I’ve been reading it everywhere that people have become more polarized. From twitter to Trevor Noah’s goodbye segment to posts in my SDMB threads, people seem to agree that people have become more closed-minded, thinking in black and white with no nuance.
First, do you agree that people have been exhibiting the tendency to be closed-minded and more negative more often lately? Is it the political climate? The effects of lockdown from covid? Or something else?
If the attitude of the world has trended toward the negative and close-mindedness, when will it trend back?
Poll is public (your vote will show your username)
When will people’s attitudes trend back to the positive?
I don’t know that humanity in general has a higher percentage of angry, negative people than before. What I do know is that every single, angry, negative person now has access to a bigger audience of other angry, negative people.
It’s the nature of communication that loud voices overpower quiet ones, which means anger and negativity are feeding back on themselves.
Thank god this is IMHO. I’m personally voting ‘within 5 years’, but my true feelings are more like ‘within 10 years, but possibly never’. My reasons do tend to match with the other posters - like @panache45 I think things tend to be cyclic, but I fully acknowledge @Kent_Clark 's point that our current 24 hour non-stop news cycle, clickbait, and yes, social media tend to amplify the cranks (and cranky).
Still, people get tired of being angry and depressed all the time. If (and it’s a huge IF) we can get 4-6 years of political banality without the world ending (so no Trump or Trump-esque President in 2024, and at worst a split congress) people will start to look at Qanon, Proud Boys and their ilk as what they are - nutjobs. People will slowly move to caring more about the next big scandal, or the next big TV hit, or worry more about what’s going on ‘out there’ [ being everyone outside the US ] rather than their neighbor with the scary BLM sign across the street. It’ll also (sorry to say) let a significant chunk of older, Republican leaning voters die in place. Not that there aren’t plenty to replace them, but the trends are what they are.
But getting through the next 4-6 years will NOT be painless, and if we move towards my scenario above, I expect the Qpublican party to get worse in both speech and -action-. And this is just talking American politics - there is plenty in the world situation (both political and climate change) that could delay or flat out prevent any such return to a light-hearted hope for the future. Still as a child going to school in the 80s, I was sure I was going to be living (or dead) in a radioactive hellscape by now. So I will be (very) cautiously optimistic and stick to my 6-8 years to see some improvement.
In order for the US not to be so politically polarized there has to be common ground between the two major political parties. Given that both sides are moving further away from each other every day, and there are few true moderates left, why would anyone believe the polarization will decrease over time? I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist. Our only hope is for one of the major political parties to split into pieces or dissolve altogether, and nobody seriously sees that happening anytime soon.
Are any of you old enough to remember the sixties? And way things were in the sixties were a vast improvement over the way they were in the fifties, the forties, the thirties, and the twenties. I don’t think you remember how bad things were so you can’t see how much they have improved.
Is white supremacy in the news? Yes - because nowadays it’s unusual enough to be newsworthy. The Trump presidency was its last stand. What we’re seeing now is its dying gasps.
I’m going with “Never.” At least not as long as social media is a thing and media in general thrives on outrage.
I’m a little worried, but also keeping in mind this isn’t even the most polarized the US has ever been. We straight up murdered each other en masse at one point. So by those standards we are doing okay.
What I don’t want to do is romanticize history as this time where everyone got along. People have been demonizing political opponents for a very long time.
Maybe we’ll see a swing toward moderation in 10-15 years. Or maybe things will get progressively worse until we start killing one another again. I hope it’s the former.
Right now some people are waking up to the state of the country and trying to do better, but it’s hard to say how many people and if it will be enough. Also it’s arguably better for people to be polarized than for people to be complacent and friendly in the face of a systematic campaign of social oppression and suppression of democratic freedom.
Should we really greet that kind of evil with a smile and a handshake? I’m not so sure. The OP suggests it’s an irrefutable good that everyone gets along and I propose that people getting along in the face of injustice is really not so good.
But I can see, and feel, both sides of that argument. I want to see more humanity in myself and other people but I also want to see all people treated with respect and dignity regardless of color, gender identity or other immutable characteristics. These ideals are in constant tension.
It was a pretty broad and open-ended OP but one thing I was thinking of was the declining membership thread in ATMB. In that, people said that membership was declining in part because of the polarization and black and white thinking of others. So maybe we don’t have to get along with our oppressors, but it would be good to get along with someone(s). Because it doesn’t seem like the negativity just drives us into silos, it drives us apart.
I do agree that there’s a lot of black and white thinking in areas where the reality is more nuanced. I do agree it’s a problem on this board. I do generally agree that one can catch more flies with honey. And as for myself, I’m certainly tired of the negativity. I understand why Trevor Noah and others are burned out. A lot of us are burned out.
As you say that, I’m just thinking aloud whether it’s not the convergence of a lot of things that has people burned out. I think the last US Presidency had a lot of people stressed out - on both sides. And the pandemic on top of that. Now those are over or coming to a close, people are now feeling the fatigue of the whole thing, like being in a car crash a day or so later.
Or it could be, as some others have said in the thread, just the human condition that’s being more noticed.
I’m hesitant to say “never”, but if it ever does, it will take a long time, probably at least 50 years. Maybe it even needs things to get really bad, like World War III-level bad, before people come to their senses.
All of those, plus the huge information bubbles in social media / other online sites that people choose to barricade themselves in, as well as the disinformation peddled by right-wing media and nefarious foreign actors.
Very true, I don’t see this problem going away any time soon. There’s a lotta money to be made in keeping the masses riled up and going at each other’s throats.
But we do. Or, at least, I do. I will admit there are more people I don’t get along with than before, but I still get along with the majority of people I choose to interact with. I don’t feel I’m any less open minded than before expect in areas that relate to bigotry, and in believing the people who would before pretend to have certain moral principles (ones I actually hold) but have since shown they never really did.
That’s not to say that I’m not angrier now than I’ve been in the past, and that such isn’t largely due to the way the world is right now. I do agree there is a lot of division. But it doesn’t mean I don’t get along with most people I interact with, and I’m sure the same is true of most people.
Still, the areas where I am now more closed-minded are not things I can see ever really changing. I became more closed-minded because I realized there was less gray than I previously thought. I learned that I was sitting in ignorance about the way the world really is. I know many people hate this word, but I was sitting in privilege in so many ways.
I just don’t see becoming more “open minded” as the solution to things becoming more lighthearted. I don’t think that’s actually the underlying issue. It’s just how shitty the world is right now, and our frustration in dealing with it.
At least, that’s what I see on one side. One side sees the solution to problems by moving forward, while another seems to want to go back to when they think things were better. I think that’s actually where the big divide is. If I’m moving forwards and someone else is moving back, we’ll wind up further apart.
I do think the solution for the side running back to the past is to reverse course.
So “It was never negative” is a typo, and you meant never positive?
I voted for that one as it’s closest to my position. I actually disagree somewhat with the premise. I think people in general, and young people in particular, are more open to changing their minds in light of new evidence than ever.
Look at gay marriage say.
The US seems to have gone to shit recently but remember kids: The US is not the only country
Elsewhere there is a thread of spirited discussion about the recent discovery of 200 First Nations’ children’s corpse. I’d dare not thread-shit, but we could agree that they wouldn’t be there if the Turks hadn’t taken Constantinople in 1453, causing Western Europe to explore across the Atlantic.
I don’t think the Turks really needed Constantinople or had any solid justification for taking it. I don’t think Western Europe couldn’t satisfy its needs at home, with the application of ample common-sense and fair-mindedness. But humans don’t operate that way. I’d like to say it’s been that way since the apes came down from the trees, but we were acting this way up there too.
Now the world population is expected to top out between 10-11 billion in fewer years that those between 1453 and 1492, with a dreadful result on the CO2 level. That will be a lot more of the same human material competing for scarcer resources.
Of course, those of us who grew up with the Bomb will always have eschatology as our go-to solution. A few human beings will open a very different 22nd Century. Some out of sheer luck, and some because they were raging assholes. Hopefully, they will realize they can relax the aggression, and as happened after the deluge of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, enjoy being clever and productive instead.
I think it’s typical of a fall of a ruling power if you are talking to the US. Everything is fine when everyone’s onboard with the general culture (such as conservative christian). But as those numbers dwindle and they are threatened in becoming no longer the ruling majority, things go sideways fast as they come up with ways to cling to power and pass laws to try to maintain their ruling ability and expected way of life for our nation as they become a minority. In any ways it appears they would like to turn us into a nation akin to a Muslim nation with their restrictions on voting and women’s rights.
As such they are a hurt animal backed into a corner, thus ready to pull out all the stops to survive. What is needed is the other side to grow a pair and eliminate their minority held advantage legally, as long as this wounded animal is allowed to remain in power it’s going to be ugly.
This is the way that I am tending to lean. I think that what is happening in the world is more than people having a lack of nuance.
I think that humanity is well on its way toward another ‘dark age’. Between climate change, environmental degradation and the current distrust of things like science and fact - things are going to get worse before they get better.
The problem is that because of YouTube and other media, people are selectively hearing things in echo chambers. I actually work with a flat-Earther who gets all of his information from there and similar sources.
It used to be, back when the dinosaurs walked the Earth, that there was only the three network news stations and everyone heard the same news. People would disagree about it issues, but there was one set of facts to argue about.
Now, the facts aren’t even the same. It’s impossible to have a rational discussion about things when you can’t even agree on the fundamentals.
From around 2000 to 2005 I went back from Japan where I lived at the time to visit my sister and her family in Georgia. Her husband at the time (now an ex!) was really conservative, and he was really antagonistic towards “liberals.” Even back then all he would watch was Fox News and he’d get his blood pressure high.
He just couldn’t see that liberals could have a different point of view then him. We were just simply evil people who were trying to destroy America because we hate it. I haven’t seen him since 2012 (and now they are divorced there is no reason to see him again) but I can’t image his becoming any more open minded.
I couldn’t believe how bitter he was and how much he actually hated liberals. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would feel that strongly about politics, and then Trump was elected.
I don’t see how it’s going to get better anytime soon.