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Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We made our “home” here, but we never really invested in neighbors. We had many warm relationships, but they were with other people passing through. We were two of the nomads in the emerging “digital economy.”
We didn’t intend to isolate ourselves, but we had too little time to do any of the community-building we had intentionally done
divides Americans into the mobile, the rooted, and the stuck.
Community is collapsing in America because the rooted are vanishing;
the stuck have too many crises in their lives to thin...
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the mobile are too schizophrenic to busy themselves with the care and feeding of their fl...
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Increasingly, we’re shackled to the feeling that we don’t belong anywhere,
the costs of mobility—and, ironically, the costs of having too many opportunities. Everything was thin.
requires cultivation. We have to make the decision to prioritize it.
What sustains people, really, is sharing a common cause, a common purpose—a sense of being in it together.
People yearn to belong. They want to be part of a tribe, to have roots. That desire will never be stamped out of the human heart. What it means, though, is that when healthy forms of belonging vanish, people will turn to more troubling forms.
We’re meant to be for things and people, but absent that, most of us will choose to be against things and people, together, rather than to be alone.
the inbuilt desire for a tribe—the instinctive need to belong, to be part of a community, to know we’re home. But what happens when we lose that sense? We start hunting for substitutes. In contemporary America, the most powerful substitute is very often our TV “family.”
parents today are far more worried about kidnapping than in the past—even though child abductions are at an all-time low. Similarly, voters in the last election cycle believed that violent crime was spiking—but it simply wasn’t true. Violent crime was at a forty-five-year low. Emotion trumps data. Some
Polititainment inevitably distorts our political foes
Even if you know the story probably isn’t quite as black and white as they’re saying, it’s reassuring to hear that what you believed to be true about the presumed bad guys is “true.”
One reason for the ever-growing chasm is that almost all of us are convinced that our position is 100 percent right, and the other side is 100 percent wrong—no
to assume there are only two sides to all big debates.
“confirmation bias,”
Because confirmation bias and motivated reasoning (we’ll discuss this later) have become the organizing principle of our media consumption and our political discourse.
people filter out most information that conflicts with their presuppositions or desired conclusions. We’ve all had friends in the midst of a self-destructive cycle who sincerely want advice, then resist when you tell them something they don’t want to hear. I’ve had friends like that, and I’ve also been that friend. You’ve been both, too.
participants spent far more time reading articles that confirmed what they already thought than articles that might have taught them anything new.
people work hard to confirm their biases, not to challenge them.
most scientists are not trailblazers; most of them, most days, work inside a given paradigm—the shared set of assumptions
Crusaders for a new model rarely win, because big change is hard, but when they do succeed, it produces a “paradigm shift”—a new outlook on the world.
Most of the time, the path of least resistance is confirmation.
In order to make progress, it’s prudent to start from certain assumptions, even if they’re not perfect. We can’t restart from square one every day.
We’re all like the scientists who are looking not to upend their theories but to confirm them. We are more interested in coherence—or internal consistency in our worldview—than to correspondence with the facts we encounter in the world beyond our heads.
our tendency to accept what we want to be true much more easily than we accept apparent new “facts” that we don’t want to be true.
Does this mean a Columbia-educated liberal laboring for life as a D.C. reporter is intentionally skewing his or her reporting? Of course not. But it does mean he or she is likely to have a difficult time appreciating the assumptions shared by the patrons in a suburban Nashville or rural Nebraska diner—and that makes it harder to write well about them.
Regardless of one’s position on abortion, this should have attracted front-page, wall-to-wall attention from the start. But it didn’t. Why not? Because, as some reporters and editors later admitted, they were reluctant to cover any abortion-related story that might help the pro-life cause.
The result of selection bias of this sort in decisions about what news is news has led tens of millions of Americans to divorce from the mainstream media, citing irreconcilable differences.
They explained that they feel antagonized and condescended to by the national press.
I’m simply trying to demonstrate why it is that millions of Americans have turned to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other right-wing outlets for the news, to the exclusion of almost everything else. They’ve wearied of the uncomplicated, left-leaning picture of the world presented by the mainstream press for three decades. Too many anomalies piled up in the minds of right-leaning newsreaders—and they eventually chose a different model.
It made Romney look dishonest, even though he was fully accurate in his claim.
Republicans, even those not in love with Romney’s candidacy, saw Crowley’s intervention as representative of the press: not dispassionate arbiters, but open partisans. The story dominated conservative headlines for days after the debate and remains a lingering psychic wound. Yet it apparently made so little impression at CNN that Wolf Blitzer didn’t even remember it.
It isn’t an accident that Fox News recently changed its motto from “Fair and Balanced” to “America’s Most Watched, Most Trusted” network. In Chapter 1, we considered Robert Putnam’s argument that in America, “Connections among individuals, social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them” have eroded dangerously. As recently as the early 1990s, it wasn’t like this.
polarization is growing faster among elderly Americans than among those under 40.14
The pressure to belong, the desire to belong, makes people forget the Golden Rule.
and so we fall into “anti-tribes,” defined by what we’re against rather than what we’re for.
There’s something comforting in joining people of a similar mind-set (“we”) to denounce “them.”
where there is demand, supply will emerge. And it turns out that “contempt” is big business.
Post-truth: (adjective) relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. —Oxford Dictionary, 2016 Word of the Year
not to promote a particular conservative agenda, or to encourage American patriotism, or even to offer coherent arguments against liberalism. His core cause is to rage.
Liberals are evil, you’re a victim, and you should be furious. Hannity tells a lot of angry, isolated people what they want to hear. And he has the delivery down to an art form.
“Nutpicking” is when people scour the news to find a random person saying or doing something really dumb, and then use that nutjob to disparage an entire group of people, as if the nut is representative.
It’s a popular exercise, because it’s not hard. In a country of 320 million people, someone, somewhere, is doing or saying something asinine right this minute.
That’s because it’s good business. Hosts, producers, and executives know that Americans are primed to despise each other—they just need a target.
And anger is intoxicating. We’ll keep coming back for more.
they’re not telling you what’s news; you’re telling them—usually without knowing it.
