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Restoring Truth And Creating A Safe Space
Every day, when we tune into our sources of news, we are told the sky is falling. Pick your poison: polarization, crime, global warming, inflation, China, Ukraine, or Covid. But the truth is, we have survived a Civil War, two World Wars and a multi-decade Cold War. I believe we will endure this challenging period, but to do so will take a profound change of course. For instance, we must radically shift the way we communicate with one another. Social media and 24-hour news incentivize outrage because in today’s environment outrage is the most powerful driver of engagement – in a way, businesses are economically rewarded for presenting misleading information that stokes outrage and drives likes, comments, and shares. News sources increase audience with sensationalism. We need more good faith in our civil discourse.
So, what is the strategy to bring us together as a country? One approach is passing intelligent and thoughtful regulations in this area (like adjustments to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ) to encourage truth telling and punish falsehood. There have traditionally been such things as standards governing journalism, and it was settled long ago that you can’t falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater because it will cause people to be trampled. We have to defend free speech even in the darkest moments, and yet we should consider thoughtful regulations that for instance would consider holding the social media companies to some standards of libel and slander that for the time being have been extended to news companies but not social media platforms.
On one hand, to survive in a Capitalist system, you might say that one has to eat or be eaten. On the other, if we want “character-based capitalism” we as a society need to incentivize “good citizenship.” The government can play a role in this by passing appropriate laws but we as consumers also can encourage better behavior by shifting our behavior. If we demand and consume balanced news, business will respond in kind.
In addition, in a democratic and capitalistic society, we must demand more of ourselves as individuals as our institutions reflect our populace. If we learn to limit our time on social media and turn away from sensationalism, it not only disincentivizes bad behavior, but also protects our discourse. Just taking a break every day or every week from our electronics can be very restorative. We can learn to take more control of our lives and limit the ability of others to trigger us by making us angry and afraid.
When we demonize our neighbors and shut down meaningful debate it becomes impossible to solve complicated issues such as the unintentional war on our middle class that I have previously referenced in the Puck Newsletter. We must create a safe space to have thoughtful dialogue to develop sensible solutions to the problems we face.
And to be clear, learning to limit our exposure to triggering social media and 24-hour news does not mean embracing cancel culture. We must tolerate discomfort in public discourse and encourage rigorous debate. I can’t remember the last time I saw an old-fashioned debate. We hear a lot of lecturing and fear mongering. We need to all look for opportunities to learn from the other, while playing by rules of civility and respect. Consider the adage, an argument for the sake of heaven, where the two debaters must follow two simple rules. First, they have to go into the argument holding on to the belief that they may be wrong and secondly, the two debaters must remain friends after the debate. We too in less formal ways can encourage ourselves to read and listen to the “other side’s“ perspective. Case in point, Jane Coaston's podcast The Argument debates the pros and cons at the core of some of our most pressing issues while remaining firmly on the side of respectful discourse. By opening ourselves up to thoughtful consideration of how others think and believe we become wiser and more compassionate.
The bad news is that the time for action is getting shorter and shorter and we need to fix this now or our country will turn this cold civil war into a potentially hot civil war. The good news is when we turn down the hyperbole and ad hominem attacks, we can honestly do just about anything.
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