Polarization Has Five Authors, and We Are One of Them

Everyone agrees that our societies have become more polarized. Almost every explanation on offer names one culprit: the internet, or the media, or the politicians, depending on who is talking. I think that is the wrong shape for the answer. Polarization has several authors, each did something specific, and the effects compound. Here they are in order.

The Internet

The internet did two things, one obvious and one not.

The obvious thing is that it let people find others who agree with them. I have written elsewhere about how this removed a filter nobody knew was a filter: an eccentric belief used to die of loneliness, and now it can find ten thousand friends by lunchtime.

The less obvious thing is that it made argument cheap and consequence free. In a room, disagreement costs something. You have to look at the person, and you will see them again. Online, you can say the strongest possible version of your view to a stranger you will never meet, be applauded by your side for saying it, and pay nothing. A medium that rewards the strong statement and punishes the qualified one will, over years, move everyone's statements toward the poles. That is not a moral failing of the users. It is what the incentive does.

The Media

Somewhere around fifteen years ago the press split. It had always leaned, but it had pretended not to, and the pretence imposed a discipline: you had to be able to defend a story to a reader who did not already agree with you.

Then outlets discovered that a committed audience is more valuable than a broad one. A committed audience returns daily, forgives errors that flatter it, and can be sold to advertisers as a demographic. So each outlet chose a side and served it. The result is that a large share of the public now consumes news whose entire selection principle is to confirm what that public already believes, and the two halves are reading about different countries.

The Parties

The parties did not resist this. They fed on it.

A party wins by mobilising its base and demoralising the other side's, and both are easier when the sides are far apart and frightened of each other. So parties have every incentive to describe the opposition as dangerous rather than mistaken, and to convert every question, however technical, into a marker of which tribe you belong to. I have written about how the system converts questions into tribal signals; the point here is that polarization is not a side effect the parties regret. It is the product they sell.

And because there are only two of them, the bundling does the rest. You cannot be with one side on trade and the other on schooling; you must take the whole package, and having taken it, defend the whole package, as though everything you own were on the beach.

The Education System

The schools are the quiet author. They did not polarize anyone. They failed to equip anyone against it.

A person who had been taught how we know what we know, how to read a statistic, how to notice when a story is being told to produce a feeling rather than an understanding, would be a much harder target for the three mechanisms above. Almost nobody was taught these things. I have listed what a curriculum would need to produce such people, and its absence is not accidental: an electorate that could see through the machinery would be inconvenient for everyone who operates it.

So the schools sent out, year after year, people with a great many facts and no defences, into a medium built to exploit exactly that.

Us

And then there is the author nobody names.

We like it. That is the uncomfortable part. Outrage is pleasant. Belonging is pleasant. Being certain is pleasant, and being certain together with others is more pleasant still. Every one of the mechanisms above works only because it offers us something we want, and we take it every time.

The internet did not force anyone into the room where everyone agrees with them. The outlet did not force anyone to switch off the other channel. The party did not force anyone to hate. Each supplied an option, and we chose it, because it felt better than the alternative, and it still does.

Why the Order Matters

I have listed the authors in the order they act, because the sequence explains why the problem is so hard.

The internet supplies the medium. The media supplies the content shaped for it. The parties supply the stakes. The schools supply no immunity. And we supply the appetite. Remove any one and the others are weakened but not stopped. Fix the media and the internet routes around it. Reform the parties and the media keeps the tribes warm. Teach the children and it takes a generation to show.

That is not a reason for despair. It is a reason to stop looking for the single villain, because there is not one, and every proposal built around one will fail while the other four keep working.