Let’s Undo the Extremism that Online Culture has Bred
We need to raise awareness, and learn to push back on bad ideas
In recent years, the level of political polarization in the West has gotten more and more people very concerned. It seems that people can’t even have rational conversations anymore. The most extreme voices on both sides dominate the discourse, and those in the middle increasingly just don’t say anything, for fear of upsetting the wrong people. Meanwhile, both sides are left to radicalize further and further over time. Things are really getting out of control in a bad way.
What we need to remember is that it was not always like this. If you look at the political conversation just ten years or so ago, things were much healthier, even if not quite perfect. At least there were people on both sides who were willing to have good faith debates with each other. There was a time when left-right debates were quite common, even if they were often just a vehicle to advance the careers of the two personalities doing the debate. We don’t see such debates as much anymore, and I think it’s a shame, because those debates at least were often able to establish some common ground. In contrast, political commentary nowadays tends to be just people in an echo chamber talking to each other, often assuming those who disagree to be enemies that are not worthy of taking seriously. How far we’ve fallen as a society!
The fact is, both sides are probably too far radicalized to find common ground with each other anymore. I think the algorithms designed by greedy social media companies, which encourage clickbait and outrageous content for the sake of ad revenue, deserves the lion’s share of the blame for what has happened. The invisible hand of the algorithm has divided the political discourse into two mutually exclusive and opposing camps, and it has also encouraged both camps to radicalize further and further away from each other. In any case, it’s now up to us, the remaining moderates, to keep alive what was still a widespread hope just a decade ago: that we can come together to find common ground, have rational debates, and resolve our differences in a respectful way. I mean, we can’t just let the dream die, right?
But how can we save the dream? Firstly, we have to be very aware of what is happening. The hardened narratives on both sides aren’t rational, and are essentially the product of technology gone wrong. We need to see through them, and criticize them well. In particular, we need to bravely call out the most ridiculous, authoritarian and inhumane aspects of the lunacy on both sides. We need to learn to be able to say no to the outrageous stuff being dished out by influencers who thrive on controversy. We also need to be able to say, wait a minute, let’s examine the facts first, when faced with emotionally manipulative rhetoric. The age of the contrarian influencer being able to promote and normalize questionable ideas in a fact-free way without pushback needs to end, period.
Secondly, we need to keep the principled, moderate discourse alive.As I previously said, this cannot be a procedural moderatism aimed at remaining in the middle of whatever Overton Window we find ourselves in, because this would mean we would just be dragged towards whichever extreme is winning the tug of war at the moment on a particular issue. Instead, ours must be a values-based moderatism, consistently and unwaveringly upholding values like empathy, compassion, independent thinking, objectivity, commitment to the truth, anti-tribalism and honesty, even in the face of the most immense peer pressure. We need to keep the balanced, compassionate and hence moderate narrative alive, so that it can hopefully eventually shine through against all the partisan and extremist nonsense around us.
Finally, if the far-left and the far-right are both so far gone that they can’t talk to each other, it’s up to us moderates to take the conversation to them, to challenge their nonsense. They might not be interested in debating us, or even having a conversation with us, but we sure need to have a conversation about their ideas, if only to debunk the worst each side has to offer, in order to protect society from their worst consequences. The current discourse of the right is heavily polluted by baseless conspiracy theories, anti-science attitudes, racist ideas, and very real animus towards LGBT people. Meanwhile, the left’s insistence on remaining wedded to their empirically false and widely rejected ideological theories, often to the extent of refusing to have debates with those who reject their worldview, also contributes to the polarization and toxic stalemate that we are in. These things prevent us from finding common ground and having a rational debate, and we must call them out if we want to heal the political landscape. This is why, as a moderate, I will continue to offer my best critique of the excesses of both sides, accompanied by a justification of why the moderate path is the better way. I hope more moderates can join me in doing so over time.
I believe we can still fight our way back towards a saner world. However, given that we are indeed working against powerful forces aided by flawed technology that has arguably gone out of control, we really need to consciously work to fix things, if we are to have any chance of getting out of this mess.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Progressive Conservative Manifesto, the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.
