What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

Today, the parties have become proxies for two vast macro-cultures, so seeking out people like you also often means ending up surrounded by people who share your politics.

affective polarization, i.e., people not trusting or liking those from the other party. This has been on the rise—and this is the phenomenon we’re mostly exploring in this chapter.

This is how a trickle of realignment can quickly accelerate. Conservative Democrats and progressive Republicans are driven to switch parties by their party’s growing hardline ideological faction, which shrinks the area of overlap. Politicians respond in kind by catering their messages more to the hardliners, which causes more defections, and ideolo

Golems rely on a common enemy for unity and for might. The stronger and more dangerous the rival Them seems, the stronger and more united the Us group will typically be.

A golem always must be the Us in a zero-sum, Us vs. Them conflict. The thing that allows multiple golems to merge into a larger golem is a common enemy—a common Them that makes the golems feel like a united Us.

When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human history—an anomaly held up only by trust, cultural norms, and shared assumptions. It’s easy to become ove

None of this means the system isn’t working. Modern democracies weren’t built to eradicate low-rung psychology or low-rung culture. They were built to ensure that low-rung giants wouldn’t be able to do what they’ve done throughout history: conquer the country.

McGuire found that people’s beliefs worked in a similar way: being repeatedly exposed to weak arguments for a particular position makes people dismissive of all arguments for that position.

Perhaps the easiest way to squash a dissenting argument is to just disqualify it right off the bat based on who said it, without ever addressing the argument itself. The infamous ad hominem fallacy.