Why We Can’t See How Others See Things

A recent front page from one of Canada’s largest-circulation ‘newspapers’, the extreme-right-wing National Post. The publication has been owned by a series of lunatic-fringe ultraconservatives since it was founded. Racist and hate-mongering editorials appear unabashedly on the front page of this ‘newspaper’. Thanks to Indrajit Samarajiva for the image.

I was asked recently for my thoughts on why we seem so locked into our ideological silos that we can’t begin to understand how ‘Others’ see things, to the point we often simply throw up our hands and conclude that they must be either ‘evil’ or ‘insane’. Or both.

My answer was that while I think social media have amplified this blindness, they, and the mainstream media, are not in themselves the cause. As much as the media would like to believe they have a strong impact on our worldviews, my sense is that they tend to reflect and coddle this blindness rather than create it. The mainstream media write what they’re ‘paid’ to write, of course, but they also write what they think readers want to (pay to) read. As often as anything, what readers want is reassurance that what they already believe is correct. The media and their readers co-condition each other and hence entrench each other’s thinking.

I think our incapacity to understand others’ thinking and feelings actually stems largely from a confluence of three things:

1. Imaginative poverty: Most of us have grown up in a world where technologies and entertainments do our imagining for us, so we get no practice doing it ourselves. Toys and games come complete with detailed instructions. Children’s time is managed so there is no ‘idle’ time. Never having to imagine anything means our imagining ‘muscle’ is undeveloped, so we can’t imagine how others live and why they feel what they do.
2. A decline in critical thinking capacity: At one time, students and journalists were trained to challenge what we were told, and to expect evidence, not hearsay, before believing or reporting the facts. We had enough exposure to other points of view (I was a shortwave radio listener back in the day) that we had no choice but to try to balance conflicting reports and opinions to make sense of the dissonance. But now we live in a world where most people of all ages do not read very much, almost never read history or in-depth background books on any subject, never encounter investigative journalism in their reading (it’s too expensive for the media to do, and it’s unprofitable), rarely engage in political conversation except at the most shallow, reactive level, and often read no works of fiction at all. No surprise then that most of us never learned, or have forgotten, how to think critically. So now opinions, like the eight page full front-section editorial illustrated above, actually pass for ‘facts’ and ‘news’ in many people’s minds, and go unquestioned.
3. A lack of curiosity: As young children, we are preoccupied with playing and exploring and asking ‘why’; curiosity is nature’s way of getting us to learn things that will help us broaden our experiences and hence be better able to cope with challenging situations. So why are we so much less curious as adults? One recent study described curiosity as the drive to fill the gap between what we know and what we want to know. But if we’re driven mostly by fear, and overwhelmed by what’s happening in the world, we probably don’t want to know what we don’t already (think we) know. But paradoxically, one of our greatest fears is the unknown — what we don’t know. So the less we know, the more fearful we become, and the less we want to know that might heighten those fears. So we squelch our curiosity. Most of the Americans I know have very little curiosity, and hence no knowledge, about history, or about the ways other cultures live; most don’t even own passports. Most Canadians I know aren’t much better.

The upshot of these three ‘incapacities’, I think, is that the strident ideologies and deluge of propaganda we encounter every day end up largely unchallenged by most people, because most people simply lack these essential capacities needed to challenge them.

American exceptionalism, which I have witnessed across the political spectrum, is even more pervasive in business environments than political ones. If you believe you are inherently superior to any other group or culture, and that your worldview is of necessity the correct one, and destined to prevail globally (the alternative if it doesn’t, as Blinken recently blandly reasserted, is “chaos”), then why would you ever try to see anything any other way? If it’s not the American (Empire’s) way, then it’s either evil or insane, and by definition wrong.

That same exceptionalism prevails in various Empire subcultures that have devolved into insular echo chambers, left and (mostly) right. (The British privileged class has its own particularly smug version of exceptionalism, that largely enabled the debacle of Brexit.)

Exceptionalism means never having to say you’re sorry. More importantly, it requires no imagination, no critical thinking, and no curiosity — in fact, like most religions, it makes a virtue of their absence.

I think exceptionalism is an extreme manifestation of the growing paucity of imagination, critical thinking, and curiosity in our world, which has, I believe, arisen for the reasons outlined above, having to do mostly with “how we live, now”. But these three incapacities seem increasingly present in almost every form of public discourse I see, and they may in fact be increasingly a global phenomenon.

If that’s the case, it doesn’t bode well for our ability to deal with growing economic, political, social and ecological crises in the coming decades. If we can’t see points of view other than our own, we’re going to have a hellish time when governments collapse and we have to learn to work together in a radically relocalized world, in community. With people we don’t know, and can’t possibly understand.