 Everybody's noticing how social and political conversation has become more and more polarized to the point where you hardly could call it a conversation anymore. It's more of a battle. And not only have contentious topics become more polarized than ever, but also more and more topics are kind of entering the polarized realm, leaving very little common ground for people to establish civic discourse anymore. I think what makes a topic especially prone to hyperpolarization is if it lends itself to a totalizing discourse. A totalizing discourse means that everything can be framed in its terms. So some examples are race, gender, climate change, socialism versus capitalism. Anything that allows you to organize the entire world into pro and against us and them. And that allows you to take on an identity as one of the good guys. I talk about this a lot now that allows you to identify with team good and to cast off others into team evil. That lends itself to a polarized conversation. And you can see then from that you can see what the underlying need is. It's the need to identify with something, the need to accept oneself as good, as right, as part of the solution, not part of the problem. To excuse oneself from feeling guilt, from really feeling the pain of a world that has gone astray. To feel okay with yourself and to belong. I remember from being on sports teams in high school and college, the feeling of belonging was so strong, I kind of searched for it for the rest of my life. And today because of the fragmenting of society, because of the erosion of community, because of the breakdown in our unifying story as a civilization and as a culture, people are suffering a huge identity loss. Because, yeah, shorn of their intimate connections to nature, to place, to community, to extended family and so forth, boxed into these single family nuclear family units that are utterly disconnected from the land and the people around them. Having digitally mediated relationships, there's no sense of belonging that can come from that. No sense of being embedded in a world that is part of you and you're part of it. So those conditions drive people to want to identify with something, to give life meaning again. This is partly a symptom of the larger cultural breakdown in stories, in our meaning making capacity, well, our meaning making stories. So here's a substitute. Here's something that gives life meaning again. So really the polarization of society is a symptom of many things. But one of them is the breakdown of our overarching narratives that give life direction and meaning. Here's what I'm a part of. That's the basic, we need that. We need a social narrative that gives everybody a feeling of here's what I am a part of. And secondly, the second thing it's a symptom of is the breakdown in community and connection to place and a feeling of belonging. As long as those conditions persist, I think that intensifying polarization is inevitable, which then becomes a vicious circle because it doesn't meet the real need. Identity with a polarized in-group doesn't actually meet the need. And so you end up, then your polarized in-group ends up splintering again into the good team and the bad team. You see this today in the left, where it's cannibalizing itself. And people who thought that they were liberals and identified as progressives are getting called out for insufficient purity in their use of language around race or something like that. And so you have a shrinking in-group or a bifurcating or multi-fricating of an original side of things. And I'll just say, I mean, I could say a lot more about that, what gets sacrificed to the war effort. Because the more that you other the people on the other side of an issue, the more that you dehumanize them, the more that winning the fight becomes important, then the more you have to sacrifice everything else to that goal. When winning is the most important thing, then, for example, any data point that comes in that doesn't fit into a weaponized narrative that's going to help you arouse hatred and anger against the other side is going to be a, you're going to be hostile to that data point. You're going to want to exclude it whether or not it's true. So you can see for example, okay, so I'm going to get it. So, okay, if I give any examples, I'm going to risk pissing people off because if it doesn't fit into your opinion set, then I become one of the enemy or worse yet, I'm saying, well, maybe neither side is right. And then I'm a pacifist. If I'm calling for an end to the war, I'm a pacifist. And in times of war pacifists, I've said this in many places pacifists are more hated than the enemy because the enemy affirms your identity, the pacifist questions it. So if I give an example, then I can very easily become someone on the other side. So if I say, say if I question the Russian collusion narrative that says Hillary Clinton lost the election because Russian bots and Russian trolls poisoned the public mind and got them to vote, got people to vote for Donald Trump or whatever. If I cast doubt on that, then I'm not helping. I'm not helping in the anti-Trump effort because this is a piece of ammunition that could be used. And I'm saying, well, okay, you know, I actually think he's doing horrible things with immigration, with the environment, with so many other things. But that part, I don't think so. I don't think that's true. Well, then I'm playing into the hands of the Russians. I'm playing into the hands of the Republicans. I'm playing because I'm de-weaponizing a weaponized narrative. So I must be on the other side. So we can see that what gets sacrificed is the truth. And I bet a lot of people who are advancing and rubbing their hands with glee every time a new revelation comes up that seems to support the Russian collusion narrative, a lot of them secretly know that it is in Van Jones' words a big nothing burger. But they're not going to admit that. They're going to keep that quiet, maybe not even admit that to themselves. It's a textbook application of double-think to believe two contradictory things at the same time. I wish I could read the quote from Orwell. But in the quest for power, truth must be sacrificed. And the quest for power is justified if you're good, if you're the good guys, then anything you do to gain power is by definition good, because you're the good guys. This is the logic of the party in 1984. We're going to create a paradise on earth if we have enough power to do so. Therefore, we have to gain more and more power until our power is total. It's a recipe for totalitarianism, all for the greater good, to quote the evil wizard in Harry Potter, what was his name? Grindelwald, for the greater good, to gain total power for the greater good, because we're the good guys. And you can see how this plays out in U.S. foreign policy, where good is identified as American interests. So if somebody is a horrendous brutal autocracy, say Saudi Arabia, but they're on our side. So they're the good guys. Whereas if you're a Venezuela and resisting dollar hegemony and nationalizing your oil fields and not allowing Western investment in it, then you get branded as socialist and anti-American and you're the bad guys. And even if you have a democratic election that was witnessed by international observers, et cetera, et cetera, and deemed fair by many organizations, but you elect the wrong person, then that person is by definition an evil dictator because he's on the other side. And there's a certain naivete here. It's not fully conscious, this assignment of Maduro to the category of evil. It's, of course, don't you understand? We're the good guys. So if he's anti-American, he must be the bad guys. And if something doesn't serve that narrative, it must be rejected. And if you support something, advance a data point that doesn't fit the narrative, you're an enemy. Don't you get it? You're not helping here. You're rendering aid and comfort to the enemy, whether or not it's true. So the filter is not true. The filter is not, is it true? The filter is, does it serve our goals? And this leads to some deeper philosophical questions like what is truth actually? A refuge from that question is truth is fact. Truth is what corresponds to objective facts in the world. But in the postmodern age, we recognize the limitations of that understanding of truth.