Recently, I read a series of fantastic articles by Tim Urban detailing the reasons politics has been and continues to be a particularly contentious issue among individuals. Particularly in our current election climate, it seems that the country has been divided like never before.  I believe that his entire series on the subject is excellent in learning about fundamental human group psychology and behavior.  However the one section focusing on politics is especially insightful.

There are many great points made in his series, however one that I focused on was his depiction of how different political parties, typically conservatives and progressives (in the case of America, the Republicans and Democrats), go out of their way to create echo chambers within their communities that support their views, and more importantly vilify their opponents.  

Of course, if you yourself have an affliction to one party or the other and think that you are merely a reasonable individual whom understands common sense while it is the other side that is unilaterally misinformed and close-minded, allow me to spoil the main idea of the article.  If you happen to…

1. Agree to every single policy that “your side” is in favor of, particularly without thoroughly considering the implications of these policies nor the non-stereotypical reasons the opposing party may think differently
2. Commonly write off said people as assholes

…then unfortunately you are the asshole.  You get bonus points if you think that not being explicitly aligned with your side is just as bad as it “enables the evils” of the other side.

As cliche as it sounds, in forming opinions about politics much like anything else, the merits of your views should not be as much of a function of what the views ultimately are, as much as the journey and process it took to form them.  Good views are formed when they are frequently critiqued, criticized, and revised; while bad views are derivatives of whatever is the prevailing “correct” view in your environment.    It’s ironic that “sheeple” is a derisive term that each side thinks of the other, with both probably being at least somewhat right.

As a result of this, the article continues to argue that we end up in a polarized bimodal distribution of beliefs, with most people congregating on one side or the other.  Now I could create a  visualization of this, but I’m also pretty lazy and not artistically talented, so I thought it would just be easier to “borrow” his images instead.

Pretty intuitively, we see that the x-axis is position on the political spectrum and y-axis is amount of people who are there.  Ideally, we would have a distribution like something on the top-left.  To clarify, this is not to argue for the moral  and intellectual “superiority” of having a centrist stance in all viewpoints.  Instead, it’s arguing that individuals should independently form opinions on a wide range of policies, which may or may not be aligned with their current political parties, and then vigorously discuss these ideas with others.  In the process of this discussion, productive conclusions can be reached, leading on average for most people to tend around the most prevailing ideas.  Although this stance will be by definition be centrist when it is reached, it does not necessarily have to be a centrist stance at present.  An example of this is the health effects of smoking.  When evidence initially emerged that smoking could be bad for one’s health, it was common and pretty reasonable for people to believe this as true or false.  Eventually, through decades of research and studies, we as a society have converged on, the correct answer of, “true”.  Nowadays, no one’s debating whether smoking is bad, but instead are considering “how bad” and “how to make it less bad” it is.  

The opposite of this is the the distribution of the top-left; two bimodal peaks with a deep valley in the middle.  Combing this with the normal distribution yields the one at the bottom-middle, where we still see the two bimodal peaks, but with a much smaller central valley.  

For any topic, in terms of what the actual distribution is, it is always some version of the bottom middle-one.  People aren’t perfect, but do strive to be better.  Politics is no different.  However, because of the “Us vs Them” mentality commonly associated with politics, our distribution has been moving closer towards the top-right at the expense of the top-left.

It is my hope that I have imparted on you, a thoughtful reader, a new or revised way in which to think about our current political situation as well as a more open-ended mindset regards to people who do not agree with you.