in order to relieve the debilitating conditions these communities are living under, the narrative calls for a radical change in the status quo, including a willingness to deprioritize legal justice in order to achieve social justice.

There are two separate audiences this narrative seeks to engage. Ostensibly, it is the oppressed themselves, but this can be misleading. Under exceptional circumstances, it is true that such narratives can trigger a revolution of the oppressed, but more commonly, these folks are in no position to take action on their own behalf. The far more frequent audience is people of means who have the power to take action and who empathize with the cause. This results in two kinds of calls to action—a revolutionary path, led by the oppressed, which seeks to overthrow the oppressors through violent means, and a liberal path, led by the empathizers, which seeks reform by working within the system.

Although we associate the oppressed-vs-the-oppressors narrative primarily with the left, we should note that the far right is leveraging it as well, as witnessed by the following widely held claims:

• The woke liberal establishment is imposing socialist agendas around climate change and DEI on the oppressed white middle class.
• Parental rights are under attack, threatened by liberal ideologies that have taken over public schools.
• The 2020 election was rigged by Democrats, and Republicans, therefore, need not accept the results of the 2024 election because it also could be rigged.
• Donald Trump did not get a fair trial because it, too, was rigged.
• (And at the far right) the tyranny of the Deep State is so oppressive it warrants patriotic citizens taking up arms and shedding blood.

The Implications

To sum up, both political parties are using both narratives, but in very different contexts.

• US Right: “Oppressors are the woke liberal establishment imposing socialist agendas around climate change and DEI on the oppressed white middle class.”
• US Right: “Barbarians are the illegal immigrants seeking to invade our country and take over our democracy by outnumbering the civilized native white citizenry.”
• US Left: “Oppressors are the conservative capitalist establishment imposing unjust requirements on disadvantaged populations, including illegal immigrants, the homeless, and the addicted.”
• US Left: “Barbarians are the far-right politicians and pundits undermining the rule of law with fake news and demagogic rhetoric to block reproductive rights, equal opportunity programs, and climate change initiatives.”

Any attempt to argue people off of any of these positions is almost certain to fail, not because the arguments that support them are especially persuasive, but because people have bound their identities to them so tightly that they cannot break with them. As part of this binding, society self-segregates into “Us” and “Them,” each with its own amplifying media sources, its own signals of solidarity, its own righteous indignation, its own contempt for the other side.

Given all that, what could anyone seeking a better way possibly do? That is a question for a future blog post, one that is still very much in the works. For now, we should just note when these narratives are being used in corrupt ways to legitimize illegitimate claims and do our best to detach ourselves from them.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

---

One might be forgiven for thinking that our world is undergoing an unprecedented crisis of polarization, but to help put things in perspective, here are some lyrics from a song sung by the Kingston Trio in 1959 to a tuneful minuet:

The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans
The Germans hate the Poles

Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like
Anybody very much.

Polarization has been with us throughout recorded history. What is bringing it to crisis proportions in our era is a digitally connected world population being fed a stream of narratives that are constructed specifically and intentionally to exacerbate the problem. If we are going to navigate our way through this challenge, we need to get a better understanding of how polarization works and what it takes to depolarize.

How Polarization Works

Polarization begins when we embrace an opinion so deeply we incorporate it into our personal identity. It becomes part of the narrative we use to make sense of the world and our lives, and in this way becomes inseparable from our sense of self. An attack on such an opinion strikes at the very foundations of our personhood, something we hold inviolate, something we will defend to the death. This results in a “no-fly zone” of non-negotiability, a ring-fence that we will not allow to be breached.

Clearly, this is dangerous stuff, and we would all do well to avoid it altogether. Indeed, one way to think of spiritual enlightenment is to have grounded one’s identity in a state of being outside the realm of opinions. One still has opinions, but one controls them instead of having them control you. Unfortunately, but for a few saints and enlightened Buddhas, there are precious few of us who can claim that state. Most of us hold (or are held by) positions on one or more issues of contention that we simply refuse to entertain abandoning. That, let us say, is normal. But we need to understand, these are not positions of strength. They are not assets. They are liabilities. They make us vulnerable in all sorts of ways, some of which we might not appreciate or even detect.

Why do we do this? Our identities are anchored in narratives, stories we tell about ourselves and that others tell about us. They tell everyone including ourselves who we are. These narratives are organized around protagonists and antagonists. We seek to emulate the protagonists and defeat the antagonists. Now, the antagonists don’t have to be people. They can be challenges like crime or poverty or sickness or climate change. More often, however, they do end up being people, people we don’t know in all likelihood but who stand for the very things that we are so clearly against. The weird part about this is that they feel exactly the same way about us! But, how can that be? We are in the right, they are in the wrong, why don’t they see that? Instead, bizarrely, they are saying the same thing.

OK, this is pretty obviously a trap of our own making, and as adults, it is incumbent upon us to resist its effects as best we can. It is also clear that we come up short more often than one would like. So, for the time being, let us assume that some amount of polarization is a fact of life, and in that context, take stock of what that entails.

On a personal level, polarized beliefs make us susceptible to righteousness. We are deeply certain we are right and, when put under sufficient pressure, entitled to take whatever action we feel is necessary, even when that involves breaking the law. We have no interest in understanding our opponents or negotiating with them. We are in our very own “no-fly zone,” and we carry it with us wherever we go. This takes a toll on us but perhaps more importantly on our friends and family as well. They either have to capitulate and participate in our vision, or they have to skirt the issue altogether. Direct honest communication would require a level of vulnerability we are unwilling to entertain.

As citizens, polarized beliefs make us susceptible to political manipulation. Demagogues can engage our psyches by demonizing our antagonists, inflaming our righteousness with calls to action that speak to our very souls. We will bond with these leaders regardless of their histories because we are not interested in evidence, only validation. We unite with them around what is wrong and then allow them to define what is right as the destruction of what is wrong. It is a playbook that has been used throughout history, sad to say, because it is very, very effective. We see this in other people all the time. We need to see it in ourselves as well.

Next up: On Depolarization

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.