It turns out that it isn’t really about being right or wrong; an opinion isn’t right or wrong, it’s a belief. But the fighting on social media is about winning and losing, about gaining attention, about power. In the early 1980s Republican strategist and national chairman Lee Atwater figured out how to emotionally motivate voters. “While I didn’t invent ‘negative politics,’ ” he once admitted, “I am among its ardent practitioners. Frankly, I didn’t care what anyone called me so long as we won. “Like a good general, I treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”
The nonpartisan National Election Study, a survey that tracks voter preferences, found that beginning in 1980, the same time Atwater burst onto the political stage, voters began reporting increasingly negative opinions about the opposition party. Dartmouth professor Sean Westwood interpreted that data and concluded, “Partisanship, for a long period of time, wasn’t viewed as part of who we are. It wasn’t core to our identity. It was just an ancillary trait. But in the modern era we view party identity as something akin to gender, ethnicity, or race—the core traits that we use to describe ourselves to others.” More than that, researchers have found that political identity has seeped into our daily lives. It helps determine who we associate with and apparently has made marriages between Democrats and Republicans somewhat unusual.
That’s one reason a part of my audience felt betrayed when I refused to support Donald Trump.
Two years after Atwater and Roger Ailes managed George H. W. Bush’s successful 1988 presidential campaign, at least partially by introducing racial fears with their legendary Willie Horton ad campaign, Atwater was diagnosed with brain cancer. Facing death, he had a revival of spirit, converting to Roman Catholicism. As a way of repenting, he reached out to many of the people he had maligned to offer an apology. In one such letter he wrote, “My illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood, and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.”
Finally, in an article in Life magazine, he reached a significant conclusion, admitting, “My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The 1980s were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the nineties, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”
The difficulty is that it was much too late. Atwater, Ailes, and later Karl Rove showed politicians how to win. Former Democratic congressman Robert Wexler, who lost his first campaign for Congress but won his second, admitted he had figured it out. “I learned in my first campaign that whoever goes negative first wins.”
Just as with every other addiction, there is a strong physiological component to your feelings of outrage. A study conducted by USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute and published in Scientific Reports in 2017 showed that when forty self-identified liberals were confronted with political statements that contradicted their beliefs, there was increased activity in that part of the brain associated with the regulation of emotion and a decrease in activity in the region of the cortex governing cognitive flexibility. It also demonstrated increased activity in the area of the brain generally associated with emotion, fear, and anxiety. Meaning that when confronted with statements that reinforced an opinion different from ours, rather than being open to change or persuasion, our own position hardened. We are too strongly emotionally invested in being right to be open to a differing opinion.
In other words, your outrage results in actual physical changes—changes you may enjoy like a jolt of coffee or, in my case, a good drink or three after work. This confirmed the results of earlier studies that had shown, according to Emory University professor Drew Westen, the author of The Political Brain, “The last thing to do is to try to argue someone out of a belief when they’re strongly committed to it emotionally, because what makes it so strong is the emotion attached to it, not the facts or arguments that support it.”
So the emotional hold our political positions have on us isn’t limited to the intellectual satisfaction of being right, and it’s not really about the issues; it’s not about guns or abortion, free speech or privacy, it comes from that great feeling we get from winning. That’s why so many otherwise intelligent people so easily defend fake news or even obvious lies; satisfying their emotional needs is way more important to them than having a nice intellectual discussion with all of its nuances. It no longer surprises me when I speak to really smart people who refuse to condemn or even criticize Trump for his practically pathological lying; it isn’t about him, it’s about them. Also unsurprising is my friends on the left’s inability to distinguish “fake news” from facts when its coming from someone on their “side.” In the past, the kind of “alternative facts” he routinely spouts would have made it impossible for any politician to be elected; now a significant segment of the American people just doesn’t care. Being on the winning side—the joy they get from watching their opponents complain in frustration—is more important to them than the truth.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. When I was a teenager I picked up a copy of Dale Carnegie’s 1936 classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. I thought it might help me relate to the radio audience I expected to have one day. This is a book that has influenced Americans from presidents to Charles Manson. “Nine times out of ten,” Carnegie wrote, “an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right. You can’t win an argument. You can’t, because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. Why? Well, suppose you triumph over the other man and shoot his argument full of holes and prove he is non compos mentis. Then what? You will feel fine. But what about him? You have made him feel inferior. You have hurt his pride.”
What Dale Carnegie didn’t foresee is the fact that making your opponent feel inferior would not only become a good thing, it would become the ultimate goal. But that’s where we are today in political debate. When Carnegie wrote his book, just about the only way people could argue with each other was face-to-face. We knew the people we were arguing with; maybe we worked with them every day or they were friends or relatives. So we knew they weren’t bad people, they were just misguided. In addition to manners, the proximity of a clenched fist caused people to hesitate before they called someone a nasty name or insulted them.
That’s changed; through social media we communicate every day with people we’ve never met; often we don’t even know their real name or, in some situations, whether they are a human being or a bot. The only thing we know about them, or it, is that they disagree with us. And there are times when they are disagreeable about it. They have the audacity to call you a name or make fun of you. That brings us to the ultimate excuse: They started it! It’s human nature to easily absorb and forget compliments, but, boy oh boy, when someone hurls an insult at you, all systems are go! Some unnamed person living somewhere doing something, whom you have never met and know nothing about, dares to say, “You’re a jerk!” and your entire defense mechanism goes into action. Oh, yeah? I’m a jerk? Well, you know what you are for calling me a jerk!
And so it escalates.
So how do we “make amends” to those people, as we are taught in AA? How do we treat them with respect, even when they’re clearly jerks? You might start by understanding there is little chance you are going to change their opinion—unless, of course, they read this book, too. Billy Graham pointed out that “unfortunately, experience tells us that p
eople like this seldom change; their pride gets in their way, and they can’t bring themselves to admit that they alone are responsible for their failures.” So, chances are, they aren’t going to accept it when you do it for them.
We can start by remembering the words of Pogo, the great cartoon character created by Walt Kelly, who is credited with the warning, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Pogo is right. It isn’t the other guy somewhere out there in cyberspace, it’s us. It may take two to tango, but it takes only one person to change the dynamics of a relationship. That means taking responsibility for your own words. Truthfully, I never thought I’d be quoting pop star Justin Bieber, but after a racist video he’d made many years earlier surfaced, his apology was worth considering. “As a kid, I didn’t understand the power of certain words and how they can hurt. I thought it was okay to repeat hateful words and jokes, but I didn’t realize at the time that it wasn’t funny and that in fact my actions were continuing the ignorance. Thanks to friends and family, I learned from my mistakes and grew up and apologized for those wrongs. . . . I’m very sorry.”
A lot of us don’t understand the power of our words. We send them out into cyberspace because there really are few, if any, consequences. We can be as tough as we wish we actually were. We can take out all our frustrations on someone we don’t know. There is no clenched fist close by; pretty much the worst thing that can happen is that the other person will respond with bigger insults. So, who are you harming by your participation in this?
Listen to Pogo—he knows what he is talking about. It’s yourself you’re hurting, both directly and indirectly, both physically and mentally. Some people believe getting out their anger is good for them. And once in a while it might be. But living with outrage is unhealthy. Getting angry—yes, even getting angry on social media—causes your brain to release stress hormones. At the extreme, it can cause a heart attack. A small study published in the European Heart Journal reported that the risk of a heart attack increased substantially, especially among people who have survived previous heart attacks, in the two hours following an outburst of anger. In her book Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion, psychologist Nathalie Nahai points out that anger causes an individual’s cortisol levels to rise, “and when you are very angry you can end up in a fight or flight mode. Physically it’s not good for people to be in a prolonged state of rage and anxiety.”
There also is some evidence that social media hostility can transform into aggressive real-world behavior. That makes sense, and I suspect a lot of people can relate to this; after a heated political argument, including name-calling, your husband or wife or friend casually says something to you, and you snap back at them. That jerk on the Internet got you so angry that you just have to release your frustration at the first easy target.
Here’s something else you probably haven’t thought about: The person you were arguing with is just as angry as you are. And they may be taking it out on someone in their life, too!
Being outraged can make you less productive and sensitive in your real life. There are things many people would never think about saying in person, yet after using those words to describe a political opponent, they somehow seem to have lost their edge; they don’t seem quite so offensive, and they may sneak into real-life vocabulary.
The long-term effect is what we have been discussing throughout this book: It is damaging to our country. No matter what happens, half of America is alienated. Even if you win, the country loses, and that will eventually affect you and everyone you know.
I’d like you to pause here for a few seconds and think about the last time someone who believed differently than you do was able to convince you that they were right and you were wrong; the last time you said to someone, “Thank you for correcting me. Now I understand.” Let me take a guess: How about never? No matter how much you or anyone else explains or complains, huffs and puffs and yells and threatens, there still are only distant rumors that once, years ago, in a galaxy far away, someone used social media to successfully change another person’s political opinion.
It doesn’t work that way. Not only is it ineffective but being attacked, ridiculed, or even presented with accurate evidence actually causes people to embrace those things they believe even more tightly. Researchers studying this so-called backfire effect concluded that “corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.”
So here is what you accomplish when you get into a debate with someone who has a different opinion than you do: Neither one of you is going to change your opinion. Nothing is going to be accomplished.
You’ll notice I haven’t used the word “troll” even once yet. Wikipedia defines an Internet troll as “someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” We’ve all had experience with trolls, even if we didn’t know it. The Russian government understands the damage that this behavior is doing to this country and has used it successfully to further divide Americans. This has been one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history, the largest hostile intelligence operation in our history, and we’re not taking it seriously enough. Just think about this for a moment: You may well have been used by the Russian government in the attempt to divide and conquer the United States.
I was. TheBlaze was. A former employee of Russia’s Internet Research Agency admitted that pro-Putin comments had been “left on sites like TheBlaze and Politico.” In other words, sites on both sides of the political spectrum. A former hotel receptionist employed by the Putin government admitted that one of her assignments had been to write an essay as if she were an average American housewife and post it. When I found out about this, I called it a “shark bump,” meaning that it was a test to see how easy it might be to manipulate American public opinion.
It was amazingly easy for them to do. I admitted that the Russians had become very good at spreading disinformation. And disinformation makes you lose trust in legitimate news sources. Most Americans are getting their information from social media, and discrediting all of those sources makes it more difficult for people to know what’s real. In 2016, for example, an ad posted by a supposed conservative organization on Facebook invited Americans to protest the “Islamification of Texas” by participating in a rally outside an Islamic center in Houston, but a second ad directed at the Muslim community invited them to attend a “Save Islamic Knowledge” rally at the same place and time. Both organizations were Russian creations, and the result was a nasty confrontation. Total cost to the Russians was estimated at $200.
What was real? The confrontation. It was just a little taste of the ability of the Russians to use the outrage in this country to cause serious problems. Maybe after they plant phony stories that motivate angry people to burn down a city we’ll finally take this threat seriously.
But all of this is made possible by the anger that is pulling us apart. All of it. In fact, Russian instigators made at least 130 documented attempts to create confrontational rallies.
So how do you make amends to people you don’t know? You can’t. AA encourages members to seek out people they have hurt with their behavior, but obviously that isn’t possible in a social-media environment. You don’t even know the people you’ve attacked (or who have attacked you), and in reality you can’t be sure they are even people. You may have been provoked and manipulated by a bot or a Russian national following a script. But more than that, it isn’t necessary or helpful to apologize to anyone. Chances are, whatever you were doing to them, they often were doing exactly the same thing to you. They were trading insults and accusations with you. We are all equally guilty in creating this toxic environment. And we all need to become part of the solution.
The muck stops here. That’s the first thing on which we all have to agree.
37
* * * r />
Precept upon Precept
I have a new outlook on life. I look forward to each day with happiness because of the real enjoyment it is to me to be sane, sober, and respectable. I was existing really from one drink to the next, with no perception about circumstances, conditions, or even nature’s elements. My acquaintance with God—lost and forgotten when I was a young man—is renewed. God is all loving and all forgiving. The memories of my past are being dimmed by the life I now aspire to.
Anonymous, The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous
There are a lot of programs, methods, and devices other than AA to help people deal with addictions. You can go to rehab, take certain drugs, consult experts. There is no one solution that fits all. But among the few things that all of them have in common is that they focus on the future. They provide a goal, an appreciation for what is possible. After you open your veins and get rid of the poison, then what? You’re giving up something really important to you; what are you going to get in return? In other words, when we abandon this outrage and begin treating the other side with respect, or at least civility, what’s the payoff?
For me, overcoming my addiction allowed me to have a healthy relationship with my children, clarity, and the ability to move through my career without the fear I was living with that I would be exposed. When I stopped drinking, I was able to deal head-on with all those things in my life that were causing my unhappiness, rather than covering them up with more alcohol. The result was so much greater than I would have envisioned in my wildest dreams.
For you? Look around; look outward, not inward. Appreciate everything we have here. We have so much. We have every opportunity. We have the most amazing tools and toys. We have phones and iThis and iThat and video devices and music; we have all the information contained in the British Library a click away. We are about to colonize another planet. Fewer people are killed in wars than at any other time in the history of mankind. We can replace lost limbs. We have access to the greatest artists and the coolest cars. We can attend MIT for FREE online. We can witness history live while speaking with someone on the other side of the globe. We have so much food that the WHO says that for the very first time, starvation has been replaced by obesity as a global problem. And we don’t have to crap outside and wipe with moss . . . unless we WANT to!