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

by Ben Sasse

When we start from the assumption that our opponents are like us—decent folks who want what’s best but who start from a different place—we are more likely to be respectful and to have a conversation that’s productive.

According to Alter, it’s “as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.”

We’re losing our ability to read closely and think carefully (about which more momentarily). We’re losing the ability to focus deeply on important work.

The problem with their utopian vision is that it denies the fundamental reality that humans are situated in time and space. And ignoring this existential truth brings loads of misery.

We don’t primarily lack technology, we primarily lack wisdom. We lack habits for navigating this digital revolution. Healthy people will figure out a way to be rooted even amid the proliferation of tools allowing us to be rootless.

Everyone is busy—but when our phones are on, we feel even busier than we’re required to be. We need to create space. Happily, when we let go of the need to be constantly connected, we find the time to become meaningfully connected—to the people around us.

I got some great advice from Harry (“Skip”) Stout, one of Yale’s award-winning historians: “Have a specific reader in mind. Pretend that he or she is sitting next to your desk, and you’re reading aloud to an audience of one. Pretend your audience is smarter than you are, but knows absolutely nothing about the topic.”

The other people in the comments section don’t love you and never will; your spouse and kids do and always will. But often we let technology convince us that the people we should put in front of us are the people retweeting us and liking our statuses.

This book is not about theology. It’s about community. But, like many Americans, some of the most important communities in my life are founded on shared theology.

Religion is the opiate of the masses

It turns out that making the best possible decision at the cost of time and ease is often a worse overall experience than making a good-enough decision with less handwringing.

What is really worth having is someone who wants to work on a relationship, who wants to build together, and who recognizes that suffering—though still painful—is easier to manage when the one who falls down has someone to help him back up again.

When we look for reasons to avoid investing our time or energy or resources in a particular place or at a particular moment, what we’re really doing is trying to dodge the call that it might make on us. We’re trying to avoid the hard work of digging in.

The wise man learns how to grow where he is planted. He chooses joy. He embraces the time and season, these people and this place.

We should stop holding the candidates on “our side” to lower standards than we expect from our opponents. This shouldn’t be hard. Lying matters, and truth matters. We should stop lazily absolving bad actors on our side by just shrugging and saying, “Well, they all lie.” Be skeptical of any politician whose statements frame our primary struggle in terms of one group of Americans versus another.

We need to recover the essential distinction between journalism and entertainment. Why? Because a democracy depends on shared facts. Real journalism isn’t a “game”; it’s not about the quippiest hot takes. Journalists do not exist to entertain you, confirm your opinions, or support your candidate.

Inverting our loyalties—putting politics (the means) before civics (the ends)—makes certain that we don’t get either: We sacrifice the fundamental bonds that should unite us across our differences, and we don’t get sustainable political or legislative output either.

What is needed is for people from both sides to agree that political and policy divides are not our primary identities or our primary divides.