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Those who are in the middle are forced to take sides
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While I would like to believe Mr Robert Shiller’s optimistic thesis (“Improved communication will reduce wealth gap,” September 28, Shanghai Daily) I must confess to being a tad more pessimistic.
I recognize that our choice of path in life is often not a conscious one but a consequence of our upbringing and group values. Nonetheless, at some point we do choose to either affirm or change both our beliefs and values and even the direction of our life.
What does this have to do with Mr Shiller’s piece? Simply, many people choose not to allow new or challenging information to alter their structured perception of “how things are.”
This is not limited to matters of religious or spiritual beliefs but, rather, extends to all those belief structures we have about social hierarchies, nation-states, and even such matters as climate change and the role that humans are playing in accelerating that change.
An American humorist once observed that it is very hard to get a man to recognize something as true when his income depends upon his not recognizing it. Thus, coal and oil companies are deeply invested in the “good” that their products do, and tobacco companies market their products as “calming” for frazzled human nerves. While these people are surrounded by mountains of evidence that their convictions are seriously in error, the momentum of their lives works against their integrating that information, lest it upset their consciences and effect their behaviors.
We are all more or less like that, even those of us who like to think of ourselves as being relatively open-minded.
I have been devouring all sorts of books in the last couple of years examining the “state” of my country. I have been most fascinated by how so many people can be “misled” to support candidates and organizations that are clearly — by the evidence — working against their self-interest.
Also, as a person who enjoyed learning about, and winning over, persons with whom I initially seemed to have little in common, I have been trying to better understand what I might do to communicate and dialog with people on the Right. What I have learned, however, is rather discouraging.
To begin with, the more “conservative” individual has several mental processes that are not conducive to processing new — and especially challenging — information. While we all, to a greater or lesser degree, tend to (mostly unconsciously) “filter” information — that is, we latch on to information that supports our existing biases or inclinations even as we filter out much that could challenge them, the more conservative persons do this more often and successfully.
Less open
In good measure this is because they are less open to new information in the first place, but it is also because they are more likely to be certain that they are correct. By contrast, more liberal individuals tend to be more curious persons in the first instance and, because of that, less likely to be rigidly committed to maintaining rigid belief structures.
Furthermore, the more highly educated a person on the Right is, the more likely that they will adhere to their convictions. In other words, when they receive contrary or challenging information they double-down in their existing belief systems! I find this incredible, but it does explain how “reaching across the aisle” to people on the far Right is likely to be futile.
One of the problems of our current time in the US — and, seemingly, throughout much of Europe, too — is that the “people in the middle” are being driven to choose between one “side or the other” as partisanship becomes more extreme and the middle ground shrinks.
Thus I feel that the current wave of populist nationalism, nourished as it is by fears of immigrants and horror at terrorism, may well be operative for some time into the future.
This will more than blunt the favorable outcomes Mr Shiller hopes for and, precisely because populist nationalism has much more to do with symbols and fond memories of past golden ages that must be restored, people enthralled by such passions actually pay less attention to those matters that do impact them on a day to day level, including the ongoing destruction of our planet and the increasing concentration of wealth.
The author is a retired statesman from the US.
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