Stop seeing the world as good or evil
Humans carve the world in two when they feel threatened. There’s right/wrong, good/evil, us/them. In normal times, this behavior is most obvious in people with serious depression or borderline personality disorder. Psychologists call it “splitting.”
These days, we see a lot of splitting by all kinds of people. “This fight is barbarism against civilization, good versus evil,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. “The differences between the two sides are as stark as darkness and light.”
In times of high anxiety, each new conflict gets framed this way, a galactic struggle against a dark lord. “There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist,’” Ibram X. Kendi wrote.
Splitting is deeply comforting. It promises an escape hatch from chaos.
But like most cognitive distortions, splitting makes us feel worse after it makes us feel better. Bright lines have a way of hardening into prison bars. “When besieged, we tend to raise our mental drawbridges and shut out new information just when it is needed most,” Maggie Jackson writes in her new book, “Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.”
“We yearn for clarity when we know least about our predicament.”
We also start to misidentify our enemies and heroes. We can’t integrate information that doesn’t fit the narrative.
For example, about 20 percent of Israel’s citizens are Arab. Recently, 70 percent of these Arab citizens said they felt part of Israel. Meanwhile, among Jewish Israelis, less than 4 percent said they trust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the most reliable source of information on the war against Hamas, according to another poll. Splitting is a broken compass in a byzantine world.
When it comes to climate change, there are not two groups—deniers and believers—and never were. Since 2008, researchers Anthony Leiserowitz and Edward Maibach have been tracking American public opinion on the subject, and have identified no fewer than six groups, from the Alarmed to the Disengaged to the Dismissive, which have shifted in size over the years.
The lesson here is to always assume that humans reside along a spectrum of behavior, if they fit anywhere at all. Journalists must help us see this by interviewing people who have changed their minds or who are unsure and don’t fit neatly into one camp. Amplify their voices; they are a lot like most of us.
One of the most helpful things I’ve read since the war in Gaza began was Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s interview with Israeli writer Etgar Keret for The New York Times. In the days after Hamas’ attacks, he felt the urge to split, and was actively working to see the fuller catastrophe: “I think that in our souls, or our minds, or whatever you call it, there is something very complex, some ability to contain ambiguity, not to be swept with only one emotion, to be able to inhale the complexity of existing,” he said.
To Americans more than 5,000 miles away, feuding over whether this public school system or that college leader was sufficiently outraged, he had this to say: “That’s crazy. This idea of people saying: Condemn this, condemn that. I don’t want anybody to condemn anything. I say, be human. You see somebody in pain, try to see that pain.”