What I feel when I watch TV, the news, or my twitter / G+ stream today is extremely frustrating to me. The polarization that is going on inside the minds of the people I know, follow or even admire is starting to get noticeable bizarre. It is as if people are going to fight for their mental survival without even knowing it, without even noticing that their opinions get more ignorant and sharper day by day.
Often I see worlds of facts being ignored in one single statement, just for the single purpose to push out an angled perspective and hope for those ignorant minds to follow up on it.
It is as if the people who previously ran on linear gray levels (which is not great either) get more and more attracted to the two point polarization of just good and bad. Polarized statements are a successful viral meme. They lift us from thinking about details, thereby ignoring everything in between and nearby. I’ve complained about that before, but I suspect it is getting worse at times when all the media hype on current and upcoming crises closes up on us.
One of the most influencing factor is our environment, and that’s something we can actually get under control. We can decide what information we consume and when it is allowed to reach us. And we can strengthen our firewalls that define how information affects us.
Our world is complex and faceted. It’s a complicated, chaotic fractal we will never understand, and so are most ideas and concepts the human mind was capable of creating yet. In polarized terms, that is a very good thing. No one would say that the holistic experience of nature is a bad thing.
Simplification and differentiation is what makes this world understandable to us, or better: engineerable to us. But that does not mean that simplification should make you feel better. And that does not mean that complexity should make you feel bad. They are just two perspectives which can even coexist at the same time.
What we first-world people seem to forget these days, is that a lot of what is important to us are just human created “concepts”. These “concepts” affect our emotions by igniting neural connections that are man made, learned and trained. Some of these connections may be fine. But others, specifically the ones that react on higher “concepts”, may be the root cause of the polarization trending I observe.
I can think about two directions to counter that trend:
“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.” – Gloria Steinem