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

by Ben Sasse

We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.

The same technology that has liberated us from so much inconvenience and drudgery has also unmoored us from the things that anchor our identities.

So, the first third of this book is about the collapse of the local tribes that give us true, meaningful identity—family, workplace, and neighborhood.

anti-tribes—of news consumption more than political activism—have cropped up to try to fill the void left by the collapse of the natural, local, embodied, healthy tribes people have traditionally known.*

These anti-tribes aren’t succeeding at addressing our emptiness, and they’re poisoning our nation’s spirit in critical ways.

If America is going to survive—and that’s never an assumption to be taken for granted in a republic—we will have to find a way to restore the bonds of community that give individuals a place in the world where they can enjoy the love of family and friends, express their talents, and serve others in fulfilling ways.

Our world is nudging us toward rootlessness, when only a recovery of rootedness can heal us. What’s wrong with America, then, starts with one uncomfortable word. Loneliness.

Elderly men are the loneliest demographic group in the United States.

loneliness is not merely isolation or an individual’s “perception of being alone and isolated,” but rather the “inability to find meaning in one’s life.”

“a subjective, negative feeling related to deficient social relations,” or the “feeling of disconnectedness” from a community of meaning.

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.

Life is smoother and safer when you have some shoulder to work with. If you do, a bad decision, an error in judgment, or a moral lapse means merely

that you have a learning opportunity.

the importance of having a shoulder or cushion—“a greater margin”—to work with in life.

Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the left-of-center Brookings Institute, proposes a three-step rule book for modern American life: Finish high school. Get a job. (Any job. Because working leads to more working, which leads to better jobs.) Get married before having children. When people follow this pattern—and crucially, in this order—life generally turns out pretty well.

Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, has labeled this elite unwillingness to admit the importance of family structure and parenting “talking left, walking right.”

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.

That’s why the most important “decision” anyone can make, Putnam quips, is “choosing their parents.” If you “choose” affluent, well-educated, married parents, then in today’s America, you’re going to be fine. But if you “choose” poor, less-educated parents, no matter how talented you may be, “you’re not going to be fine,” Putnam worries.22 This isn’t how America is supposed to work.

This is because we are made to work but are often so disconnected from real community that we don’t have anything necessary to do.

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

“Work gives people something welfare never can. It’s a sense of self-worth and mastery, the feeling that we are in control of our lives,” Brooks wrote in his book The Conservative Heart. “Work is where we build character. Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.”

the strong, long-lasting relationships—the years of coworking—that characterized previous generations are not being created by more recent generations.

Put differently, our work used to be a noun: Mr. Smith. Coach Sasse. But work is likely going to become a verb. We will do many different important things but rarely with permanence. And that means we’re losing the sense of identity that a job once brought.

Urban studies theorist Richard Florida 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 think about much else; and the mobile are too schizophrenic to busy themselves with the care and feeding of their flesh-and-blood communities.4

television is not very good at giving us the news we need—no one is getting an in-depth analysis of a tax proposal or health-care reform plan in a four-minute segment—but it’s exceptionally good at selling a kind of cut-rate comfort.

the form of communication dictates the content that’s communicated.

You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.”

“the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in [shallower] terms that are most suitable to television.”

It’s comforting to tune in and hear the somber tone of our favorite media personality during a tragedy. On mundane trivialities, their sarcasm is soothing. And during political scandals, their indignant tone is cathartic.

But instead of expertly separating us from our wallets, they’re separating us from things much more valuable: our time, our sense of perspective, and our judgment. And they’re separating us from each other.

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

people work hard to confirm their biases, not to challenge them.

we usually yearn for internal coherence far more strongly than we yearn for external correspondence with reality.

“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.

they were growing up with Lucy and Desi. Everyone knew their history, their facial tics, their pet peeves, their soft spots, and Desi’s latest antics. Was this life-changing cultural content? No. But it was shared.

Still, limited choices had an upside: everyone tended to be watching the same things.

America quickly became a place with a whole lot of “pluribus,” and very little “unum.”

As The Atlantic’s Julie Beck has written, we’re building “pillow forts” of comfortable information around us and making it more and more difficult for anything we don’t want to hear to penetrate.

Our opinions aren’t more thoughtful, or our characters more noble, simply because we have more data.

America is an idea—until it ceases to be. That is, America is an idea until we let it devolve into something less. And that’s what we’re flirting with right now. The threat to the American idea is real in our time.

Cursing the other political party will not draw us together as friends in pursuit of common goals.

In addition to the professional rage-peddlers, we have another, even larger group of Americans who just don’t care enough about any of this to be bothered. America might be going to hell, but as long as there’s another show to bingewatch on Netflix . .

We’ve come to assume that the American idea can be neglected year after year after year and nonetheless endure. It can’t. It’s an idea—and as such, it needs to be taught and ...

We don’t have a shared understanding of our underlying inheritance, and our ignorance is tearing us apart at the seams.

Our unsatisfying politics is not the cause of our deformed discourse; the ugliness of our public square is only one more effect of our civic neglect.

the only way to preserve sufficient space for true community and for meaningful, beautiful human relationships is to have a political philosophy that emphasizes constraint—constraint that applies as much to ourselves, with our tendency toward absolute certainty and self-righteousness, as to the government.

wary of moral intuition.

imperfect human beings could see the world only imperfectly, through unreliably self-centered lenses.

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat didn’t create our darker impulses; they simply revealed them.

Government isn’t in the business of setting down ultimate truths. It doesn’t decide who’s saved and who’s damned. Government is merely a tool to preserve order, to preserve space for free minds to wrestle with the big questions.