Dueling Echo Chambers
How a two-party system has us fighting imaginary conflicts
If you’re like me and you live in the United States, you’re living in a country with over three hundred million people; and it is both unfortunate and not an accident that we are divided into merely two groups on the political spectrum — Republicans and Democrats, or “right” and “left” as they are broadly defined — as if that were to encompass all of the possible beliefs of the myriad of states, cultures, subcultures, belief systems and ideologies of three hundred million people.
In reality, we’re pigeonholed by a wedge that sorts us into two extremely vague categories. Ours, whichever it is, is going to be reinforced constantly with notions of familiarity — yes, we’re not perfect, but we have the basics down and if other people just supported us, we’d fix all those issues created by the other guys — while the opposing side is demonized by a huge swatch of anecdotal stories, bad actors, and often cherry-picked stories of "this person on the other side did this bad thing, which you see all the time so you know that side is bad” kinds of media. It sells; that’s the part of the reason.
This isn’t to excuse the extremism in the United States. Far from it. But in order to understand how it got so bad, we have to realize just how easily mislead people can be. What might an unthinkable public act to one person might not even be known to another, and the sheer amount of misinformation out there makes it plausible that millions of Americans who do, in fact, support all human rights unknowingly support a party that compromises those rights.
This also isn’t a “both sides” or “centrist” post; I stand firmly with the people whose rights are being violated. I merely assert that the most effective way to defend those rights is to combat the sources of modern polarization — to recognize them, address them — and call them out. A lot of previously radicalized Americans have stated, publicly and often, how shocked they were by activities they had never questioned only weeks or months earlier. Since the January 6th Capitol Building incident, many rioters have stated on record that they were misled into radical and illegal action. While some have since reneged on their statements (leading many to speculate that they lied to a judge in court) others have stuck to their claims of being radicalized, recognize they were sold a lie, and have returned to otherwise normal lives.
I mentioned earlier that part of this is due to a for-profit media that prioritizes its bottom line over the value of an informed public; another part, however, is much older: tribalism. Studies show that human beings, for as long as we have existed, are only really capable of keeping track of information of about a hundred, to a hundred-and-fifty people. In other words, we can “keep up” with a running tab of about that many — juggling gossip, updates, stories, relationship status, jobs, etc. — about those immediate people. After that it becomes confusing; the information becomes unraveled and we lose track. In short, our brains can’t constantly update information on a thousand acquaintances without losing track, and this was so predominant an issue, planet-wide, throughout the bulk of our history, that every major group beyond that number had to create abstract concepts to preserve a sense of “tribal” identity; these could be anything from gods to place names, to group names. You could be part of a community of a hundred people or so who lived in a village or nomadic group somewhere, but when it came time to mingle with other similar groups, you met under the banner of “we’re all people of this land” or “we all follow this leader” or “we all worship this same god.” It works because such meetings only happen once in a while — holidays, major decision-making events, or wars — so that the people involved can still keep track of their own hundred-person community while working with other ones.
It has been suggested that the age of the internet — and, more specifically, social media — may be messing this up, and causing all sorts of unrealized consequences by steering us into whatever pigeonholes the algorithms decide to put us in. We’re no longer working within a small community that takes care of each other, but a group that constantly reinforces both the strengths and flaws we already have. While in the olden days our community was made up of different specialists — the innovators coming up with new ideas, the teachers passing them along, the record-keepers tracking information, and the cooler-heads keeping us from getting out of control — our new communities are just echo chambers where all the individual “leftists” and “rightists” end up cut off from each other. Our long history of having both a necessary “force of change” and a tempering, traditionalist force of “preserving what works” often butted heads, but recognized that both were needed in order to survive.
Today, we don’t have that, and while it benefits a small minority of us who capitalize on those echo-chambers, the vast majority of us suffer, because we’re no longer capable of adapting to change or preserving any helpful status quo. Instead, we’re taught to fear the “other side” of the imaginary construct the algorithm has unknowingly created.
Professor Greg Graffin, who teaches biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is better known as the lead singer of the famous, decades-old punk band Bad Religion. While he has written extensively about division and tribalism, including a huge number of songs on the subject, his 1996 song “Them and Us” encapsulates the age-old problem that social media has put on steroids: half of a huge population divided into “us” and everyone else being a strawman “them” fed by those same algorithms that convey to us an identity that is absolutely alien to literary millions of people who were, perhaps unwillingly or unconsciously, funneled into that opposite end of the three-hundred-million-plus spectrum.
The result is what I call “dueling echo chambers.” Literally: we have one huge population, divided into two groups, who are given constant reassurance and back-patting from all the people on “their side” while constantly being shown evidence that the “other side” is full of terrible people. This isn’t because those stories are untrue; it’s because we’re being funneled at an early age and bombarded with polarizing information.
It’s (obviously) much more complicated. There absolutely are terrible things happening in the country right now. Insider trading is rampant, the climate is in crisis, discriminatory bills are being passed by people with little to no medical knowledge while doctors are being ignored, and the hate crimes are on the rise. What I hear most often is that people don’t think their party (whichever it is) is doing nearly enough. They’re frustrated that their elected representatives don’t address real problems, instead focusing on outrage politics, scapegoating, or kowtowing to whomever donates most generously to their campaigns. That’s a huge problem (and one that deserves its own article) but for now, I ‘d like to say this:
This is not a “both sides do it” argument. There is no plausible way they’re magically equal. But we’re not going to help solve this issue by finger-pointing, and it doesn’t help to demonize the people pigeonholed or indoctrinated by others. Harvard debate coach Bo Seo has spoken at length about how our ability to change minds is woefully archaic compared to decades ago, and shutting out half the country isn’t going to fix that, and may in fact make things worse.
This post is not an attempt to “make peace” with people who engage in hate. There are absolutely people out there within that 300-million-plus population that wish to engage in racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ or any other form of prejudice, they have to be called out and opposed for the sake of protecting others. Tolerance is a two-way social contract; those who refuse to practice tolerance aren’t agreeing to that contract and are, publicly and by their own admission, a threat to other people. We have to do everything to combat bigotry.
The goal of this post is to address the elephant in the room: splitting the huge population into “two sides” forces us into a carefully arranged scenario where millions of us are only shown huge amounts of misinformation that can color our perceptions and make it easy to demonize us. We have to recognize that, as the first step to overcoming a system that is being used to tear us apart. If a nation divided cannot stand, we have to break down that barrier between us so that the people are no longer being radicalized by rabbit-hole algorithms that cut them off from the real world or manipulate our opinions. We all have friends, family, and loved ones who have been backed into these echo chambers. If we truly want to defend the victims of these systems, we have to identify the problem first. And we have to recognize the source of that manipulation to put a stop to it.
Sorry for the long article on this one. It’s a complex subject, but I’m hoping the term “dueling echo chambers” will stick, and erase a lot of the irrational fear of nonsense conspiracies and strawman ideologies that plague our public discourse this day and age.
Thanks again,
Alexander McGrath