How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

by Elif Shafak

Stories bring us together, untold stories keep us apart.

The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning. Because the truth is we don’t learn much from sameness and monotony. We usually learn from differences.

If all my friends and acquaintances think like me, vote like me, speak like me, if I only read the kind of books, newspapers and magazines that are in line with what I have read before, if I only follow online sites that sympathise with my preconceived verdicts, if I only watch videos or programmes that essentially validate my worldview, and if nearly all of my information comes from the same limited sources, day in, day out, it means that, deep within, I want to be surrounded with my mirror image 24/7. That is not only a suffocatingly claustrophobic setting, it is also a profoundly narcissistic existence.

and we, too, find ourselves falling ill due to the state of uncertainty we are surrounded with – betwixt and between,* neither capable of letting go of the old order that made us increasingly unhappy nor capable of building a new world with solutions from lessons learned. We are exhausted by anxiety, consumed with anger, our minds and defences all too often overwhelmed.

A human being, every human being, is complicated – layers upon layers of ideas, feelings, perceptions, recollections, reactions, desires and dreams. By placing us into boxes they are denying us our own truth. By placing others into boxes we are denying them their own truth.

What are the values we should prioritise from now on: accumulation of wealth and a fat bank account, ambitious trade agreements and financial deregulation, profit-driven business models … or health and social care, diversity and inclusion, positive human interaction with natural ecosystems, purpose-driven business models?

On the one side stretches out nationalism, protectionism, ‘my kind first’ approach – already authoritarian leaders have been using the disruption as an excuse to consolidate their power, control civil society and further retreat into isolationism. On the other side extends the road towards international communication and cooperation, a spirit of humanism to deal with major global challenges, from climate emergency to rising poverty, from cyber terrorism to the dark side of digital technologies. Although the choice between these paths will ultimately be shaped by economic and political factors, it is also dependent on another debate: Identity.

Do I have a single identity – based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, gender or geography? Or am I essentially a mixture of multiple belongings, cultural allegiances and diverse inheritances, backgrounds and trajectories?

‘Don’t thank me,’ Grandma said. ‘You focus on improving your daughter’s life. We inherit our circumstances, we improve them for the next generation. I had little education, I wanted you to do better. Now you need to make sure your daughter has more than you had. Isn’t this the natural way of the world?’

My mother and grandmother had an entrenched faith that tomorrow, almost by definition, would be brighter than yesterday. They believed that in the fullness of time, Turkey, with a greater number of citizens getting educated, would be fully democratic, secular. Trusting in progress was at the centre of their worldview. If every generation did their best and spared no effort to improve the conditions they had inherited from their parents, gradually, incrementally, the world would become a fairer place.

The truth is, there are plenty of negative sentiments all around and within us – anger, fear, discontent, distrust, sadness, suspicion, constant self-doubt … but perhaps more than anything, an ongoing apprehension. An existential angst. All these emotions are very much part of our lives now. Even digital spaces have become primarily emotional spaces. The posts that go viral or the videos that are watched most widely are freighted with emotions. What is equally significant is how this creates a tendency, a habit of mind, that perpetuates itself through space and time. In a study conducted by the Institute for Social Research scholars have found that ‘when exposed to less positive news, people posted less positive comments and more negative ones. When exposed to less negative posts, the opposite pattern occurred.’*

Children see their parents distressed at home, then they start feeling the same way. Parents meet in online chat groups or school gatherings and they exchange, among other things, their anxieties about the education system or the future in general. We are social creatures. We worry when we see someone else worry. We also panic if the people around us are panicking.

How can we turn our individual and collective anger into a force for good? I find the question important. We must be very careful here: anger can also easily turn repetitive, intransigent, corrosive. Equally, it can be a paralytic emotion. It’s as if the intensity of it is enough to persuade the person feeling it that they’ve done enough – or else, it might keep you in a state of brooding and obsessing over the wrong without being able to move forward, to find a way to heal the wrong. Unless we manage to channel anger into a more productive, calmer but not necessarily less intense force, it runs the risk of becoming highly combustible and blindly destructive, burning through buildings and bridges and human connections, burning in a vicious cycle in which violence begets more violence. We cannot let that happen.

When the world is blatantly infuriating we can’t keep repressing our anger. At the same time, we need to go out and connect with our fellow human beings and stand by those who are hurting; we shouldn’t forget to look within, critically examine our own assumptions and hidden stereotypes, expand and soften our hearts; and as we do all that, we must go on and continue working just as others have before us.

It is a problem, the endless barrage of information – let alone, misinformation. We cannot process this much, and the truth is, we don’t. In reality, we only skim through the news, scroll up and down our screens, without contemplating, and more importantly, without feeling. After a while, numbers don’t mean much any more, whether it is 5,000 refugees who have died or 10,000, the difference doesn’t and won’t register unless we know the personal stories behind the statistics. Information flows amid our fingers like dry sand. It also gives us the illusion that we know the subject (and if we don’t, we just ‘google’ it) when, in truth, we know so little. Paradoxically, too much information is an obstacle in front of true knowledge. Knowledge requires reading. Books. In-depth analyses. Investigative journalism. Then there is wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy. For that we need stories and storytelling.