When in conflict, we craft elaborate, false, and conflict-amplifying stories about our adversaries and our allies

Humans are storytellers, but our emotions when in conflict lead us to weave simplistic and conflict-amplifying stories

Humans are storytellers. In a sense, you could say that we are the stories we tell: the stories we tell about ourselves, our place in the world, how the world works, and the people around us. When we’re in toxic conflict, we are prone to believing highly pessimistic stories about our adversaries: narratives that align with our already pessimistic views of “them.” We are also prone to believing stories that put us and our allies in a highly positive, noble light.

These stories we craft and embrace, internally and externally, can then in turn lead us deeper into conflict. Our pessimistic stories about our adversaries will serve as just more proof to them that we are the toxic aggressors: more proof that our hate for them is the problem. Righteous stories we craft about the obvious rightness of stances on “our side” can be obstacles to empathy and understanding.

This also points to the important role that storytellers and artists can play in reducing toxic polarization. Because a society’s storytellers and artists are usually highly politically involved, they’ll often (unintentionally) play a role in amplifying polarization. They will do this by building and promoting narratives that are simplistic, overly pessimistic, and insulting to the “other side.” Storytellers are drawn to dramatic framings — grand, exciting framings of good versus evil, of revolutions, of clashes of ideas — and those dramatic framings, in their Manichaean simplicity, can end up being just more fuel on the fire of our us-vs-them contempt.

The following is an excerpt from my ebook Defusing American Anger (written for all Americans). There is an equivalent section in my book How Contempt Destroys Democracy (written for a liberal, anti-Trump audience) but the version of this is longer in my first book.

The excerpt…

We create elaborate negative stories about “them”

Often, we look for dramatic, historical narratives to explain the beliefs of the people around us.

For example, a liberal person might weave a dramatic and elaborate narrative about how America’s history of slavery and racism is directly linked to various Republican stances today (and many people have weaved those stories). Or a conservative person might weave a dramatic and elaborate story about how today’s liberal activism is directly linked to various Marxist or American-hating ideologies of the past.

These dramatic historical narratives about our political opponents can be tempting to us because they make us feel we’ve finally understood why they are so wrong and misguided. Reaching a seeming understanding of what motivates the “bad guys” can make us feel smart and superior — can make us feel like we possess rare and powerful knowledge.

And these stories can have some valid points. After all, the past does affect the present, and many ideas and events can be found to be related in various ways.

But it’s also true that our biases and animosity can lead us to create distorted and overly pessimistic stories about the nature of our political opponents.

For example, it’s common to find liberals espousing the view that Republicans’ animosity toward current liberal-side race-related stances is directly related to conservative racism in the 1960s: the pushback to the Civil Rights Movement and to desegregation. There can be some connections to be found there, but it’s also true that the people around us today can have rational, understandable reasons for thinking liberal ideas are wrong that have nothing to do with what happened decades ago.

On the right, some conservatives today weave elaborate stories about the dark Marxist underpinnings of leftist activism. The conservative activist Chris Rufo has a book titled America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, that claims to expose “the hidden history of left-wing intellectuals and activists who systematically took control of America’s institutions to undermine them from within.” The book asks, “Has the goal of the left, for a century, actually been the destruction of every Western institution?”

Similarly, here, there can be threads of truth: clearly we can find a through-line between various bad, extreme, and strange far-left ideas in the past and far-left ideas in the present. One can find connections between some ideas implemented in dangerous, authoritarian communist regimes and some modern progressive ideas (just as one can find connections between various far-right, authoritarian regimes and conservatives ideas). One big factor explaining the popularity of liberal-side ideas is that successful societies seem to grow more socially permissive and tradition-questioning over time. It’s also true that progressivism, whatever one thinks of it, is a movement that always seeks to question conceptual structures that society has largely taken for granted. These are societal patterns that one can see as sometimes going too far without requiring creeping Marxist plots to explain them.

The truth is that, just as on the “other side,” a person can believe liberals are more right than conservatives on a variety of issues for reasons that have nothing to do with what happened decades ago. But people on both “sides” will seek to find sinister, long-running reasons and factors for why their opponents are now acting the way they are.

A 2018 piece by Geoffrey Kabaservice was titled “Liberals don’t know much about conservative history: And both sides suffer for it.” His main point was that many of the books written about the history of conservatism in America were written by liberal people with biased perspectives. He writes:

Some of the new works on conservatism have been excellent, others awful. But nearly all reveal the pitfalls for liberals writing about a movement with which they have no personal experience. If you’re a historian who has not a single conservative colleague — and perhaps not even one conservative friend — chances are you’ll approach conservatism as anthropologists once approached tribes they considered remote, exotic, and quite possibly dangerous.

One mistake he saw liberal writers frequently make was that they wrote as if some of the extreme fringes of the conservative movement throughout American history were more powerful and popular than they were; they wrote as though those views represented the overall conservative movement. He argued that such reductionist takes were the “mirror image of the sloppy right-wing canard that liberalism is no different from socialism, or even communism.”

Let’s imagine a young person who’s just starting to become politically aware. They’ll perceive a bunch of competing ideas around them, and sometimes it will just be a few factors that convince them that one political group or another is right or wrong. They might, for example, see Trump’s behavior and think, “Any political party that supports this, I want no part of.” Or maybe they’ll see liberal stances on race as misguided and divisive, and that might be one of the main reasons they lean Republican. Or someone may be hugely influenced by the abortion issue, in one direction or another. And of course we’ll also be highly influenced by our peer group and surroundings: that’s another major factor that supersedes much else.

So even as we may see political party stances as being affected by the past, it’s also true that the people around us are making judgments that, from their point of view, are about the issues and ideas around them now — issues and ideas that have little to do with the past.

Scary narratives about the origins of the other side’s badness are persuasive because we’re primed to see that group’s badness. We can try to keep in mind that we can be suckers for simplistic stories that confirm our existing beliefs. We should try to keep in mind how complex the world around us and the people in it really are.

Simplistic stories obscure huge complexity

As a way to examine this dynamic in more detail, let’s look at abortion. In the early 1970s, being pro-life or pro-choice wasn’t yet associated with one political party or the other. It just wasn’t yet a topic most people thought much about. For quite a few reasons, which we’ll examine in a bit, it’s possible to imagine the abortion issue going either way. In fact, it’s possible to imagine Democrats and Republicans being reversed on their abortion stances.

One piece of supporting evidence for this was that, before the 1970s, being against abortion was primarily associated with the Catholics — and Catholics were mostly Democrat voters. You may recall that John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, was a Catholic.

Another piece of supporting evidence: in many other countries, where religion doesn’t play as much of a role as it does in America, the conservative party is the more pro-choice party because that view aligns more with a more libertarian, “keep government out of our lives” philosophy.

Dan Williams has written several books about the history of the abortion issue in America. Besides being an expert on the abortion issue, he’s also a pro-life activist. Via personal correspondence, Williams wrote the following:

It’s plausible that the Republican Party would be a pro-choice party. The party’s leadership in the 1970s was heavily pro-choice, and Republicans in that era were more likely than Democrats to favor abortion rights. In nearly every other industrialized democracy in the Western world, the leading conservative party in a country is pro-choice on libertarian grounds. This is the case in Canada, Britain, and Australia, for instance, and it’s also true of most of Western Europe.

In the 1970s, it appeared that the same situation was developing in the United States. Indeed, throughout the 1980s, the US Senate’s Republican leadership included a strongly pro-choice element. It was not until the end of the 1990s that pro-choice influence in the Republican Party began to rapidly decline.

If the Christian Right had not become such a strong influence in the GOP—and if the Supreme Court had not become a battleground over the future of abortion rights—it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which both the Democratic and Republican parties would be moderately pro-choice parties, but with the Democratic Party more likely than the GOP to attract a sizeable minority of Catholic and conservative evangelical voters who wanted to restrict abortion. This was the case in the mid-1970s, and perhaps it could have remained the case for decades afterwards if the Christian Right had not developed the partisan alliance that it did.

To be clear: this is not to say that there aren’t rational, understandable reasons for being either pro-life or pro-choice. It’s not to say that our beliefs on abortion, or anything else, are formed only by peer pressure. The point is that we tend to create stories—and associated meaning—about a party’s overall grouping of stances.

We form stories about what such things mean, such as:

“My pro-life stance is connected to my wanting a small government,” or…

“My pro-choice stance is connected to me being pro-immigration.”

But it’s possible some of these stories we tell ourselves about our group—or about the other group—can be based on somewhat arbitrary events that could have ended up in different ways.

Michael Macy has researched how the stances associated with each political party may form at random. He wrote a paper about his work called Opinion Cascades and the Unpredictability of Partisan Polarization. In that research, they asked self-described Democrats and Republicans to guess how their political party would feel about “future controversies.” These were issues where stances weren’t associated with either political party—questions about artificial intelligence or about stances on classic literature—but that one day might be a point of conflict. This would be similar to asking people back in the 1960s which way they thought the political parties would go on abortion.

This is from a 2019 article about this study in the Cornell Chronicle:

The researchers split more than 2,000 Democratic and Republican volunteers into 10 “parallel worlds,” each isolated from the others. Within each world, participants took turns filling out an online survey to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of unfamiliar political and cultural issues. In two of the 10 “worlds,” the survey was private, but in the other eight, whenever a partisan took a position on a given issue, all other participants in their “world” saw a real-time update of how each party was leaning.

The results showed how a handful of “early movers” can trigger a cascade in which later partisans pile on to their party’s newly emerging position, leading eventually to large political differences. The big surprise was that the party that supported the issue in one world was just as likely to oppose the issue in another world.

“Sometimes the same party’s early movers would go one way, and sometimes the other,” Macy said.

And in each world, participants followed these early movers – often in opposite directions.

“In one world, it was Democrats who favored using [artificial intelligence] to spot online criminals, and in another world it was Republicans,” he said. “In one world, Democrats favored classic books, and in another world, Republicans favored the classics. In one world, Democrats were more optimistic about the future and in another world, it was Republicans.”

This unpredictability has a surprising implication for our world, Macy said.

“Deep political divisions between Democrats and Republicans—which seem like they must have some philosophical or ideological foundation—may turn out to be arbitrary, in that the two sides could have switched but for the luck of the draw among the early movers,” he said. [emphasis added]

[I talked to Michael Macy on my podcast about his work.]

To reduce anger, it can help to imagine how different issue stances might have gone different ways and how, no matter what happens, people are able to create a story about how those stances ended up. Let’s examine a world where our political parties’ stances on abortion were largely reversed (and this is more plausible a scenario than you might think, and something we’ll examine later in the section on abortion):

Suppose you’re a pro-choice Democrat who views Republican pro-life views as representative of Republicans’ overall meanness. Imagine an alternate world where Democrats were the more pro-life-friendly party: If you lived in that world, you might perceive Democrats’ anti-abortion stances as relating to other ways liberals typically care for defenseless and downtrodden groups, people, and animals.

If you’re a pro-life Republican, you might imagine an alternate world where Republicans were the more pro-choice party. In that world, you might see that stance as being aligned with other small-government, “keep the government out of our lives” stances.

Whichever “world” we find ourselves in, we’ll form stories about how each side’s stances fit together. We humans are very good storytellers: telling stories is what sets us apart from animals and makes us human. We tell stories to make sense of the things around us, and we create those stories even if some of the things around us are arbitrary and random. So it can be valuable to question those narratives we have about what the other group’s stances tell us about them—or what our group’s views tell us about us. This can help us lower our anger.

And again, this isn’t to say that one can’t have logical and examined reasons for being either pro-life or pro-choice. Clearly, we can have many reasons for our beliefs. But these points can help us see how the stories we tell ourselves about our group and the other group can be biased and simplistic, and can contribute to our anger.

Thanks to our highly polarized environment, political parties form some of their unpredictable viewpoints in a chaotic and seemingly random way. The more polarized we are, the more emotions are at play, and the more quickly and randomly a group’s stances might shift.

As discussed, when we see the other group’s stances as so uniformly bad, we often have the emotional instinct to take the opposite views of the other group when any new issues arise. “If the bad people believe x,” we may instinctively think, “then good people believe the opposite of x.”

Is it possible to imagine a scenario where Trump initially implemented very strict lockdowns in response to covid? Maybe he would do this because his advisors told him it would help him avoid crashing the economy. Or maybe he’d do that to help build a case for why we need stricter immigration rules. To better imagine this scenario, it helps to remember that Republicans wanted strict policies to combat the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

In that alternate world, it’s possible to imagine liberals taking a stand against those policies (at least initially). In that world, some liberals would complain that strict covid lockdown policies were an overly oppressive authoritarian action. Some liberals would say that too-strict lockdowns hurt poor communities financially and psychologically, especially communities of color.

We saw some of this in our world. For example, in a September 2020 piece in the socialist magazine Jacobin, Swedish biostatistician Martin Kulldorff said, “I think the lockdown is the worst assault on the working class in half a century, and especially on the urban working class,” and “There have been studies, for example in Toronto, that show that lockdowns have primarily protected high-income, low-minority neighborhoods, but not low-income or high-minority neighborhoods.” It’s possible to imagine that, if Trump had implemented strict lockdowns, we’d see much more of that kind of sentiment.

To take another covid-related example: When I interviewed Matthew Hornsey, a group-psychology researcher, he shared an anecdote: Early on in the pandemic, Trump mentioned hydroxychloroquine as a promising treatment. Hornsey was surprised how that led many liberals to associate the drug with Trump and, therefore, to mock it—despite the ongoing research on its usefulness for treating covid. This could be seen as another example of people reflexively taking an opposite stance of the people they dislike.

We’ve become polarized across a surprising number of recent issues, yet it’s possible to imagine things going differently if members of each group had done different things. Often, all that’s needed is an influential, polarizing person to take a firm stance on something and the other side will feel motivated to push back against them. If we’re willing to examine how those kinds of emotional dynamics can factor into our divides, it will help us lower our anger. For some of the recent issues that people have been surprised we’ve become polarized on, it’s possible to imagine things going a different way if some people in each group had done different things.

Our great story-telling abilities also helps explain why human divides can be so long-lasting and so entrenched. It helps explains why us-vs-them feuds can last decades, and even centuries, even as the issues being fought over might dramatically shift.

The role of storytellers and artists in reducing polarization

That was the end of that excerpt from my book Defusing American Anger. Because the above deals so much with storytelling, I thought I’d include another excerpt about the role storytellers and artists can play in reducing toxic polarization and contempt. This excerpt is present in different forms in both my books:

This excerpt comes from the final chapter of both books, which is about what we can all do to help reduce polarization:

If you’re a writer, artist, social media influencer, or other creator, you might look for ways to incorporate depolarization-aimed ideas in your work. Political messages in creative projects are often aimed at denigrating the other side in various ways. We have no shortage of that kind of thing. A lot of this art, even when it comes from a place of compassion, communicates a message that liberals are nice and wise and conservatives are backwards and mean. As such, much of this content is an accelerant of polarization.

Creative people are skilled at weaving dramatic and eloquent narratives about the “good” and “bad” people. In their desire to create art that contains moral lessons, they can be unintentional contributors to our divides. We should remember that just because something is eloquent and capable of arousing exciting emotions it isn’t necessarily true. We may see an artistic message as meaningful simply because it aligns with our biases and distorted views.

If you’re a creative person who wants to reduce toxic polarization, perhaps you can brainstorm projects that would include these ideas and have a cultural impact. I can imagine all sorts of novels, TV shows, movies, and online media projects that could incorporate these ideas in ways that would keep people entertained while communicating lessons about the nature of our divides.

For those aspiring to be artists, writers, and creators, maybe you can see how that desire doesn’t need to be about making the things we traditionally think of as art: paintings, fiction, movies, and such. Maybe that’s a limited view of what art is and can be. The underlying point of art, after all, is to communicate, to influence, and to change people’s perceptions. That can be done in many ways, including creating projects aimed at bridge-building, empathy-building, and reducing polarization.

Maybe part of our problem is that so much of our artistic energy, as a culture, is devoted to the more popular and ego-boosting forms of art rather than art that is difficult, that challenges us, that brings us together, and that tries to solve real-world problems. Perhaps we should try to expand our idea of what art is and can be.

If enough people start believing in and promoting these ideas, that will start a feedback cycle where influential people — journalists, politicians, pundits — start talking more about these ideas, which in turn will get other citizens talking about them. Polarization grows via a vicious feedback cycle and we can try to combat it with a virtuous feedback cycle.

Conflict resolution specialists Guy and Heidi Burgess, in a 2022 paper, made the case that we need to take a “massively parallel” approach to reducing polarization. In other words, we need to try to get as many people and organizations as possible to work on this problem. As they say, “We will need a new generation of conflict professionals willing to commit to doing for the conflict field what a previous generation did (and is still trying to do) for the climate.”

All of our efforts, big and small, will ripple out in various ways. The people you pass these ideas to will pass them to other people, who will pass them to other people. In a highly connected society, change can happen quickly.

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