How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

[...] now we all stand and stare at a political system that churns out slogans like advertising copy, at a financial market that is motivated only by greed and profit, at the recent events that don’t move in the linear progressive way expected, realising that underneath the polished veneer of rhetoric that we have been sold, there is – and always was – hollowness. No wonder, then, that we are deeply disillusioned.

Today, social media and digital communication have both accelerated and heightened group narcissism. Stuck in our whispering galleries we have become bad listeners and even worse learners. Whether in public or digital spaces nuanced debates are not welcome any more. Instead there are clashing certainties. Media panels often exacerbate dualities. On our television screens or YouTube channels almost every day we watch people from opposite camps, talking and shouting over each other. They are not there to listen and they are not there to learn. They are there to make a point, and to harangue and fulminate. Likewise, far too often, we viewers are not tuning in with the aim of discovering anything new either – ordinarily we want to see ‘our guy’ beat ‘their guy’.

We have all the tools to build our societies anew, reform our ways of thinking, fix the inequalities and end the discriminations, and choose earnest wisdom over snippets of information, choose empathy over hatred, choose humanism over tribalism, yet we don’t have much time or room for error while we are losing our planet, our only home. After the pandemic, we won’t go back to the way things were before. And we shouldn’t. ‘What we call the beginning is often the end ... The end is where we start from.’*