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

by Ben Sasse

But truth be told, I don’t think the protesters were actually yelling like that because we have different positions on policy. Something deeper is going on.

This book is not about politics—but it is at least tangentially about the question “Why can’t you guys in D.C. get anything done?”

But I notice, too, that constituents are rarely just interested in solutions; they’re also interested in assigning blame.

The assumption now isn’t just that folks are incompetent but that they are evil. We really don’t like each other, do we?

We’re angry, and politics is filling a vacuum it was never intended to fill. Suddenly, all of America feels marginalized and ignored. We’re all standing there in the dark, feeling powerless and isolated, pleading: “Don’t you see me?” Why are we so angry?

And, after 2007, if kids huddled together at all, it was just each child “parallel playing” with their own phone or iPad—“alone together,” to quote social scientist Sherry Turkle.

Most Americans just don’t have community cohesion like we used to. We don’t feel that we’re connected to our neighbors in any meaningful ways. We don’t feel like we’re part of something bigger.

Getting rid of political strife would be like whitening the yellowed teeth of a smoker. It would simply erase one characteristic of a toxic situation, camouflaging problems that go much deeper.

Right now partisan tribalism is statistically higher than at any point since the Civil War. Why? It’s certainly not because our political discussions are more important. It’s because the local, human relationships that anchored political talk have shriveled up.

Loneliness is surely part of the reason Americans consume almost all the world’s hydrocodone (99%) and most of its oxycodone (81%).

The natural, healthy stimulus of community is vanishing, and the damaging health effects of persistent loneliness are being compounded—by drug overuse and abuse, which now claim more lives in a year than diabetes, liver disease, pneumonia, or the flu. This is very bad and very new.

“Our kids” used to indicate a sense of neighborhood responsibility, in which parents kept an eye out for all the kids on the block, not just their own. Now, we retreat from the common, and the term has been pared down.

You are readers of books, and that habit is now—unlike throughout most of U.S. history—largely a habit of an institutionally educated elite.

To be clear, although I served as a college president for five years, I do not believe that a college education is at all necessary for a thoughtful, meaningful, or happy life. In fact, the cartel-like hold of universities on the American imagination and American economy has throttled alternative paths to flourishing and forced people with no interest in it or need for a degree into a costly four-year investment.

Today, the top one-third of Americans once again have significantly lower rates of divorce and marital infidelity, and that has been a crucial element of their social and economic success. Ironically, their conservative behavior is part of what makes elite (and mostly liberal) Americans so successful.

It turns out that the cultural shifts that were so unsettling then have much to teach us about what we’re experiencing now: namely, a revolution in work, a transformation of the ways we provide for ourselves and our families and express our skills and talents.

According to estimates, two-thirds of driving jobs could evaporate inside the next decade, as autonomous vehicles become reality.

Today, less than 8 percent of American workers perform industrial jobs, and—the false promises of politicians notwithstanding—large-scale manufacturing is never going to be the cornerstone of American work again.

New technologies displace humans over time, because humans plan it that way. We literally think ourselves out of our jobs.

As Manyika points out, in the case of big changes, it’s rarely true that they’re uniformly good or uniformly bad; they’re good, and bad, and neutral all at once, and it’s important to be able to disentangle the predictable and unpredictable elements.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to increase productivity, expanding the goods and services on offer globally.

The central takeaway of one of their major, yearlong reports, Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation, is a blockbuster: “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” (italics added). 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.

If one group sees only upside, another group sees only instant apocalypse.

We agree that meaningful work is part of how human beings find genuine fulfillment.

Ray Dalio - meaningful work and meaningful relationships

As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the average breadwinner in the 1970s stayed at a single company for two and a half decades, whereas the average employee today will stay at any one job for little more than four years.

Most of us reading (or listening to) this book are mobile. We’re free from the constraints of place—its annoyances and inconveniences, its potentially burdensome obligations—and we’re free to see more of the world, with its extraordinary richness and color. But what have we lost in the process? Increasingly, we’re shackled to the feeling that we don’t belong anywhere, and we’re not bound to people who can anchor us in a place we can call home.

The slums didn’t give a hand out of poverty; they helped to entrench it.

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

No, the gossip and bickering and witty put-downs are tasty. We’re not eating our daily helping of vegetables. We’re snacking on potato chips as comfort food.

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

When we consume something poisonous from the flood of news now flowing over us daily—say, a story that is subtly but significantly biased, or an argument that is unsupported by strong evidence—we are often unable to tell.

When you combine rapid-fire, 24/7 news—coming not just from a few sources, but from hundreds of thousands of “sources,” from the New York Times to Henry Hipster live-streaming the “breaking news” from his Brooklyn walk-up—with the loneliness we’ve discussed previously, it’s little wonder that people turn to the loudest voices.

Polititainment inevitably distorts our political foes like a gigantic funhouse mirror.

Commission chairman Martin Castro continued: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”

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.

Ridiculous. This is the reactionary view of conservatives that like to play the victim card when challenged.

Retired seniors now watch fifty hours of television per week. Fox News viewers are among the oldest—68 years old, compared to a median age of 60 among CNN and MSNBC viewers.

Start watching for nutpicking, and it’s amazing how much national “news” is devoted to turning a random social media account into a full-scale indictment of this or that group. That’s because it’s good business.

(Only 55 percent of Americans will spend more than fifteen seconds reading an article.)

There are a whole bunch of people I’ve heard from in the political media who despise their own song-and-dance routine—but are too in love with their fame, their influence, or their money to give it up. What else are they going to do? This has become their work.

In exchange for wild accusations and exaggerations, they get rich and famous—and we, their viewers and listeners, get a shallower, angrier, less workable America.

When he suggested that Ted Cruz’s dad had a hand in the assassination of JFK, he recognized that media were already using “reporting on other reporting” as a backdoor way to allow titillating but unsubstantiated content into their “serious” news coverage.

What is wrong with us is exacerbated by technology, but it did not originate with technology. What is wrong is that we have let our habits corrode, and our affections warp.

The terrible 2016 election did not cause our disunion; it was just a painful symptom of the bigger disease—which is our growing disinterest in the meaning of America.

In other words, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat didn’t create our darker impulses; they simply revealed them. Madison explained that a “zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points” has always “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

Power is for a purpose, and that purpose is not to elevate those who wield it.

We don’t appreciate what Washington did because it was so successful that we tend to think about it as the way the world should work. But in fact, it’s still rare in the world. Power is no different from money (which is just power stored in a bank) in this regard, and nobody walks away from a pile of money.

Our government’s ineffectiveness, so often on display, is therefore not only the product of modern failures of execution; gridlock is also an intentional design feature of our system. The Founders wanted it to be difficult for fallible people to wield too much power, especially when it comes to the most important things—curtailing the freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion, the rights of assembly and press and protest.

In America, we are all minorities. And so we should all be nervous about any temporary majority and the powers it seeks.

Cultures are changed for the better only when individuals are persuaded and transformed, not beaten into silence.

Warriors view the present moment as make-or-break for all time—but neighbors do not. Neighbors see today’s conversation not as the last discussion we’ll ever have, but as a precursor to tomorrow’s.