Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

by Ben Sasse

Our limitless technology is transforming us into nomadic, rootless people. How easy is it for any of us, instead of being present with a friend or a spouse, to tune out by getting lost in our isolating screens? How easy is it for us as parents to give our kids an iPad to drug them into silence for a bit? It’s so easy to tune our world out, we often do it without even thinking. We look to pass the time rather than redeem it.

We’re literally dying of despair.

We’re angry, and politics is filling a vacuum it was never intended to fill.

We can’t fix this with new legislation. We don’t need a new program, a new department, one more election. If our 2016 presidential election was the most lurid and dismaying election of our lifetime—and it was, without a doubt, a five-alarm dumpster fire—it was still only the consequence of deeper problems, not their cause.

What we need are new habits of mind and heart. We need new practices of neighborliness. We need to get our hands dirty replenishing the soil that nourishes rooted, purposeful lives.

People walked away from political conversations without thinking ill of each other, because that kind of talk happened in the context of actual relationships centered around local things that were a lot more important.

They died alone because they lived alone.

lonely people get sick more often, take longer to recover from illness, and are at higher risk of heart attacks. According to researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Chicago, emotional stress causes us to age faster—and it turns out that chronically lonely individuals are more prone to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Studies suggest that one lonely day exacts roughly the same toll on the body as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes.4

“Take away the stimulus of community and all the oxytocin it naturally generates,” Sullivan writes, “and an artificial variety of the substance becomes much more compelling.”

the difference between rich and poor is no longer determined by wages or property as much as by education—and then by social network.

At the same time that the upper third of modern America is proclaiming its open-mindedness on matters of family life and sexual ethics, most of us are actually living staunchly “conservative” or “bourgeois” lives.

We sort ourselves out geographically in ways that ensure we rarely rub shoulders with people outside our social class.

Today, counterintuitively, intellectual preparedness has actually become statistically less important to ultimate success in college than the amount of social capital with which a freshman arrives.

Do you have family you love, and who love you? Do you have friends you trust and confide in? Do you have work that matters—callings that benefit your neighbors? Do you have a worldview that can make sense of suffering and death?

“Driver” is the number one job in America.

“50 percent of the activities that people are paid to do in the global economy have the potential to be automated by adopting currently demonstrated technology”

To reiterate, half of all jobs in the global economy could be automated not just by speculative technologies but rather simply by the broad dissemination of already existing technologies.1

They further predict that up to one-third of workers in the United States and Germany—and 800 million total workers across the globe—could see their jo...

Community is collapsing in America because the rooted are vanishing; the stuck have too many crises in their lives to think about much else; and the mobile are too schizophrenic to busy themselves with the care and feeding of their flesh-and-blood communities.

The challenge today isn’t catching the news; it’s figuring out what even is news.

When it comes to consuming news, we’re miles wide and an inch deep.

“If news were just one of many things that we read each day, it wouldn’t have the same impact. If we would read science, the classics, history, theology or political theory at any length, we would make much better sense of today’s events.”

we’re seeing lots more images and news about each specific tragic shooting or kidnapping than in the past—despite the fact that there are objectively fewer such tragedies.

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 matter how silly it seems, when you think about it, to assume there are only two sides to all big debates. We like being told that there are black hats and white hats. It’s cleaner that way.

Because confirmation bias and motivated reasoning (we’ll discuss this later) have become the organizing principle of our media consumption and our political discourse.

In other words, academic research is confirming what most of us see every day: people work hard to confirm their biases, not to challenge them.

Most scientists are constantly collecting new data and trying to work it into a prevailing framework. This is what Kuhn calls “normal science.” They are trying to support the current model. But as they work, they also regularly find facts that don’t fit neatly into the dominant theory. These “anomalies” are set aside. Over time, the junkyard of anomalies might get really big—but most of the folks working in “normal science” are willing to ignore it. The important thing—especially emotionally—is how many of the new facts continue to confirm the theory “all of us” have believed for so long. However, at some point, an innovative thinker comes along and introduces a new model, which can account for more facts—including the anomalies resting uncomfortably in the junkyard.

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. In simple terms: We’re biased.

The lack of diversity of reporters’ average experience—especially in terms of socioeconomic class and years spent around college campuses—often means they only infrequently meet people holding different views, even on topics where the dissenting views are the national majority. Indeed, perhaps counter to what they and you might think, there is actually much greater experience of socioeconomic diversity in most small towns in America than in the “super-ZIP” East Coast neighborhoods in which most reporters live, work, and go out.

Many of the reporters who were so stunned by Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton have never paused to consider how disconnected their experiences are from the daily lives of many—perhaps most—Americans.

Bixenspan’s retort was reminiscent of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s (in)famous remark that she had no idea how Richard Nixon had won the presidency: “I don’t know anyone who voted for him!” Nixon in 1972 carried every state except Massachusetts, and tied for the largest popular vote in U.S. history (61%), and yet in many liberal neighborhoods in Eastern cities, his victory was utterly inexplicable.

Thomas would ultimately be confirmed to the Court, but many Republican staffers and operatives found their view of politics as a form of warfare permanently cemented by the Thomas hearings—famously described by the justice himself as a “high-tech lynching.” To them, Newt Gingrich was a reaction to, not the first cause of, ugly political tactics. Similarly, many Republicans began to feel that political reporters, having opted for sensationalism over hard-nosed reporting, could no longer be trusted as dispassionate chroniclers of American public life.

But for Nebraska Republicans, as for many conservatives, the judiciary was the last remaining bulwark of religious liberty—which, to them, is being rapidly eroded, not least by a national media that frequently presents “religious liberty” as little more than a code word for right-wing bigotry.

It is obvious to most Americans that groups necessarily “discriminate” on the basis of belief and practice in leadership selections. No one would mandate that the Black Student Union accept a white supremacist as its president, or that the College Republicans accept a Bernie Sanders Democrat to head their organization. But when it comes to complex debates about sexual ethics, “tolerance” has sometimes come to look like a pretext for pushing religious believers to the margins.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s name should elicit the same shock and repulsion as Jeffrey Dahmer’s and Charles Manson’s. Yet you probably haven’t heard of him. The “why” of this story is instructive about the stories our national media fail to see—or choose not to see.

“The truth is that most of us tend to be less interested in sick-making stories—if the sick-making was done by ‘our side.’”

there is a great deal of nuttiness in this alternative, right-leaning media (about which, more to come). But there is also far too little soul-searching by national political reporters about why the caricature of the “liberal elite” rings so true to so many of their fellow citizens.

we have a country of increasingly disconnected people sitting around watching news that riles them up.

In a society that has fewer and fewer groups to which we naturally belong, it’s no wonder that lonely older folks take comfort in a substitute television family. People want to be in a group.

Of course, where there is demand, supply will emerge. And it turns out that “contempt” is big business.

The leading programs are orchestrated by executives and personalities who understand well that there’s real money to be made in helping people keep their fears and hatreds aligned.

The storyline is simple: 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.

We’d all be better off, as would our communities, if we understood the game he and his colleagues—on both sides of the spectrum—are playing.

“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.

Hosts, producers, and executives know that Americans are primed to despise each other—they just need a target. And anger is intoxicating.

Naming the enemy helped put limits, conceptually, on what the enemy was capable of.

We need each particular horror to fit into some larger story with which we can make sense of the brokenness of the world.

As it happens, though, the Twitter user Hannity cited, @TheResistANNce, didn’t exist. When reporters went to track down the schoolteacher supposedly behind the account, peculiarities emerged: the account had no archived tweets;

the profile photo had mysteriously morphed from a middle-aged woman into a young man; there were discrepancies in the creation date of the account; and the actual tweet was only ever seen by two people. What Hannity aired, and what went viral online, was a screenshot. Although this was not of Hannity’s doing, the infamous tweet was a hoax.