To Heal the West, We Must Heal Ourselves (Part 1)

In order to reduce affective polarization, we need to stop identifying with our political tribe.

This is the first installment in my series To Heal the West, We Must Heal Ourselves. My hypothesis is that a lot of us (myself sometimes included) contribute to the problem of affective polarization without realizing it. But when we focus on healing the broken parts of our own psychology and spirituality, we can start to see our own blind spots. We can start to identify places where we're part of the problem, and then change our actions to become part of the solution instead.

Think of our political discourse like a choir in which we're all singing. Right now, it's a cacophony. Everything is off-key because so many of us are fighting with our fellow singers rather than harmonizing. But when we focus on taking the log out of our own eye, we can get back in key and change the tone of the choir just a little bit towards euphony instead.

Whenever I write about affective polarization, one question that invariably comes up is: so how do we fix it? How do we knit our society back together, prevent a civil war, and get back to the productive and healthy conversations that our civitas demands and that we as individuals deserve?

I think the answer is to heal ourselves.

Why is this the answer? The great Buddhist teacher S.N. Goenka, whom Huffington Post called "The Man Who Taught the World to Meditate" put it this way: "If there is no peace in the minds of individuals, how can there be peace in the world?" He exhorted us to "Make peace in your own mind first."

When we focus on healing the broken parts of our internal landscape, we can start to become aware of our own blind spots. We can start to identify places where we would have been previously tempted to be accidentally part of the problem, and then change our actions to become part of the solution instead.

So how can we do that? In this blog series we'll explore multiple different strategies. In Part 1, I'd like to focus on the strategy that I've found to be most powerful: to change our identity.

Most of us get our sense of identity from our tribe. We don't see ourselves as, "John Smith, human and child of God." Instead we identify ourselves as "John Smith, libertarian" or "John Smith, Christian." We acquire certain beliefs (for instance, that higher taxes are good or that welfare is bad or that God performed miracles to rescue the Israelites thousands of years ago), and find a tribe that also believes those things; and then we conflate those beliefs with who we are. Rather than something that can change–and, in fact, probably has changed in the past–we assume that our particular way of seeing the world is an essential part of who we are. 

There are two problems with this. First, it leads almost invariably to affective polarization. Tribalism leads us into us-vs-them thinking; the moment we identify with an in-group, we start to dislike the out-group.

One study documented this particularly well. In 1970, social psychologist Henry Tajfel took boys and divided them into two groups along an arbitrary metric. He then asked each boy to help him distribute some money. The boys were given two options: they could give a large but equal sum to both groups, or give a smaller sum to their in-group but a much smaller sum to the out-group. Tajfel was stunned by the results. Even when the group distinctions were completely arbitrary, the boys generally chose to distribute the smaller sum.

Here’s how David McRaney summarized the study in his book How Minds Change: “Once people become an us, we begin to loathe a them, so much so that we are willing to sacrifice the greater good if it means we can shift the balance in our group’s favor.”

The moment we sort ourselves into tribes, we become a little bit pro-"us" and a lot anti-"them."

The second problem with getting our identity from our tribe is that it closes our minds. When we confuse our politics (for instance) with our identity, then we start to see any criticism of our political tribe as an attack on ourselves. From a neuroscience perspective, we actually go into fight-or-flight mode just like we would if someone threw a punch at us instead of merely criticizing our ideas.

Exacerbating this is the fact that humans are what McRaney calls "ultra-social animals." Changing our minds carries the risk of social death. If I'm a libertarian and I suddenly decide that higher taxes are good, it is possible that my fellow libertarians will kick me out of their group. This is not a trivial danger. As hunter-gatherers, we needed our tribes; a human who was ostracized from their tribe rarely lasted long in the wild. Social death led to physical death. We are therefore evolutionarily wired not to change our minds if that might put us at odds with our tribe.

What this means is that no matter how open-minded we consider ourselves or aspire to be, if we identify with a tribe then that puts a ceiling on our ability to seriously and openly consider ideas that go against the received wisdom of the tribe. The more strongly we identify with this tribe, on a conscious or subconscious level, the lower this ceiling is.

So how can we change this?

One way that I've found to be effective is to see myself as part of one great tribe of humanity. When I see myself as intimately connected and at one with all life on this planet, then my desire to ingratiate myself with the in-group and oppose the out-group goes down.

In order to accomplish this, I'm a fan of embodied experiences. The first reason I like embodied experiences is because I've found that they're more powerful than a mere intellectual understanding. I used to have neck-up "of course we're all one tribe, and people who disagree with me are children of God as well" epiphanies on a regular basis. But the epiphany was just a flash in the pan; it didn't stick, and it didn't change my behavior. It wasn't until I started to have embodied experiences of oneness that the new mindset started to stick.

The second reason that I like embodied experiences is that they seem to cut down on the cognitive bias known as "bias blind spot." As Taft College describes it, bias blind spot "is the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself." I struggled with an enormous bias blind spot for years in my 20s, and I still suffer from it sometimes now. A merely intellectual understanding that we're all one human tribe didn't do much to reduce this. But I find that embodied experiences of oneness with all other life on this planet has cut down on my belief that I've got it figured out and that the problem is all those people in the other tribe.

So here's my action item for us as a community of practice: meditate with the intention of having an embodied experience of oneness with every other human being on the planet. Here's a guided meditation from my friend and mentor (and, full disclosure, client) Mark Johnson at The Undaunted Man.

After you do the meditation, leave a comment letting us know how it went!

---

Heal the West is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or becoming a founding member. Your support is greatly appreciated.