Starting with a key point or two.
One reason, and a short answer, is that we haven’t really worked very hard on answering this question, for some reason thinking that other things are so much more important: interplanetary travel, social networking about completely frivolous topics, etc.
What we have now – in varying states of mind about our societies that sometimes conflict – didn’t just drop out of the sky, but have “origin stories” behind them:
1. Early on, humans observed the other animals around them and saw that they were bound up in a competitive food chain. We, also, competed within that food chain, and readily transferred that way of being into our relationships with one another.
2. We had the gift of knowing we could collaborate with other humans to tackle long-term challenges, beyond the cooperative hunting efforts some of our (more shortsighted) animal friends did. That kind of collaboration more or less naturally led to specialization by individuals, which allowed them to more efficiently serve the interests of the group while also sustaining themselves. The spread of specialization made the participants, and pretty much everyone else, better off.
3. When it was necessary to come together, to produce something that required a major effort or launch a defensive or offensive fighting force, the interdependence fostered by specialization made it easier for that to happen.
4. You can see that the sticking point in this otherwise rosy scenario is that someone has to be in charge – by either inflicting themselves on the rest, or coming to power through some mutually agreed-upon process that can be generally accepted by the group. Then that leader must sustain their position, which is usually done through a combination of rewards and punishments. They must also respond appropriately to any changes that arise, both anticipatable and without warning, and from the inside or outside, from natural or sociological causes, etc. Finally, the system must include ways for authority to transition as time marches on.
5. To use an engineering analogy, there are multiple failure points within the leadership structure summarized above. Attempts to institutionalize governing systems usually rely on some base level of “getting along” behavior assumed to be acceptable, plus a series of compromises to head off potential conflicts over constituents’ differing interests. (In the US, these compromises have become unsustainable as the country has evolved into an entirely different entity from where it started, and are in desperate need of updating – a challenge that has so far proven insurmountable.)
6. People’s willingness to be governed within some kind of system takes place within a very fragile veneer of civility. If we had a meter that could do it, we can imagine measuring the point at which differences of opinion about governance among individuals make negotiations to resolve them impractical if not impossible. Under these conditions, any one group is likely to feel threatened by some other group. The two circumstances together open the door to a breakdown of whatever governing system might be in place.
7. People feel threatened by others when they perceive themselves to be on the wrong side of an imbalance in power: outvoted, outmoded, underpaid, under-invested, and otherwise underappreciated. Facts are peripheral in such cases; the relationship we have established with the world – our uniquely defined and configured world – is what matters.
8. The usual response to these perceptions is to “gang up” to minimize the risk. Gangs of course don’t always behave, and gang leaders can be highly noxious individuals, but that just becomes part of the appeal. Gang membership carries its own bag of fears, but the fear is tinged with the exhilaration of possible vindication – by whatever means necessary. And once a “cause” is engaged, its “purity” transcends any bounds of civil behavior.
So what can be done to defuse these potentially combustible situations? We first have to understand the fragility of whatever social arrangements we are working with. And it’s not enough to comprehend that people have differing points of view; these views can be packed with emotional content, so any communications must reflect that.
Can we design a system for this kind of discourse? We surely could if only we would allocate even a fairly modest level of effort to doing so. Human beings have struggled and suffered incredibly over millennia while making only minimal progress on basic questions of how we can better get along with one another. Meanwhile, there are now more of us, with a fantastic variety of opinions, constituting a greater threat to ourselves than ever before.
Do you think your own frustrations about this situation also have something to do with the fact that human beings have so much promise but seem to have really squandered their energies, right where the needs are so crucial? Not only do we not have the systems to help us get along better, but any education for young people about the nature of these challenges is cursory at best. In a broader sense, we can safely say that dissatisfaction is endemic within the human race. But if we don’t understand this, at least this, we are less likely to recognize what is behind some of the disruptive behaviors we witness in daily life.
As a starting point for getting along better, we can see that frustrations lead to emotionally driven responses. From here, we can at least attempt to expand our empathy to the point of “love your neighbor,” regardless of how corny that might sound. If it is difficult to accept that “we are one,” we can at least acknowledge that we are all in this together, and that is the only way forward. In the political realm, a few spokespersons for this kind of view include https://thepreamble.com/ presented by Sharon McMahon, and an engaging colleague of hers, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, at https://governor.utah.gov/about-govcox/. (You can also experience them both together at https://thepreamble.com/p/disagreeing-better-with-utah-governor-f1e.)
We are way too interdependent now to let our differences devolve into conflict. That may have been the inevitable alternative 30-40,000 years ago, but we can do better now.
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