Ronny Chieng has a new stand up special, which is worth the watch, but this bit about MAGA having understandable grievances stood out:
The Kolbe psychological framework suggests there are four intrinsic dimensions shaping human motivation: our need for stability vs change, feelings vs facts, flexibility vs structure, and theoretical idealism vs tangible practicality. These innate preferences fall on a spectrum and remain consistent throughout your life. Almost any significant misalignment between people with a similar cultural background can be traced back to a difference in one or more of these dimensions.1 Once we recognize that, we can account for it.
Traditionally, politics has been a push and pull between people who crave stability and people who crave change. The former is most comfortable in the world they learned as a kid. As they get older, their beliefs will appear increasingly regressive as they yearn for a world that is long gone. On the other end of the spectrum, change-seekers need rapid progress and will not feel represented by anyone who doesn’t push fast enough, even if they align on the overall goals.
Despite its frustrations, this dynamic actually worked because we would meet in the middle (where most of us already are statistically) and slowly make changes as a compromise that left both extremes of the spectrum unsatisfied.2
To be a successful politician, you had to share your message with your constituency using TV, radio, and print. Since you did not know who would see it, you had to be relatively centrist to appeal to the widest swath of voters. In the 2010’s, social media made it possible to target your messaging specifically to the viewer. Suddenly, you no longer had to compromise and extremism was actually rewarded, because people felt more seen and represented.3
Unfortunately, social media is uniquely optimized for manipulating and weaponizing people who do not care about facts thanks to its rapid bite-sized format. While half the population is still debating in good faith and citing data, the other half could care less and is instead driven by anger over issues they don’t have the vocabulary to root cause.
This transformed the political divide into a push and pull between people motivated by facts and people motivated by feelings. Previously these preferences were equally distributed across the political spectrum, balancing each other out and allowing democracy to function. But without a shared reality, democracy is physically impossible.
“Conservative” and “liberal” are meaningless labels from a bygone era. As we are witnessing in countries around the world, far-right parties are not interested in conserving. They seek rapid change to sow chaos that reflects the chaos of their internal world, while “liberal” parties try to maintain some semblance of stability as they suffer and burn out in a post-factual world. The US saw a large swing in traditionally liberal voters electing a dictator because their emotions finally felt seen.
In reality, our new political spectrum is actually between feeler and thinker.
This is not an attack on feelers. Feelings are complex thoughts compressed into an easily digestible emotion for your brain to quickly process something. They are an incredibly useful and efficient way to navigate the world, and can even be a super power at the individual level. However, that same compression algorithm makes them a lossy way to share complex thoughts externally.
Ever sat in a meeting and said something like “I feel like this is the wrong direction”, but couldn’t articulate why in the moment? That was your brain compressing a lot of thoughts into an immediate signal. Welcome to the full-time reality of feelers, who constantly experience this with a much wider breadth and depth of emotions.
Without understanding this difference though, feelers and thinkers are speaking different languages and unable to even communicate with each other. Sure, the thinkers can laugh with Ronny Chieng pointing out that feelers aren’t educated enough to describe their underlying issues, but this is not an education or intelligence gap. We all know plenty of highly educated feelers trapped in these same dangerous thought loops. It’s a fundamentally different perception of our realities that has been weaponized against them.
In the past, it was generally accepted that politics was the domain of intellectuals and we were comfortable ignoring the complaints and simmering anger of those who could not debate in the marketplace of ideas. For the feelers, this was a tyranny of facts that did not reflect their personal experience. Now the thinkers get to live in a tyranny of emotions that do not reflect observable data.
Social media companies promised to bring us closer together and have accomplished the exact opposite. Just like any addiction that tears families apart, it turns out endlessly mainling content that was algorithmically selected for maximal engagement into our eyeballs tore the fabric of our society apart. We all have that family or friend we can’t talk to anymore.
At the end of the day, social media and democracy are incompatible. Or more fundamentally, anything that makes targeted mass communication more efficient at the cost of nuance will dramatically favor emotional extremism. And while governance can’t be based exclusively on facts, it definitely can’t be based solely on feelings.
But the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no going back.
Some people believe that AI will save us.4 If you’ve ever seen utilitarian or extreme rationalist movements at work, you know that effective leadership requires both mind and heart.
Instead, the most likely eventual outcome is that political parties will re-align along the flexibility vs structure spectrum. This will be a modern version of the federal vs state rights debates in the US, and will almost certainly be precipitated by a severe abuse of human rights again.
Ultimately, the more power we can divest from centralized governments into smaller local constituencies, the more we diffuse the power of social media as a mass propaganda tool. This same principle applies in the private sector too. Small businesses are better for modern society, providing flexibility to harmonize different local needs, compared to large centralized corporations who trade that flexibility for leverage and scaling efficiency.
The question is how long will it take, and what specifically will facilitate that shift in party alignments this time?
In the meantime, all I can do is plead for you to stop using social media with algorithmic feeds, no matter how much you think you might be immune to its effects or that your feed is actually positive.5 I promise you’re not special.
1:1 or small group private communication requires more intentional effort, but it’s also more rewarding. We should strive to make unpleasant things, like work or chores, more efficient, but human connection cannot and should not be efficient.
This is obviously a huge simplification, but I’m writing my thoughts on politics, not psychology. ↩
Also, people died earlier before their beliefs became too dated. ↩
This development is even more dangerous when you consider our global enemies are just as easily targeting their propaganda to our eyeballs without needing to make their messaging generic either. ↩
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might even think that the tech oligarchs are encouraging the current political chaos because they believe they are building the antidote. ↩
This is known as the third-person effect, which is a specialized form of optimism bias where we believe we won’t experience negative outcomes as much as others. ↩