We talk about political tribalism without understanding why humans formed tribes in the first place. Once you understand what tribes are for, it becomes a lot clearer why politics is no place for tribalism.

This is true despite the fact that politicians and campaign consults are no doubt thrilled with how effective our brains’ tribal programming is for turning out voters, getting them to write large checks, and causing them to flame each other on social media and on the family group chat.

It’s important to realize not only how tribal politics differs from the more traditional politics of earlier ages, but also the price we pay when we make this switch. The political class may benefit from how effective it is, but the rest of us are paying the price with ineffective government and a social fabric that is degrading as we speak.

Tribes offered physical safety and pooled resources to small groups of early humans. They shared a perspective, a spiritual life, and a physical reality. They fought other tribes for access to resources. They did not recruit new members because resources are shared within the tribe; new members mean less stuff for everyone else. That’s why exclude outsiders and fringe members were excluded from the group’s resources and protection.

That should sound familiar. (And not just because your brain is still running the tribal programming that was installed 20 to 50,000 years ago.)

I just described the behavior of political parties in the past 15 to 20 years. And it’s a significant departure from the earlier era of competitive politics.

Tribal politics says “we will tell voters what to believe. We don’t need to understand and account for your perspectives. We set the perspective and if you don’t agree, you don’t belong.”

Competitive politics makes politicians vie to better understand and address voters’ perspectives. That responsiveness and accountability is the only path to success.

Tribal politics says elect warriors who will defeat the other side. You don’t have to solve problems, just stop them from advancing their goals.

Competitive politics says elect statesmen who can understand complex problems and build consensus to address the challenges we face.

Tribal politics says just be big enough to win and hold political power—51% is plenty. Then you can do whatever you want. After all, the other tribe doesn’t count. And we don’t want to share our resources with people who don’t deserve them.

Competitive politics says win over as many people as you can. Solve the problems of as many people as you can in order to win and keep power. After all, you need the consent of the governed, not just your party.

The logic of the tribe is that true believers get the resources. But this is perhaps the biggest lie of political tribalism. There are no goodies for party members. There certainly are goodies—political appointments, donations, pork projects, favorable regulation, quashed legislation—but those are handed out on the basis of massive PAC and lobbying dollars. Not because you’re a regular Democrat or Republican, no matter how loyal you are or how vitriolic your social media posts are.

We tend to think of tribalism as a problem of extreme political beliefs or being outraged or combative toward the other side. But tribalism goes much deeper than that. It carries its own logic and it often operates outside of our conscious awareness, leading us to think that we’re doing politics when we’re really doing out-group derogation.

Getting politics back to a healthier place requires accurately diagnosing what our problems are and how they impact us. We can’t just be nice to each other again to dismantle tribalism. We have to understand how political processes—like who gets to vote in primaries, what kind of language candidates use to talk about opponents, and how information is trusted or rejected—get hijacked by tribalism.

The only path I see is competition. That’s why I wrote,

When parties compete on good policy and strong candidates, the benefits spill over well beyond the tribe. Parties should have to earn support from as many people as possible. After all, our government draws its power from the consent of the governed, not just the consent of whichever party holds office.

Relationships can involve strong or weak ties or can be thick or thin. They can be with groups, individuals, and even ourselves. They can be communal, hierarchical, market-based, or equality-matching. Relationships occur in many different configurations and we are experts in the rules that govern them.

If you don’t believe me, imagine this scenario: your grandmother has you over for a home-cooked dinner. As you leave, you give her $40 for her time and costs. Of course not. (You probably cringed just reading that.) Or what about this: you finish your restaurant meal and leave; you’ll pay them next time. Also no.

What is required in one context is a problem in another. Despite the variety of these relational models, we are incredibly adept at navigating them.

The Law of Reciprocity

Human relationships run on reciprocity and navigating them requires understanding how reciprocity works a given relationship type. Communal relationships are unfussy about giving and receiving: We give to the person who needs based on what we have and don’t worry about the balance sheet. Marketplace relationships are very specific: We pay an agreed-upon price at an agreed-upon date for an agreed-upon product. Hierarchical relationships say that one person owes obedience or deference and in return they get protection or safety. Equality matching relationships say that the exchange must be exactly even, like education or childcare co-ops whose members have equal work requirements.

Increasingly I notice both people and organizations imagining they can suspend the law of reciprocity without suffering any repercussions. But where there is no exchange, someone is using force or power to get without having to give. Something is being taken, often the dignity of the other person, their property or resources, or their broader wellbeing.

Violating the Law of Reciprocity

Some companies think there is a workplace exception whereby if they are paying an employee, the balance of that relationship is no longer a concern. This is why certain companies expect employees to treat them like family—give whatever you have, don’t worry about repayment, hope it all balances out in the end—but they do not treat employees like family in return. Or why some retail businesses have a policy to examine the bags and purses of employees even when they are in high-responsibility roles or have a long tenure with the company—they expect the employee to earn their trust, but don’t trust the employee in return.

Many people have started to think that there is a political exception whereby the things we do and say* in the name of politics don’t impact our relationships with our fellow citizens. That is why candidates, media figures, and regular people believe they can use contemptuous, insulting, or malicious language against people with differing political beliefs without any lasting impact. But our civic lives involve relationships, and just like any other relationship, harm must be repaired for the relationship to continue.

Relationships have laws that are every bit as inescapable as the laws of physics. People may not be explicitly aware that a relationship is out of balance, but they feel it nonetheless. This is why we have increasing political division in which people cannot bring themselves to return to dialog with the other side. Because after repeated harms, they no longer trust the other side to treat them with dignity.

The problem is that we have no conception of politics operating in a relational manner, which means we have no conception of how those relationships are harmed and how they can be repaired.

Why Repair is Essential

Violating reciprocity undermines the dignity of the people we are in relationship with. People cannot maintain their self-respect when a relationship costs their dignity. In communal relationships, violation leads them to estrangement or divorce. In marketplace relationships, people quit jobs or stop doing business with each other. And in our civic lives, people categorically refuse to engage or cooperate across party lines when there is no concern about what we owe our fellow citizens.

My work often centers on observing relational harms and helping people to develop the ability to name such harms and seek repair. Harm is a normal part of relationships because we are flawed and imperfect beings who become focused on ourselves at the expense of others. We don’t notice how our actions impact the people around us.

Repair is a skill that we can learn. People have to develop the ability to both name harms and the repair that is needed. And we also have to learn to hear what harm we’ve caused and respond without becoming defensive or walking away from the relationship.

Human cooperation is a source of tremendous creativity and growth. Together we have accomplished incredible advances, making us better off as individuals, communities, and as a species. Many, many different types of thick and thin, communal and marketplace, formal and informal relationships come together to create this network of flourishing. And that is why we should learn the logic and laws of relationships.

_{* This is not an argument against freedom of speech. Of course we can disagree sharply about political issues and say so in strong terms. But questioning the intellect and morality of those who disagree with us or run against us damages the relationship we have with them, so we must govern our own speech with an eye toward achieving our political objectives while preserving our relationships with our fellow citizens.}

Read Related How to Human Essays:

• Stop Breaking the Reciprocity Rule

• Learn to Repair Civic Relationships

• The Predictable Cost of Power

• Political Narcissism and the Collapse of Accountability

Every death brings renewed calls for reform, but also a surprisingly strong resistance to reform. She died doing what she loved! is the widespread refrain. Accidents can happen anywhere.

The advent of frangible technology now allows jumps to collapse or break when struck by a horse. Frangible fences don’t prevent falls, but they do make rotational falls, in which horses flip over onto their riders, significantly less likely.

The resistance to this technology has also been surprisingly strong. Don’t change the sport, please! people write in online forums and on social media. People need to accept that this sport is dangerous. A sense of danger keeps people focused.

All of these justifications are nonsense. And as a competitor and spectator of this sport, I love the camaraderie and bravery that goes with it while also being dismayed by the sometimes-blasé response to accidents.

If that sounds like an isolated phenomenon, consider this.

When faced with the need to evacuate due to an emergency, people consistently mill about, collect their belongings, finish tasks, and consider reasons to stay put. Milling is the bane of first responders and disaster response experts, who know that the difference between life and death is often measured in seconds. And yet it occurs across fire alarms, terrorist attacks, hurricanes, earthquakes, plane crashes, and more.

The responses I’m describing are the norm for human behavior, not the exception. The status quo bias means that we like things how they currently are. We are the proverbial frogs in boiling water. There’s nothing wrong with this bath, is our response to someone trying to rescue us from a pot of scalding-hot water.

It’s not just physical threats either. Consider the response to some of our most serious political threats—a skyrocketing federal deficit, worsening political division, and decreasing levels of institutional trust. Instead of seeking reforms or welcoming new approaches, people defend the status quo. It’s just fine thank you, the problems aren’t as bad as we think, something else is the real problem, and it’s actually someone else’s fault.

Why did so many Americans who weren’t slave owners nonetheless defend the practice? Their responses probably sounded very much like the ones above. Status quo bias has characterized the public discourse on crises at various points in American history: whether we should fight against Nazi Germany, fund HIV/AIDs research and treatment, or respond to climate change. All of those crises went on for years before we responded.

In hindsight, we assume that moral people supported these causes and immoral people opposed them. (And everyone is sure they would have been in the moral group.) But the line isn’t between moral and immoral people; it’s between the status quo and openness to change.

It is a mistake to believe that moral people stand ready to take action, because it both misunderstands how people respond to threats and just how much effort it takes to galvanize action.

The experts working on various types of problems and reforms can be unnerved by this tendency to have their gravest concerns brushed off by the general public. Not because they are bad people, but because they are still in the milling phase of disaster response.

What reformers need to know is that this response is not a reflection of the importance of their issue or the solutions they advocate. It takes an extraordinary amount of energy to rally a response to even vivid, immediate problems, much less those that are hard to envision or years away.

The status quo bias is currently telling many people that our political and policy institutions are just fine. I say we are half-cooked frogs. The processes and systems that are meant to keep government responsive and accountable have been captured and subverted. State and local government is being gamed through nearly every channel of influence: district mapping processes, the erosion of norms and rules, campaign finance practices, and more.

There’s nothing wrong with this bath is the public response. Most people are milling about or possibly justifying why things are fine like they are.

I am of course not arguing that every new idea is a good one. Sometimes resistance is based on wisdom. And in evolutionary terms, it was beneficial for humans to have some degree of inertia. Hopping from one idea to the next is not inherently superior to clinging to the status quo.

If you want to respond better to crises and emergencies, learn to recognize the status quo bias in yourself. Disaster experts train people to identify the milling impulse so that they can circumvent it. People who can say to themselves, Oh, this is milling! recognize that their response is a weird quirk of the human brain rather than a rational response to the situation at hand.

The same is true for threats to larger issues of well-being. We can respond effectively to crises like the federal deficit, political division, and institutional distrust. But we will have to start by recognizing and circumventing our desire for things to stay as they are.

“Anything you teach a horse, he will use against you” is a saying among horse trainers. It means that if you teach a horse to move sideways, for example, sometimes they’ll decide to go sideways instead of jumping a fence or going through a gate.

This saying is a humorous acknowledgement you’re never really in control of a horse. Even when you’re training them, you’re also teaching them new ways to do what they want instead of what you want.

That should sound familiar to parents.

Because you’re also never really in control of your kids. And whatever you teach them is definitely going to be used against you.

One of my most important jobs is to provide children with a moral and spiritual foundation. That’s why I talk to them about my personal values. And why we talk as a family about what our values should be, what it means to live out our values, and examine where our actions are out of step with our intentions and ideals.

Sometimes the result is the kid equivalent of a horse going sideways around a jump.

I taught my children that they have bodily autonomy, which they have used as a justification for not brushing their hair.

I emphasized that art is a form of speech that lets people say unpopular and difficult things. “But it’s art” is now a defense of all kinds of NSFW content (very little of which is actually art).

I have pointed out to my kids that sometimes they think they’re upset about one thing, they’re actually upset about something else. Recently when I yelled at my 14-year-old about his disastrously messy bedroom he said, “Do you think this is about my room or something going on with you?”

Having my own ideals used against me produces a mix of indignation and admiration. On one hand, it stings to have your hypocrisy pointed out to you by someone a fraction of your age, whom you personally brought into the world.

But I also have to appreciate the fact that they are taking these ideas very seriously. Seriously enough to think about them deeply, apply them to their lives, and examine their limits. (And my limits, apparently.)

Recently I thought about this same phenomenon in a very different context: a panel discussion on the significance of the Declaration of Independence after 250 years hosted by Mike Lee as part of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston.

As a consumer psychologist, I don’t often get asked to weigh in on America’s founding documents. But as someone who studies political dysfunction and civic culture, I spend a lot of time considering our agreements with our fellow citizens.

Listening to the experts talk about the Declaration, and whether its authors ever intended their words to be used in defense of racial and ethnic minorities, women, and gay, nonbinary, and trans people, I realized that we are not that different from my kids. Or horses.

The Founding Fathers espoused equality, freedom, and human dignity and there is a strong argument to be made that we used those ideas against them. Because it’s not clear that Jefferson and other authors of the Declaration would have agreed that their words applied to indigenous people, women, and enslaved people. For many of the Declaration’s authors and signers, their words and actions undercut their commitment to our founding principles.

But that hypocrisy is not the main point, in my view.

The real point is that our intentions quickly become irrelevant when we choose to live by our principles. Our aspirations and their feasibility inevitably fall far short of the true challenge and complexity involved in holding fast to our ideals.

The words and ideals of the declaration have been taken deeply seriously by people across the globe, who have thought about them, applied them, and examined their conflicts and limitations.

Women, enslaved people, indigenous people, and same-sex couples have all used the Declaration of Independence to point out that our nation has fallen short of the standard we set out for ourselves at our founding. And to insist, often repeatedly and over long periods of time, that we meet our own standards.

Being hypocritical is the human condition. Pointing this out—whether children to their parents, or citizens to their government—is not necessarily insulting or disrespectful. It is a mark of our commitment both to our values and our relationships to point out to others that we have noticed a gap between ideals and the actual. And to ask that that gap be closed.

Committing ourselves to anything outside ourselves—a cause, a religion, a partner, a child—is a path to growth, as Wendell Berry has written, because it stretches our understanding of who we are and how we affect others. Anyone who marries or becomes a parent is signing themselves up for a transformation that they do not begin to imagine.

In the case of the Founding Fathers, committing this country to human dignity and equality was also a commitment to growth—which has been slow and at times painful. The fact that that growth is still underway 250 years later is a testament to how difficult the task of human equality, dignity, and freedom really is. And it’s also an indication of our devotion to each other and our ideals.

No one who promises till death do us part or parents a child knows what they are getting themselves into. Neither did the Founding Fathers. But it doesn’t matter whether they intended to set up a moral framework to last 250 or more years and inspire people the world over.

Just like it doesn’t matter that when I gave birth to my children, I’d never imagined myself having to consider my principles, defend them, and sometimes rethink them entirely. But that is the task that is now in front of me if I want to keep both my ideals and my relationship with my children.

Of course philosophers and historians will continue to ask what our Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. But as with so many vows and aspirations and intentions that we choose for ourselves or or otherwise enter into, our intentions at the start quickly become irrelevant.

What really matters is our willingness to continue to examine ourselves and our values, both as individuals and a nation, as we seek to close the gap between our ideals and our actual.

Like an iceberg, only the smallest part of tribalism is visible to us. The bulk of it lurks under water. That’s important because it changes how we understand the work of depolarization and bridging. Getting people to disagree civilly or stop making nasty social media posts is certainly a good thing. But it’s not enough.

We’re going to have to get together. Face to face. And you can’t do that online. You have to do it where you live.

Avoidance is a strategy

We all avoid people we dislike. You’ve probably experienced something like this: You can’t stand your colleague or cousin or in-law. For excellent reasons. So you avoid them.

But a strange thing happens when you spend time together. You find they are not as bad as you thought. When forced to grapple with their complexity as a whole human being, you find that they have their good points and their bad points. Like all of us.

And that in-person interaction smooths things over, at least for a little while. (Caveat that of course some people are genuinely harmful and you should go away from those people instead of toward them.)

Politics Lets You Avoid People Entirely

Now imagine the same thing happening at the level of national politics. You can’t stand Democrats or Republicans or leftists or MAGAs. For excellent reasons. So you avoid them.

Except it’s much harder to spend time together because there’s no such thing as a person who is purely a Democrat or solely a MAGA. There are only people who hold certain values and beliefs and identities.

As long as you avoid the people with those identities, you’re free to attribute whatever intentions and characteristics to them that are convenient. And without being bound by the full complexity of these people, you can think whatever you like.

But what we don’t realize is that, given a choice, we will tend to think things about “those people” that protect our dislike.

Dislike Comes First. Reasons Come Later.

This is another thing we’re misunderstanding about tribalism. We think that we dislike the other side for reasons. Because they are closed-minded or bigoted or unprincipled. But really we dislike the other side because they are the other side. Then we find reasons to justify our dislike.

Any number of papers (including one of my own) finds that most Americans hold remarkably similar views on policy issues. Yet we view the other political side’s views as diametrically opposed to our own. And political rhetoric insists that we cannot possibly be reconciled these views.

Tribalism starts with designating an other. Everything else follows from that. We avoid them. We attribute views and positions to them that are convenient. We exclude them from rights and benefits. We deny that they experience harm.

And all of those actions are in service of one goal: taking. Taking resources. Taking lives. Taking humanity.

Harm Requires Distance

We evolved a remarkable capability for interacting with other people. We can effortlessly understand their intentions and objectives and coordinate our behavior with theirs. Someone intends to harm us? We cross the street. Someone is one of us? We look for ways to cooperate. This ability is so effortless and automatic, that it’s hard to even detect the brain activity that underlies it.

How can you harm others and take from them if you are exquisitely aware of their suffering or fear or terror or despair? You have to turn off that awareness.

That’s what tribalism does. It turns off awareness that the other side is not a side. it’s just people. Like us.

Reality Binds Us to Complexity

It’s easy to dehumanize people en masse. It’s much harder when we interact face to face. And that’s why reality is such an important constraint. Being confronted with physical reality, whether people or places, means we can’t just pretend another person isn’t harmed by our actions or doesn’t have feelings about what we are doing to them.

This is the reason I oppose removing confederate statues. Because dismantling them distorts reality in a way that makes us more comfortable. It lets us pretend that racism is in the past. Instead, we need to be confronted with the reality that some of the best and most honored people of their day also held beliefs that were wrong and harmful. And that’s it’s possible to both contribute to the greater good and do terrible things to other people. Even now.

Online life has allowed us to curate a world where we are obviously right and anyone who disagrees is obviously immoral.

Fixing tribalism and polarization requires that we bind ourselves to reality. The people. The places. And their full, rich —and sometimes uncomfortable—complexity.

Since then, I’ve hosted plenty of potlucks and talked to a lot of people about their desire for community, their concerns about our country, and what we can do about problems like social isolation and polarization.

So it seems like a good time to share what I’ve learned, why I’ll continue to host them, and why they are more powerful and important than anyone realizes.

But I want to start by looking backward.

When I reached my early 40s, the nagging voice telling me I should be feeding more people got too loud to ignore. Perhaps it was voice of my matrilineal ancestors. From my great grandmother serving food from her own farm at Sunday dinner, to my grandmother and grandfather hosting pig-pickings (Eastern NC barbecue or nothing. I said what I said.), to my mother’s effortless and gracious dinner parties, nature and nurture prepared me to feed a crowd. In fact, they seemed to insist on it.

That’s why, when I moved to downtown Pendleton, I committed to a bi-monthly potluck for my neighbors, my fellow parishioners, and anyone else who wants to join us.

What I’ve learned

After seven potlucks, I am beginning to understand the widespread truth revealed in a recent study by the World Happiness Index: there is a strong relationship between shared meals and life satisfaction in all 142 countries they studied.

We are supposed to be eating together. Whether the occasion is casual or fancy, planned or spontaneous, joyful or tearful, breaking bread together has meant unity, vulnerability, and trust, across history and geography.

Vulnerability wasn’t something I anticipated when I started hosting potlucks. But I’ve come to see that there is a difference between a potluck and a dinner party. And that difference is control. When you host a dinner party, there are clear roles for host and guest. The host decides what food is served, how it is prepared, and who attends.

A potluck is different, because it is a communal effort. Instead of one person hosting and guests attending, a potluck involves everyone’s contributions. It’s less formal. It’s less performed. It’s just everyone together.

That lack of control can feel vulnerable. So it actually feels quite humbling when people accept the invitation to come together, with others they may not know, and do something a bit out of everyone’s control and comfort zone.

Why I’ll continue to host potlucks

That lack of control brings with it something else, too. Less control means more surprise. And psychologists will tell you that surprise plus joy equals delight.

Who will come? What will they bring? No one knows. We are finding out together!

I happen to run my potlucks with no advance commitments. Because I don’t ask for RSVPs or dish signups, I don’t know how many people to expect or what they’ll bring. (My hope is that it reduces barriers for people to attend; of course, if you’re hosting a potluck, you should arrange it in whatever way you find comfortable.)

The delight that comes from hosting potlucks, like the sense of vulnerability, is not something that I antcipated at the outset. But invariably at the end of the evening, I am amazed at the shared experience of eating with people I don’t know well.

I’m getting to know them better, though. And that’s why I will keep hosting these as long as anyone wants to attend.

Why potlucks are powerful

At a time when it seems like many of the things we value most are being lost, it might seem frivolous to organize a potluck. After all, there are real problems. Shouldn’t we be holding protests, or debates, or something more serious?

Gathering together is one of the most powerful things we can do. In the midst of a loneliness crisis and rampant political polarization, many people have accepted the premise that other people are dangerous to us, particularly if they are different in background or beliefs.

And it’s not so simple to just get together. People need something to do, otherwise they feel even more awkward and uncomfortable. So why not eat?

Our problems didn’t start because we forgot how to socialize and disagree respectfully. They started because political parties and media companies realized that activating tribalism and in-group biases was a path to power and money. They realized they could focus our attention on the threat posed by other people, and that the more terrible the threat, the more we would all look to politicians and political parties to save us.

But it’s hard to other people when you’re breaking bread with them. That’s why feeding people is so rich with meaning across history and time. Feeding the hungry or the stranger is a moral imperative all over the world. Shared vulnerability—by setting aside weapons, letting your guard down, and enjoying needed sustenance—has allowed people to resolve conflicts and build relationships again and again, in stories we tell and in stories that have been lost to history.

So I’ll keep hosting potlucks, not just because they are a recipe for delight. But because this is how we will solve our problems: one meal at a time.

If you aren’t familiar, it proposes that the political extremes are not as far apart as they seem. Instead of sitting at opposite ends of a line, they curve toward each other.

At first glance, that seems wrong. Extreme Republicans and extreme Democrats disagree on issues like abortion and immigration. How could they be more alike than different?

What they share isn’t policy; it’s an understanding of the very purpose of government.

And it is both tribal and illiberal.

Liberalism vs. Illiberalism

“Liberalism” is an unfortunate word in American politics. In everyday language, liberal often means left-leaning (recall Katie Miller’s recent confusion). But in political philosophy, liberalism refers to something else: a commitment to individual liberty, equality before the law, freedoms such as speech, religion and association, and limitations on the use of government power.

Illiberalism, in contrast, is the belief that people should be made to do what my side thinks is right with government force or the threat of it. The principles above are abridged whenever they conflict with the overarching goal of my side doing whatever it wants.

We tend to think of illiberalism as something that happens elsewhere—in authoritarian regimes or failed states. We maintain the comforting but false illusion that as long as we don’t adopt an illiberal system of government, we aren’t at risk.

But political norms and larger culture can create illiberalism here at home.

And that’s exactly what political tribalism is doing.

How Tribalism Weaponizes Government

Tribalism reframes political disagreement as an existential threat.

The other side is not just wrong, but dangerous. They cannot be allowed to govern. There is no need to collaborate, compromise, or account for their perspective.

With that mindset, the purpose of government is no longer to resolve disagreements or solve coordination problems. It exists as a tool for consolidating power and wielding it against your enemies.

That shift has serious consequences. It means we give up not only non-violent means of resolving conflict (through legislation, courts, and agencies), but also the expectation that government accomplishes anything constructive.

Its sole purpose is defense against the other side.

Making Government Useless

The consequences are evident in how our legislative system is functioning. Or rather, not.

Since the start of the Obama administration, the federal government has fully shut down four times—including the longest shutdown in U.S. history—to say nothing of partial shutdowns and near misses.

Congress regularly struggles to pass basic funding measures or even legislation with a broad support (as Paul Kane details in a sobering Washington Post farewell column). Public trust in and approval of Congress remains near historic lows.

Major problems—healthcare costs, immigration reform, fiscal sustainability—remain unaddressed.

The deadlock isn’t because of entrenched political disagreement, even though we’re tempted to think that. It’s because government has been repurposed for a new objective: it’s now a weapon.

The Non-Tribal Opt Out

The consequences extend beyond governing bodies to individual voters.

When the other political side is the enemy, it becomes reasonable to exclude that enemy from rights to free speech, free association, free practice of religion, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

This effect is well known in social psychology—the out-group does not get the same resources or the same consideration as the in-group because they are not viewed as fully human.

But most people do not want to participate in the dehumanization of fellow human beings, especially not on the basis of political party. Most people reject the extreme language and division that the parties promote. And increasingly, people are opting out of political engagement framed as a battle against enemies.

Faced with a choice between two sides that exist to do nothing but defeat the other side, many people simply disengage.

That leaves our system to the extremes. And even though the extremes are the minority, it doesn’t feel that way when we read the news, scroll social media, or see a campaign ad.

When There Are No Fellow Citizens

Liberalism holds that government should represent competing principles and seek fair compromise. Illiberalism holds that government should deliver total victory—and that compromise is failure.

The danger of the horseshoe theory is not simply that the extremes resemble one another.

It is that they converge on this belief: that government’s highest function is to be weaponized and made useless for the purpose it was designed for.

If government is a weapon, then politics is war.

And if politics is war, there are no fellow citizens—only enemies.

You are prepared in at least one regard: you know how to live as a part of a small, homogeneous in-group.

Although we’ve lost many of the skills our ancestors likely considered effortless, being a good tribe member has stuck with us. Without ever being taught how to do it, we know how to protect the strength of the tribe itself. How to belong, how to tell who doesn’t, how to share resources.

And as we become more politically tribal, people are increasingly becoming the unwitting recruits of the Democrats and Republicans. They’re working on behalf of their party in ways they likely don’t even recognize.

Given how unhappy most people are with their political party, I suspect that many of them wouldn’t actually want to work on their party’s behalf, much less engage in some of the destructive and counterproductive behaviors that tribalism incites.

Automatic tribalism

We spend a lot of time telling people to be less polarized. To listen to people who disagree with them. To disagree civilly and avoid violent language and behavior.

All of those are appeals to our conscious selves.

The dynamics I’m describing are not conscious.

They are evolved patterns of thinking and behaving that happen outside our awareness.

Trust

Trust is higher among in-group members. And our trust of our own side feels rational—we can always generate reasons why we are confident about their actions. But those reasons tend to be back-justifications that come after the choice we’ve already made to join a tribe.

As a woman without a party, I hear this from both sides. It’s the right-of-center voter explaining why even though the Trump administration is doing things they don’t understand, they know it’s for the best. It’s the left-of-center voter saying that government can’t be trusted (now that it’s in the hands of the other political party).

Did you know that every time a new president is sworn in, consumer confidence spikes among members of his party and drops among members of the other party? It has nothing to do with economic prospects of the incoming administration. It’s simply a matter of trust.

Policing

Group members also police the behavior of other members to make sure they align with group norms. Do you have the right beliefs? Do you say the right things? Make sure you don’t ask the wrong questions. If you do, you may be publicly scolded so that you get back in line. And if you don’t get back in line, you may get kicked out of the group.

People who dislike being publicly criticized—a perfectly sensible position—are likely to keep their unaligned behaviors and values to themselves rather than be scolded by members of the tribe. That makes it look like the tribe is more cohesive than it actually is. Because questioners and skeptics stay quiet.

And why does the tribe’s members care so much about who belongs?

Because of another non-conscious bias: we preferentially give resources to members of our group.

Resources

This is one of the earliest and most robust findings in social psychology.

Henri Tafjel put participants into groups based on a coin toss, or whether they liked Klee or Kandinsky paintings better. Group membership was meaningless. Participants didn’t know each other or expect to remain in contact after the experiment.

But when they were asked to distribute money, they gave more to people in their group.

This is called the minimal group paradigm.

We unconsciously follow this pattern all the time. We give more to our tribe—whether that’s money, opportunities, attention, or simply the benefit of the doubt.

And because it seems that there is real value in being a group member, we become highly attentive to the question of who does and does not belong.

The people throwing around labels like RINO, secret Republican, or squish are doing the same thing their tribal ancestors did. They are identifying the people who aren’t real group members so that they don’t get the goodies.

The Lie Beneath It All

There are lots of reasons not to be an unwitting recruit to the tribe’s demands. But the main one is that the entire premise of goodies for the political in-group is a lie.

Don’t get me wrong. There are certainly spoils of political influence, they’re just limited to a very small group of people. Lucrative contracts, favorable legislation, and political jobs are being traded in Washington, but they are not being distributed to everyday Americans, no matter how loyal they are to the Democrats or the Republicans.

So whatever work you’re doing on behalf of your political tribe has real costs—fraying your relationships and damaging our civic fabric—but no material benefits.

That’s why I want more people to be aware of the non-conscious effects of tribalism. The political parties are waging war against each other. Against human dignity and decency. Against functioning government.

Let them do it with their own resources. They don’t need our help.

We need more conscientious objectors in this conflict.

What If You Opted Out?

What if we all realized that there are no resources for us, no matter how good of a political soldier we are on social media?

What if we realized that the uncompensated work we are doing for political parties allows them to continue amassing power and wealth while failing to solve the problems they are supposed to address?

What if we recognized that the trust we feel for our own side is, at least in part, an illusion created by group membership rather than objective evaluation?

How would we participate in political life then?

Now think about talking to a programmer at work. How do you frame your request so that they deliver what you need?

When talking to other people, we solve this problem effortlessly and intuitively because that’s what our brains evolved to do.

But what if the therapist and programmer are AI agents?

The Mind-Reading Brain

Mentalization is the ability to form an understanding of what another person thinks and feels. Whether we need to cooperate or compete with them, we first need to know what’s going on in their minds. Humans are remarkable mind readers (when we want to be).

Recently I read a New York Times article in which programmers yelled in all caps and told AI coding agents that certain types of errors are embarrassing. They were trying to figure out how to make the agent follow their coding instructions instead of spontaneously going off task (a frequent occurrence).

And and have described the growing use of AI as counselors and therapists due to the high cost and lack of availability of humans in this role.

What Happens When We Talk to Non-Humans?

These examples got me thinking about my all-time favorite paper—an unpublishable darling that I couldn’t bring myself to kill—which asked the question What happens when people talk to non-humans as if they are humans?

I started asking this question because so many people were using social media to talk to businesses and companies. I wondered whether talking to non-humans affected how we perceived the people around us.

In other words, if you mentalize something with no mind, what happens to your ability to mentalize actual human minds?

This question is even important right now, because more people than ever spend more time than ever talking to AI. More than 62% of Americans deliberately use AI several times a week. Far more encounter it unobtrusively through recommendation agents and other digital interfaces.

What My Experiments Found

In my experiments, I asked people to tweet at or message a business: asking a restaurant or clothing company for a discount code or complaining or praising a purchase, for example. Then I measured their ability to understand the mental states of other human beings in one of several ways:

• By identifying emotions expressed through facial expressions (example below)

• By interpreting complex social interactions—like whether somebody was lying versus making a joke in a scenario

• By rating how hard or easy it felt to understand other people

I consistently found that after people talked to a business, they performed worse the social perception tasks.

I ruled out obvious explanations. For example, the effect isn’t a function of saying something business-related. When people talked about the company rather than to it, their social perception didn’t change.

The effect also isn’t limited to companies. Any non-human will do. When we asked people to tweet to a tree, we saw the same decrease in social perception. Why a tree? We followed the lead of Melbourne, Australia, which gave trees email addresses for maintenance purposes.

I never could publish the paper, largely because I couldn’t conclusively identify a mechanism. Perhaps fMRI data would have convinced reviewers, but without it, the project languished (though it is the great white whale of my academic career).

Even years later, I continue to think about this paper as more and more people talk to AI. Even though I never tested AI in my model (because it hadn’t been invented), I suspect that talking to AI, just like talking to companies and trees, causes a decrease in social perception.

And there are likely other effects of interacting with AI.

The Brain’s Habit of Outsourcing

We know that a small fraction of people will experience AI psychosis from interacting with AI chatbots. But we’d be wrong to think that any impact from AI will be that extreme or that uncommon.

Here’s another example that’s far more likely.

The brain readily outsources information storage to save cognitive resources—a phenomenon called transactive memory. When information is readily available someplace convenient—in a phone or a partner, for example—our brains leave it there rather than storing it.

That’s why it’s common to have one relationship partner who tracks certain information—like special occasions, financial details, or the kids’ medical care—and one partner who is basically oblivious.

Online information works the same way: if you can easily look up the dates of the American Revolution, there is little reason to retain that information in memory, which is why many kids today cannot list important historical dates that their parents or grandparents could.

It’s highly likely that people will not only outsource information to AI, but also abilities. Drafting emails, interpreting the meaning of a message, or writing a newsletter will get offloaded to AI and the brain will stop devoting resources to them.

Over time, people may lose not just the motivation to perform the task, but the ability as well. That’s an effect that’s worth understanding.

The Experiment We Are Running on Ourselves

I’m not an AI doomer. Even if we could put this genie back in its bottle, I tend to think that doing so would make us worse off, not better. Over time, we will adjust to AI and it will have a net positive effect on humans, just like all the other technological advances we’ve achieved, from printing presses to electricity to digitization.

But we are running a massive experiment on ourselves as we adopt AI, the contours of which we can’t fully appreciate. We need more people asking more questions from more vantage points:

• What is AI’s impact on children’s developing minds?

• What will happen to human relationships and in-person interactions as we spend more time interacting with AI?

• How does our tendency to anthropomorphize AI affect our ability to harness it effectively? (A question I asked in my LinkedIn newsletter)

• How do we make responsible choices about the decisions or tasks that can be entrusted to AI and which ones belong with human beings? (a question that is exploring in her fascinating newsletter AI’s Without Minds)

Most Americans won’t notice, because 80% of eligible voters don’t vote in primaries.

In many districts, we already know which party has the advantage. Which means whoever wins that party’s primary will almost certainly win in November.

A small, highly motivated slice of the electorate decides who will govern everyone else.

So let’s talk about those voters — and the ones who aren’t there.

The Incentive Structure We Built

The language coming from both parties is calibrated to mobilize the base — the most loyal voters who see politics as a contest between good and evil. But that language is heard by everyone. And for more moderate voters, it often produces withdrawal rather than engagement.

• Stop the radical left/right!

• Don’t help the other side!

• They’re coming for [your way of life]

Imagine a message that leads your most devoted customers to buy from you and also makes your competitors’ customers decide not to buy. Over time, your competitors are starved of business. You become the only game in town.

Primaries harness this precise dynamic. The most extreme candidates tend to win because the most extreme voters turn out at the polls. The people who stay home are often the ones who hear extreme political language and cringe.

Why Normal Voters Withdraw

Many of the tens of millions of eligible voters stayed home not because they didn’t care, but because they so deeply believe that our politics can and should be better. There’s nothing for them in a primary.

But the result is a doom loop (as writes) where extreme primary nominees discourage normal voters, and the lack of normal voters produces more extreme nominees.

The Leverage Point

The irony is that politically homeless voters have more leverage in primaries than almost anywhere else in the system. Turnout is low. Margins are small. In many districts, shifting even a modest number of voters changes who is nominated and therefore who will govern.

If voters who care about competence, cooperation, and accountability began to participate consistently in primaries, incentives would shift. Candidates would have to speak to a broader audience. They would have to demonstrate not only loyalty to a party, but the capacity to govern a diverse constituency.

Don’t Leave the Room

I understand the impulse to disengage. Politics often feels dehumanizing and, at times, absurd. But when those voters stay home, elections are still decided — just by the people most comfortable with conflict.

If you do not feel at home in either party, that does not make you irrelevant. It makes you pivotal.

Participating in a primary may not feel glamorous. You may be choosing among imperfect options. You may be voting for the least concerning candidate rather than the ideal one. Yet in districts where the primary winner is the likely officeholder, that vote carries disproportionate weight.

We need you.

What Can You Do?

• Make sure you’re registered to vote in a way that allows you to participate in the primary you care most about. Maybe you want to influence the primary of the party that you are most unhappy with. Maybe you want to choose which primary you vote in each election. Laws are different in every state, which is why my organization, the Independent Center, has a guide to understanding primary registration in your state.

• Vote in the primary in your state! Encourage other politically homeless voters to turn out, too.

• Support the work of groups like the Builders Movement and More than November, which educate people about primary voting.

No one realizes there is a round in the chamber and no magazine safety.

His friend dies.

I worked on this case twenty years ago as a graduate student in Chicago. Among more tragic cases than you can imagine, I remember it because the prosecutor argued that the boy formed intent as he pulled the trigger. Ergo not manslaughter but murder.

This was the first time I saw government power being applied capriciously and arbitrarily. The prosecutor benefited from getting convictions and headlines, so they twisted the meaning of the word intent. But calling a mistake a deliberate act would not bring back the dead boy or teach the living one a lesson.

Although I’ve have had very few direct run-ins with our government, I’ve worked in juvenile justice and criminal defense and dealt with the immigration system as the (former) spouse of a non-citizen. And from that vantage point, I can tell you how it feels.

Powerless. Helpless. Dehumanizing.

Frankly, I want more people to know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of government power.

• Have you ever been inside a jail or prison?

• Have you ever been interviewed by a police investigator or detained by an officer?

• Have you ever tried to get the government to meet its obligations to you—paying out benefits, providing medical care, or correctly applying a statute or regulation?

Most people have not, and that makes them blasé about governmental power. Tribalism has increasingly led us to think that that power is only a problem when it’s controlled by the other side politically. And that governmental force isn’t really a problem when our side is in control. But force, or the threat of it, is how government carries out its objectives.

One of Us or One of Them

The conversations about Alex Pretti and Renee Good’s deaths have been unproductive in part because they are centered on which side they’re on as a proxy for whether they deserved to die.

The first question is whether they are one of us or one of them. The next question is what evidence can be marshaled to support their group membership—who was armed, who was disrespectful, who was aggressive, who was unfit for duty.

We end up with two potential realities:

If you’re a Democrat (Republican), the protestors are one of us (them). That means their rights were (should be) abridged and their behaviors were at minimum legal (illegal) but more likely noble (deliberately destructive). The officers acted illegally (properly) in the course of illegitimate (vitally necessary) deployment in Minneapolis.

Arguments about these events go around and around because we can’t move beyond the tribal answer. The only solution seems to be that people in the past should have acted differently, which offers little in the way of preventing further deaths.

What Enforcement Produces

The fact that ICE’s deployment in Minneapolis led to civilian deaths isn’t all that surprising. There are a number of factors that make lethal interactions with law enforcement more likely: wearing masks for anonymity, employing a militarized approach, and weak oversight and accountability all increase the odds of negative outcomes.

But the truth is that negative outcomes from governmental action aren’t limited to immigration enforcement. Wherever government is carrying out its objectives through force, physical harm is a statistical reality, even if unlikely.

For every X citizen–officer encounters, Y injuries or fatalities will result.

This formula is most obviously true in the case of enforcing the criminal code: armed officers intervene if you harm others and use force, possibly lethal, to stop you. But it’s also true for activities that seem harmless, like using recreational drugs or not paying your taxes.

I am not saying that government is wrong to enforce laws or that we would be better off with no laws.

I’m also not saying that we should reduce the tragedy of a human being’s death to a statistic devoid of moral and emotional impact.

We need to understand the individual circumstances of these events while not losing sight of the larger probabilities. Because if we insist that the solution to these shootings was for the individuals involved to have acted differently, then we can’t reduce the likelihood of future harms. If our strategy is to hope for the right behavior from the right people at the right time, there is no ability to design different systems of law and law enforcement.

But if we assume that all government action carries with it a probability of human harm, we don’t stop at the question of who was right and who was wrong. We also ask questions like:

• What objectives are so important that human harm is a tradeoff we accept?

• How do we turn those objectives into law?

• How do we enforce those laws?

• What does it feel like to be on the receiving end of that enforcement?

• Do the laws and enforcement meet our stated objectives or can they be improved?

Who Keeps Power in Bounds

Government intervention in our lives is a reality. Again, I am not arguing against intervention. But some intervention is disproportionate to the policy objective it is meant to achieve. And that disproportion isn’t a function which political side controls the government; it is defined by the law and by our shared values.

We need people do that. We need them to look around and say: This is wrong. This is not what we voted for. This is not who we are.

Government will not limit its own power and government actors will not restrain themselves. Our only option is to use the political tools available to us—courts, legislation, outreach to elected officials—to insist that government’s force is used constitutionally and morally.

The Questions We Should Be Asking

Government power runs amok for all kinds of reasons, some benign and some malevolent. If we learn anything from watching immigration enforcement right now, it should be that even necessary policies can be carried out in ways that few people endorse—and that how the letter of the law gets turned into practice can go terribly awry.

Focusing on who is good or bad or how people should have behaved is equivalent to saying that harmful results are unexpected and unpreventable. If the problem is bad people, and not the system itself, there’s no need to re-examine policy mechanisms.

I want us to start re-examining. Together.

How can people who have previously argued that Americans have a Second Amendment right to bear arms suddenly claim that an armed protester deserves to be shot? How can people who previously argued to limit the Second Amendment suddenly be in favor of the right to keep and bear arms?

It seems like blatant hypocrisy: the same action makes someone a domestic terrorist when they’re on the other side and makes them a patriot when they’re on your side.

It’s tempting to call this hypocrisy and stop there. But there’s more to the story. The tendency to see our side as noble and the other side as a threat is nearly universal among humans. The problem is that we are increasingly defining “our side” as our political party instead of our fellow countrymen.

In other words: Republicans’ sudden concerns about the threat posed by an armed protester are no more hypocritical than Democrats’ sudden interest in the First and Second Amendments.

This isn’t a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It’s a human problem.

We all hold different standards for people in our in-group than we do for people in out-groups. In-group members are trusted, accorded legal status and social privileges, and their actions are viewed favorably, even when they make mistakes. Out-group members can’t be trusted, are denied legal status and social privileges, and their actions are viewed as negative, often deliberately so.

In recent years, people have become increasingly explicit that the full range of constitutional rights apply to members of their political party, but not necessarily to those outside it. That’s not surprising, because out-group members don’t feel like our equals. Research shows that out-group members are seen as less than fully human, that it is acceptable to deny them rights and protections, and that they suffer less when harmed—all markers of dehumanization and infrahumanization.

The crucial thing to notice about the logic of in-groups and out-groups is that we are all susceptible to it. The tendency to limit rights, privileges, and even humanity to out-group members is a universal one. It’s also something we’ve known we must actively resist since the founding of this country.

A Radical Innovation in 1776

We’ve been relating to others on the basis of their group membership for eons. In-group favoritism and out-group denigration come from a time when human survival depended on tight-knit groups competing over scarce resources. In-group loyalty helped us survive; out-group hostility made it easier to harm, exclude, or kill others.

They’re bent on destroying us. They must be stopped. They’re less than us.

The strength and pervasiveness of this belief makes it all the more extraordinary that 250 years ago, human beings had the vision of a radically different way of relating to one another. The audacity to set out a radical premise for human rights.

This premise is that rights do not flow from group membership, like being a certain religion or holding certain political beliefs. The right to dignity, fairness, and justice is not something governments grant, it is endowed to all humans by their very existence. Those rights applied to in-group members and out-group members alike.

This belief in universal dignity, humanity, and rights is what has allowed the United States to flourish. Not just in a philosophical sense, although we are a beacon of freedom to the world. And not just in a financial sense, even though intellectual property and wealth have flowed, been created, and grown here. In the broadest sense possible, when people have the right to do what they think is right and good human potential and well-being grow exponentially, and make life better for everyone.

The Struggle to Live out Our Principles

Make no mistake: the spirit of the Declaration of Independence was—and remains—a profoundly aspirational commitment.

When those words were written, we did not fully understand the promise we were making to one another. We continued to enslave human beings for nearly a century after declaring that all men were endowed with inalienable rights. Even after emancipation, we systematically denied Black Americans equal status and protection.

It took 144 years after the Declaration of Independence to realize that we could not be serious about our founding principles without extending them to women. It was even later when we revisited our decisions to intern Japanese American citizens during World War II or deny marriage to same-sex couples.

And there is no doubt that we will continue, far into the future, to discover ways in which we are failing to live up to the principles we laid out for ourselves 250 years ago.

This isn’t easy work. Treating out-group members as we expect ourselves and our in-group members to be treated is a high standard, and one that doesn’t come naturally to us. But we have come to understand the importance of doing so. We have come to see that holding ourselves to this high standard is noble and worthwhile, even if we fail at times.

And that is precisely why recent dynamics in U.S. politics are so concerning. The growing dehumanization of people outside our political party is a step backward from the values we have set for ourselves.

Rights Don’t Depend on Approval

The right to bear arms, freely assemble, worship as you choose, and express your views is your birthright as a human being. Constitutional rights do not disappear because someone wears a red hat or a blue one, or expresses views the government—or the public—disagrees with.

We have corrected ourselves again and again when we realized our actions failed to align with our values. We did it with slavery. We did it with Jim Crow. We did it with women’s suffrage. Our work is not finished.

Our rights do not depend on the views we hold or the party we affiliate with.

If you take anything from the deaths of Alex Pretti or Renee Good, let it be this: the impulse to dehumanize and marginalize out-group members is not limited to one political party. It is an ancient feature of the human mind—one that repeatedly pulls us away from the ideals embedded in the U.S. Constitution, unless we consciously choose to resist it.

Our Work

Our work is to remember that our most important in-group is our fellow Americans.

It may be hard to stop ourselves from falling into group thinking, but we can remind ourselves to move our level of group identification upward (to nationality) rather than downward (to political party).

And when we catch ourselves viewing the other side as less than human, bent on destroying the country, bigoted, or ignorant, we can remind ourselves that those are the stories our brains evolved to tell us about out-group members—stories that justify maiming, killing, destroying, and taking from others.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Americans chose a radically new way to conceive of human rights. Now we have to continue to choose it.

The idea of the self—whether defined as consciousness, an eternal soul, a divine spark, or simply stable traits and identities that endure over time—is a notion that spans many psychological, cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions.

In many of these traditions, the self is understood as a resource we can draw upon. But we often fail to recognize that it needs to be thoughtfully employed and managed. To see why, consider our tendency to look outward rather than inward—and what that tendency costs us.

We tend to focus on external expertise and approval

If you want to understand anything—what modern art means, how to fix your dryer, why your bread dough isn’t rising, when you should wake up in the morning—there is an endless supply of expertise on the internet. And while the ability to instantly and costlessly access online expertise is extraordinary, it also encourages a habit: directing our attention outward rather than inward, and prioritizing others’ ideas instead of our own.

Social media reinforces this habit. We turn outward to see what others are thinking and doing, and when we stop scrolling to share our own ideas, the number of likes, comments, and reshares is the primary indicator of their quality and importance. Whether an idea is acceptable in the eyes of others matters more than how it feels to us—and the platforms have helpfully quantified that information for easy reference.

Ignoring the self doesn’t work

When attention is constantly directed outward rather than inward, it becomes hard to know what our own experiences are telling us—not just about our values and priorities, but about how the people and world around us affect us and how we would like to affect them in return.

Telling people they should spend more time focused on themselves can sound backward. Self-absorption, self-consciousness, selfishness are all negative framings of self-focused attention. Our cultural narrative holds that external focus is prosocial and internal focus antisocial. But the truth is more complicated.

When attention rarely turns inward, the self doesn’t get the conditions it needs to do its work. That doesn’t make it quieter—it makes it louder. And because it hasn’t been able to do its work, it’s an unhealthy self that is making itself heard, often in ways that aren’t constructive.

When the work of the self goes undone, we miss important information. That information doesn’t disappear; it gets louder. Unmet emotional needs are expressed in more dramatic and destructive language and behavior. Issues that belong to one domain of life spill into others.

Sometimes it’s easier to see this dynamic outside ourselves. Think of children who begin by feeling frustrated that they can’t stay up past their bedtime. When parents don’t address the feeling of frustration (through conversation, not necessarily by changing the bedtime), that frustration escalates to anger and even rage. The sense of lacking control of sleep turns mushrooms: suddenly, lack of agency shows up in school, meals, relationships with siblings, and more.

In an effort to be heard and have needs met, the self shifts from being a useful source of information to a blaring 24/7 news station—where everything is a crisis and everything is about us.

We teach children how to monitor themselves for their needs so they can relate effectively to others. But everyone needs to self monitor—needs, desires, interests, and emotional states—because we have a relationship with our self, not just with other people.

What the self offers us

The self offers important information about

• how people and places affect us

• how we affect those people and places

• what matters to us

• larger truths about who we are

Scholarly research shows that attending to the self

• helps us regulate our behavior in line with our values

• is linked to overall well-being, greater meaning and resilience, and better emotional regulation

• increases moral behavior and

• improves relationship quality

After I left my role as a professor, other academics began reaching out to ask whether they should leave too. That’s understandable—I also spoke to other quitters before I resigned. But it’s of limited value. The answer to whether academia is the right place for your goals, skills, and interests isn’t inside someone else. It’s inside you.

The movies have been trying to tell us this for a long time. “The answer was inside you all along” is a familiar trope—The Wizard of Oz, Frozen, Inside Out, and countless others. The message of art is often: Look what I found when I looked inside myself.

For me, this became visceral during pregnancy.

Many women are familiar with the feeling that there is no space for their own experience during pregnancy. OB-GYN appointments involve nine months of outward focus on expert guidance: what to eat, how to sleep, how much to exercise, what not to drink. Too much weight gain or not enough? Too much coffee? No alcohol, right? Don’t ride a horse. Get some exercise. But not too much. Wear a seatbelt. Take your multivitamin.

The expectation is that you ignore your inner experience and defer to expert guidance—even though many of those experts have only theoretical knowledge of pregnancy.

And that’s just the first nine months of motherhood. Once a child is born, the external focus on expert views of parenting has only just begun.

A healthy sense of self sounds like this: I know my body. I know my child. I know what’s needed. I know how to do this. Apply that mindset liberally—to your home, your relationships, your community, your profession, your art.

We need more of it. Not because our opinion is the only one that matters, but because we’ve become too accustomed to looking outside ourselves. When the self is neglected, it doesn’t go quiet—it overgrows, like an algae bloom. Instead of being a still, quiet voice we can access when needed, it becomes noisy, extreme, and misdirected.

This isn’t an argument against expertise or in favor of radical self-sufficiency. The self isn’t the only source of wisdom. Religious traditions, nature, cultural heritage, and the creativity of others all expand our thinking. But we make that information complete only when we relate it to our own internal states.

When we try to silence the self

Often, we try to silence the self because we suspect what we’ll hear won’t be pleasant. If we really listen, we may have to face the fact that a relationship is more harmful than beneficial, or that a job conflicts with our values. We believe that if we ignore these nagging doubts, they’ll go away.

Looking outward offers an endless supply of information about how our job should be done or how a relationship could be fixed. Consuming and processing all that information allows us to continue avoiding what the self is trying to tell us.

But what the self has to say doesn’t disappear. It gets louder until we listen.

How to start listening to yourself

What feels missing in our content-rich environment is a little jealousy on behalf of the self—a voice that says: What about what I think? What about what I feel?

A healthy insistence on space for the self is something we can deliberately cultivate.

Here are a few ways to start rebuilding your relationship with yourself:

• Journaling helps untangle the jumble of ideas in your head and reveals themes that get buried when we constantly look outward.

• Meditation clears mental noise so we can attend to our own experiences more easily.

• Walking in nature restores self-regulation, likely because we unplug from external information and spend time alone with our thoughts (when we’re not listening to someone else).

The more time you spend attending to the self, the easier it becomes to access it when you need it—without having to deliberately unpack its insights. You’ll also notice when you’ve neglected it. You’ll come to expect that there should be space for your self, and you’ll notice when relationships or environments—at work, with romantic partners, or with friends—don’t make that space.

The way to quiet the self is to listen to it.

Give it a try.

When mobility is low, the cost of exit is high. That has some benefits: rootedness, continuity, being known. Other people had a long memory of you—your childhood, your family, your patterns.

But that belonging could also be limiting for people who didn’t fit in well or who wanted to grow and evolve.

When leaving is easy, staying gets hard

But in the past hundred years or so, it’s become far easier for people to leave.

Millions of Americans change counties or states year after year rather than settling permanently, either because their career requires it (e.g., military service, academia, executive leadership, tech or consulting work) or because they enjoy it (i.e., digital nomads).

But ease of exit can distort our sense of what relationships feel like. If your job doesn’t feel meaningful, you leave. If a neighborhood is disappointing, you find another home. If a relationship requires effort or discomfort, you wonder if there’s a better one out there.

We begin to feel that the people in our lives should make us feel deeply seen, affirmed, and understood. If they don’t, we move on. After all, there’s an endless supply of new people online and we can always find a different place to live or to work.

This is a form of objectification: people exist to validate us and provide frictionless social engagement, rather than existing individuals in their own right with their own unique qualities and perspectives.

Who we pick when we pick our friends

It’s also important to understand that when we choose our social connections, we tend to pick people who are like us: same gender, same race, same socioeconomic group, same education, same career, same religion. Psychology calls this homophily—and it’s commonplace and automatic.

Similarity creates ease and our brains tell us that easy things are valuable and true and trustworthy.

Difference and friction are also good for us, but we have to consciously seek them out if we want to challenge our innate preferences.

Here are five benefits of engaging with who’s around instead of who we picked, which you may not have considered:

1. We understand the world better

Being in ongoing relationships with people who are different from us—temperamentally, politically, culturally—forces us to stretch. Even when we don’t adopt someone else’s POV, the ability to try it on is important. Perspective-taking has many benefits, from empathy to creativity.

And engaging with a broader group of people not only creates a more accurate understanding of the world than we get by talking only to similar others, we also benefit from creating a broader shared reality because we have to first agree about the state of the world in we want to cooperate with one another and influence the world around us.

2. We understand others better

To coordinate or cooperate with other people, we have to accurately understand them. Mentalizing—forming an understanding of how someone else thinks or feels—is a skill that we seem to be losing as we view people who disagree with us as immoral or foolish and we may not bother to examine the nuances or reasoning of the people who agree with us.

The skill of mentalizing decays without use. We instead attribute whatever mental states to them that are convenient for us. But that doesn’t help us work together or understand when people who see things differently from us are actually right.

3. We understand ourselves better

The most significant effect of engaging with different others may be on how we perceive ourselves. What gets reflected back to us by similar others is a distorted image. Our jokes seem funny when they’re actually mean. Our views seem obviously right. Our blind spots go unchallenged.

But when we have relationships with who’s around instead of who we picked, we get different feedback. Those people are more likely to tell us when we’re not as reasonable, funny, or insightful as we think. That information is invaluable—even when it stings.

4. We learn to adapt to others

Relating to others is a skill that we develop early on, through play. As a kid of the 90s, I grew up with neighborhood kids. They weren’t my best friends or especially chosen—they were just around. Often they were boys who wanted to build forts and play army. It wasn’t my first choice, but we learned to negotiate games, adapt to each other, and coexist.

My kids don’t have this experience. There is no roaming pack of neighborhood kids; play now requires adult coordination—texts, schedules, transportation. As play has become costly, kids seek out most preferred friends, usually those most like them. And that means they may never develop the skill of learning how to play with kids who are different—older or younger, athletic or not—and how to make a shared game work.

5. We benefit from constraint

This returns us to our starting point about the limitations effects of where you live. When you rely on who’s around, you have their skills, limitations, personalities, and histories. And if the community is going to thrive, you have to make something work with what you have.

That seems limiting, but it can actually spur creativity. With fewer options, people work with what they have. Research shows that they make something better within a defined space than they could make with unlimited options. In a neighborhood or community, the projects people develop are richer when you maximize what’s available to you.

How to practice the skill of staying

None of this is an argument for going back to small-town life or recreating high-cost-of-exit communities. Mobility matters. Choice matters. Freedom matters.

But staying has gifts, too.

If you want to human better, here are three small ways:

• Notice where exit is so easy that staying never gets a chance to teach you anything.

• When you feel inclined to tap out of a relationship, pause to examine that feeling before you make a choice to stay or go.

• Spend some time imagining the things you can create and the relationships you can build if you invest in who’s already there, instead of who you pick.

But we could also use this occasion to imagine becoming more ourselves. That is not a question of how to optimize, but how to attend to both our individual identities and our connections to other people.

Because just like light is both a wave and a particle, humans are both interconnected networks and individuals. Strong and weak ties to the people around us create our sense of reality and determine whether we thrive or wither. But we are also individuals with our own unique identities and qualities—a self that remains stable across our lifespan.

If that sounds worthwhile to you, here are some How to Human resolutions that you might adopt for 2026. They don’t lend themselves to check marks in the same way that losing 10 pounds or saving up and emergency fund or reading 52 books does. But even moving in the general direction of these resolutions has been rewarding for me. And I look forward to continuing that work in the coming year.

1. Spend more time with people who are not like you—in person.

Not to persuade them. Not to educate them. Just to share space, food, and ordinary human interaction. Screens flatten people; presence restores dimensionality. Host the potluck. Make small talk with the neighbors. Trust your ability to connect with other people in big and small ways.

2. Treat other people as fully human—even when you’d rather not.

There are no NPCs. Don’t assume shallowness, stupidity, or bad faith just because someone looks at things differently than you do. The temptation to dismiss someone as interchangeable or mindless is a cue to go looking for their complexity and uniqueness.

3. Stop forcing the world into false binaries.

Reality is rarely binary. People don’t fit neatly into two boxes, and pretending they do distorts everything downstream—analysis, policy, and trust. Resist frameworks that simplify at the cost of accuracy. (For more on rejecting false binaries, see the work of my collaborator .)

4. Build something small, local, and real.

Community doesn’t come from agreement; it comes from collaboration. So go clean a park with your neighbors. Whether you start a fun tradition or fix a shared problem, working side by side on a project increases trust and allows us to understand each other (whether or not we agree).

5. Take your own ideas seriously—don’t wait for permission.

Your inner heckler is not a gatekeeper for your ideas. You don’t need consensus to begin, nor applause to continue. Most things that look effortless are the result of sustained, invisible work. So start creating the thing. The world needs your ideas.

Let me know how it goes. I’m always here to listen.

Here’s to spending 2026, together, in pursuit of being more human and more ourselves.

Thank you for being part of How to Human.

Today I want to look at three of those phrases that have become increasingly common in our conversations as individuals and as citizens.

1. “That’s just something I said.”

If you’ve ever confronted someone about a claim or accusation they made, only to hear

“Oh that? I just said that.”

—then you know how disorienting that can be.

The basis of the conversation has been yanked out from under you. You realize the person is willing to say things they don’t mean if those statements help them achieve an immediate emotional or interpersonal goal.

And if someone’s words don’t mean anything, you can’t build trust with them. You can’t know whether their promises, commitments, or claims have any stable basis. Humans rely on speech as a proxy for inner states—intentions, beliefs, and motivations. That’s how we predict how people are likely to behave in the future. And when their words aren’t tied to anything deeper, it’s hard to know how they’ll behave or how you should respond to them.

This is bad enough in personal relationships. It’s far worse when it comes from elected officials, whose words aren’t just interpersonal—they influence laws, policy, legal decisions, international affairs, financial markets, and the public’s understanding of events.

This rhetorical maneuver isn’t unique to any one political figure or party—it’s a bipartisan habit used whenever a statement becomes inconvenient. Republicans do it, Democrats do it, and the pattern looks remarkably similar across the aisle. Donald Trump has repeatedly reframed prior comments as jokes, sarcasm, or statements that weren’t meant to be taken literally. Ron DeSantis has walked back earlier remarks about COVID policy as “mischaracterizations” of what he meant, and Lindsey Graham often distances himself from past positions by describing them as “taken out of context” or “not what I was saying.” Democrats use the same move in their own style—Barack Obama’s “If you like your plan, you can keep it,” Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” Joe Biden’s controversial quips later described as jokes, and public health figures reframing early COVID statements as oversimplifications. The effect is identical: leaders detach themselves from the meaning of their own words. And when words become fluid—disposable, revisable, or merely rhetorical—it erodes the trust that civic relationships depend on. Accountability requires words to have weight, no matter who says them.

We should be able to take an official’s statements to the bank. And when they do change their minds, elected officials should:

• clearly acknowledge the change,

• explain why they changed their view, and

• articulate what the shift means for their actions and decisions going forward.

Both Democrats and Republicans have shown what real accountability looks like when they change their minds. Barack Obama did it in 2012 when he shifted his position on same-sex marriage: he reminded the public of his earlier stance, stated plainly that his view had evolved, and explained the conversations and personal reflections that changed his thinking. On the other side of the aisle, John McCain modeled the same honesty when he renounced his 2000 refusal to criticize the Confederate flag; he acknowledged his earlier position, admitted it was wrong, and explained that political self-interest—not conviction—had guided his past decision.

2. “He/She is always nice to me.”

This is the classic line of the enabler.

Someone raises concerns about indecency, unkindness, dishonesty, or abuse, and the enabler shrugs it off because they haven’t experienced it.

“He’s always been nice to me.”

Translation:
If it didn’t happen to me, it doesn’t matter.

This is moral myopia. It implies that harm only counts when we are personally affected. But being human means caring about behavior that harms others—whether it affects us or not.

If someone is cruel, manipulative, or abusive to others, you should care. Historically we’ve held public figures to higher standards of behavior because their behavior has more impact because of the power they wield. It’s important that there are social costs to bad behavior in order to curtail it. Even the possibility of being accused of bad behavior should concern people; let along a reputation of repeated accusations.

You can see this dynamic clearly in the way many public figures defend Donald Trump when confronted with his treatment of others. Again and again, allies fall back on the same line: “He’s always been nice to me.” Lindsey Graham has used it. Marco Rubio has used it. Even former cabinet officials such as Bill Barr have leaned on some version of “He was always personally gracious to me.” These responses don’t address the behavior in question—they simply assert that, because the harm wasn’t directed at them, it must not matter or must not be real. This tactic denies the possibility that someone can treat different people very differently. And it is precisely this narrowing of concern—this unwillingness to take seriously someone else’s account of harm—that quietly erodes decency in both personal and civic life.

3. “They’re used to it.”

Saying someone doesn’t mind being treated poorly is a form of infrahumanization—a lesser-known and more subtle cousin of dehumanization. Infrahumanization occurs when we unconsciously assume that “other people” don’t feel pain, fear, shame, or hurt as deeply as we do.

Over evolutionary time, infrahumanization made it easier to harm outgroup members. If the people you raided or exploited didn’t have a negative response to harm, then you experience far less emotional impact from causing that harm.

We may not raid or exploit other people in modern life, but we still engage in infrahumanization.

We deny aid to people experiencing a disaster or crises because we choose to believe that they suffer less if they are accustomed to frequent flooding, earthquakes, or political instability. “It doesn’t bother them” or “they don’t mind” are similar dismissals of other people’s emotional responses to negative events, whether these are acute or long-term.

You can hear this same logic in countless contexts where harm is minimized by claiming the people experiencing it “are used to it.” It’s been used to excuse overcrowded border facilities for migrant children, to rationalize violence and deprivation in Native American and black communities, and to justify unsafe working conditions for undocumented or immigrant laborers. Schools have used it to dismiss bullying of LGBTQ+ students or explain harsher discipline for low-income and minority children; and hospitals have used versions of it to undertreat black patients’ pain. It appears globally, in comments that refugees are “used to conflict” or that people living under authoritarianism “are used to strong rulers.”

This is dehumanization-lite—and it’s pervasive and harmful. Of course other people feel emotional pain in response to harm. They feel the same fear, uncertainty, and unfairness that we would feel if we were in their place.

Why These Phrases Matter

All three of these phrases pretend to be neutral or polite. They aren’t. They are tools for:

• dodging accountability,

• dismissing others’ experiences, and

• minimizing harm and therefore responsibility to help.

But because they sound civil, they slip past our radar. They normalize moral disengagement—the psychological distancing that allows harm to continue unchecked.

Healthy relationships require reciprocity. Healthy communities require mutual concern. Healthy democracies require accountability.

These phrases quietly erode all three.

How to Human

If you want to human better, start here:

• Take people’s words seriously.
  If they said it, they meant it—or they need to explain why they didn’t.

• Care about behavior even when it isn’t directed at you.
  Decency requires holding everyone to the same standard: not causing harm.

• Understand that denying suffering from harm is meant to make us more comfortable. But what we should do is comfort the harmed.

These shifts matter. They shape the moral culture we live in. They teach people what we tolerate—and what we won’t.

And they remind us that decency isn’t measured by how polite something sounds. It’s measured by how we treat the people around us.

What are your examples?

I suspect you’ve heard versions of these phrases in your own life—at work, in your community, or in the political conversations swirling around us. We often recognize them in hindsight, when something doesn’t sit quite right or when someone’s suffering suddenly becomes visible to us in a new way.

If you’re willing, I’d love to hear your own examples: moments when a seemingly polite phrase papered over real harm. We can all of us get better at noticing the quiet ways decency erodes—and the small, human ways we can build it back.

NPR ran a fascinating story this week about my colleagues at the Independent PAC which is a sister organization to the Independent Center. It’s about something I think is long overdue in American politics: not using AI to manipulate people—but using it to finally listen to them.

For decades, the two parties have relied on a mental model that throws away most of the data about voters and reduces 330 million Americans into just two boxes. Red or blue. Coke or Pepsi. With us or against us.

But that’s not reality. And pretending it is reality is why so many Americans feel politically homeless.

AI is giving us a way out of that—not by replacing human judgment, but by recovering something we’ve lost: the ability to see people as they actually are, rather than as the parties insist they must be.

In a political world that has flattened us into caricatures, AI is helping us recover dimensionality.

AI as a Tool for Re-Humanizing Politics

What excites me about what the Independent PAC is doing isn’t the technology itself. It’s the human problem it solves.

I’ve written about this countless times:

Humans routinely misperceive one another. We project, we assume, we oversimplify. The two-party system is basically one giant exercise in categorical overreach. It discards nuance, context, individuality—all the “data” that makes people human.

AI doesn’t magically fix polarization. But it does something profound: it stops throwing away information.

It can:

• Notice voters who don’t fit the party mold

• Surface the issues people actually care about

• Identify communities that feel unheard

• Find the people whose footprints show leadership long before they ever see themselves as candidates

In other words, AI helps us correct the distortions that plague human perception—distortions I’ve written about in How to Human: projection, motivated reasoning, pluralistic ignorance, groupthink, and the Procrustean bed of the two-party system.

The Real Innovation Isn’t AI. It’s Accountability.

The NPR article frames this as a “bold experiment,” and it is.
But the bold part isn’t the technology.
We’ve had powerful technology for years.

The bold part is the theory of change:

A government is healthier when more people are represented—and when elected officials can no longer hide behind a binary that excuses them from accountability.

Independent candidates provide that accountability.

AI simply helps locate the places—and the people—most ready for it.

Shared Reality Requires Shared Representation

Politics breaks down when we can no longer understand one another.
It repairs itself when we build mechanisms that require us to notice, listen, and respond.

That’s what this project is trying to do.

Not burn the system down.
Not replace humans with machines.
But use AI as a tool to expand human agency, not shrink it.
To create more on-ramps into public life, instead of fewer.
To put voters back at the center of politics, not treat them as members of one tribe or the other.

Why This Moment Matters

A plurality of Americans now identify as independent—not because they’re indecisive, but because they’re paying attention. They’re asking better questions. They’re refusing to contort themselves to fit a partisan script.

This is the process that keeps me up at night:

When people stop being listened to, they stop participating.
When they stop participating, the system stops correcting itself.
And when the system stops correcting itself, instability follows.

The Independent PAC is trying to build those small corrections back in.

And AI—used thoughtfully—is helping.

How to Human, in Politics

Everything I write comes back to the same principle:
Humans are astonishingly good at relating to each other when we’re in the same room, solving the same problem, working toward the same goal.

We get into trouble when systems force us apart—into categories, identities, bubbles, and narratives that erase the complexity of who we are.

This project is one attempt to undo that.
To see voters as individuals.
To identify leaders who don’t look like politicians.
To rebuild shared reality from the ground up.

It’s early. It’s ambitious. It’s uphill.
But so is every human-centered reform worth attempting.

And as the NPR piece makes clear, that work is already underway.

I’ve linked to the written article, which will be accompanied by an audio story this afternoon on All Things Considered. I’ll update the comments with that link when it’s live.

Forty-three percent of Americans now describe themselves as political independents. They’re not members of either party. And if we want to fix what’s breaking in our democracy, we need to understand why they’re abandoning both political parties.

Many independents will tell you it’s because normal people have checked out, leaving politics to the deeply polarized. And those people are, frankly, pretty weird. These are the deepest partisans—Democrats and Republicans—who insist that their president is in peak cognitive health and their president’s economy is excellent, no matter what evidence contradicts their claims.

The polarized prefer outrage and tribal victory over problem solving. Compromise is a dirty word because it doesn’t mean you found common ground, it means you caved. The polarized have bipartisan agreement on at least one thing, though. They believe that division is better than solutions.

Independents believe that government should solve problems, prize decency, and respect others’ choices about how to live their lives. And because both parties are increasingly opposed to those values, independents have left the building, politically speaking. And I can’t blame them. Why engage in a system this dysfunctional and frankly destructive?

Independents’ withdrawal is understandable and also dangerous. Because when decent people abandon politics, the polarized take over. They alone vote in primaries, making the nominees more extreme when it’s time for the general election. They pour in donations to elected officials based on social media spats and arguments in committee hearings and floor debates. They capture institutions that should be neutral.

And their divisiveness has gone beyond politics to weaken the social fabric of our country.

What I’ve Learned a Year in

Over the past year, as president of the Independent Center, I’ve learned just how hard it is to make politics normal again. The challenges make textbook sense to someone whose parent field is social psychology (it’s me, hi!). But seeing what used to be academic and theoretical exist in real life, among people I know, and in my own work has been unnerving.

Here are three roadblocks we encountered in the past year that probably shouldn’t have surprised me:

1. Candidates Who Won’t Share a Stage

The Independent Center organized a candidate forum for a special election, inviting all three contenders—Republican, Democrat, and Independent. Only the independent agreed. The other two refused, likely because they didn’t want to share a stage with someone free to listen to voters instead of parroting a party line.

That’s what the parties fear most: competition. They thrive when they can control the format, the questions, and the rules. They avoid fair fights. And rather than reaching new voters, partisan campaigns retreat to their bases—because outrage and purity tests are safer than persuasion and compromise.

2. Funders Who Fear Real Independence

We’ve approached many foundations and individuals who are ostensibly nonpartisan but act otherwise. They’ll admit frustration with “their” party but oppose anything that might threaten it. They’d rather preserve influence than support a movement that serves voters over parties.

3. Media Who Can’t Evaluate Ideas Without a Party Label

We’ve also seen how partisanship distorts perception—even among people whose job is to assess ideas. When we pitch policy proposals without a partisan label, many journalists don’t know how to cover them. They want to know which side we’re on (Who funds you? Who works with you?) and not how the proposal would work.

Without a party label to anchor their interpretation, they struggle to decide whether an idea is serious or suspect. The result: nonpartisan solutions get ignored, not because they lack merit, but because they don’t fit a partisan script.

The Psychology of In-groups and Power

I shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. After all, psychologists have been studying this exact dynamic for about 90 years. Humans evolved to form and defend in-groups—the circles that grant access to resources and status. Once those groups form, people protect them fiercely.

In Washington, these groups are the political parties and while they claim they’re fighting over morality and policy, they’re actually fighting over money and power. Some people believe that when their party is in power, they have access to these resources. Political parties don’t have to say this explicitly, because our brains evolved over millennia to know and act on this idea: supporting your group is how you get things. But that’s absurd—the parties aren’t funneling resources to their members, they’re divvying up the pie for themselves, at tremendous cost to the American people.

We Need You Back — Here’s How to Make Politics Normal Again

The Independent Center is building a home for the politically homeless. These are the people who work across differences to solve problems in their families, communities, and workplaces. That’s actually pretty normal behavior for most Americans, no matter what the polarized would have you believe. We desperately need these normal people in politics, even though it’s discouraging, dehumanizing, and frankly weird.

We can make the 2026 and 2028 election cycles look very different from recent elections. But we need principled people and organizations, and we need to start now.

What can you do?

• Run for office if you can—and if you can’t, find other ways to support good candidates.

• Vote for shared values if you can’t find policy alignment.

• Reward cooperation, not conflict.

• Support candidates who treat opponents as fellow citizens, not enemies.

Let’s make politics normal again. Together.

Not long ago, a friend told me about what happened when he criticized the president of his own party to people he knew and trusted. It had been years, but I could hear the pain in his voice when he told me what it was like.

He hasn’t moved on. And he’s not the only one.

It can feel impossible to let go of unresolved injuries like this. Moments when we feel unheard, dismissed, or condemned. Political life is increasingly made of these injuries, whether you’re talking to people from your own party or across the aisle. You cross a line and they attack.

The damage we experience is real and it goes unrepaired because you can’t take your feelings of disconnection, hurt pride, or sadness to court.

And without a means of repair, the people affected get louder and more extreme. They don’t realize that the problem is damaged relationships that need to be restored to balance. Instead they become angrier and angrier.

But of course you can’t shout your way to relationship repair.

What Civic Relationships Are (And Why We Don’t See Them)

We don’t usually think of politics as relational. We use metaphors like battles, wars, contests. But when the dominant framing is conflict, it covers up something vitally important:

We are in ongoing relationships with the people and institutions that govern us and with our fellow citizens.

Political gridlock, screaming matches, cancellations, bad-faith arguments, broken policy promises—these are all relational problems even more than they are political ones.

Like all relationships, our civic relationships depend on trust, reciprocity, and accountability. And when those elements are missing, conflict will escalate as a means to force repair or to end the relationship.

That’s why we can’t fix our political problems by telling people to stop yelling about politics. Because the problem is relational more than political.

Why “Be Less Polarized” Doesn’t Work

A lot of democracy strengthening and depolarization work involves telling people to be more civil. Be less polarized. That’s a lot like telling people they should just forgive people who have been destructive and abusive. It puts niceness and harmony above the needs of the person who has been harmed.

Forgiveness is not a mindset. It’s a process. You can’t skip ahead to the good part.

Polarization is the result of unhealthy civic relationships—our relationships with political leaders, institutions, parties, and with each other. Without repairing those relationships, we can’t begin to move forward politically.

How do we do it? It’s not easy. We need some kind of model and it will take insight from faith leaders, legal scholars, psychologists, political leaders, and historians to help us understand what reconciliation entails. But it surely involves many of the same steps as repairing our personal relationship: naming the harm, acknowledging it, taking responsibility, and making amends.

What Happens When We Don’t Repair Civic Harms

Without a deeper understanding of civic harm, we are treating everything as harm, even things like reasonable disagreement or differences of interpretation or values.

Although it might seem like the answer is to think less about harm in order to reduce it, the answer is actually the opposite. We need to think a lot more carefully about what happened that caused pain, why it caused pain, whether the harm was intentional, and what might resolve it.

Civic reconciliation, if we can get it right, isn’t about cataloguing grievances or making apology into an art form. It’s about restoring the conditions that make self-government possible.

Repair not only brings our civic relationships back to health so that we can self-govern. It also offers skills and insight that help us better navigate our civic lives in the future:

• Anticipating how our actions might affect the people around us

• Confronting and learning from our mistakes

• Expecting to account for our actions and others to do the same

• Repairing harms we have caused or naming the repair we need when we are harmed

• Telling the difference between real harm and discomfort or challenge

A Warning—and a Way Forward

In countries that have experienced conflict and genoicde—Rwanda, Northern Ireland, and Bosnia, for example—there have been truth and reconciliation commissions that rebuild the civic and social fabric of the country after violence. These examples might feel distant from American politics, but they point to something universal:

When harms accumulate and no repair follows, it will escalate until people reach their breaking point.

That breaking point is violence and lost lives: Nearly a million people in Rwanda. 3,500 in Northern Ireland. 34,000 in Bosnia.

We aren’t those countries, it’s true. But we’d be naive to think we’re immune to the forces that led other nations to catastrophe.

Civic reconciliation invites us to step away from the breaking point and back toward each other.

If you liked the art in this week’s post, please read more about Legarsi alla montagna (To Be Tied to the Mountain), by the Italian conceptual artist Maria Lai. From her Wikipedia entry:

“In 1981 Lai created the event Legarsi alla montagna (Bound to the Mountain) in Ulassai, over three days. Blue ribbons totalling 17 miles linked the houses in the village to each other and to the summit of Mount Gedili which overlooks the village. Residents connected their houses to their neighbours’, sometimes with a bow or a loaf of bread to signify particular friendship, or tied taut to represent tensions between households.”

You might also enjoy the first article a four-part series that I wrote with entitled The Red Flags Are Everywhere. This piece about political gaslighting draws from our recent podcast about politics as an abusive relationship.

A couple of years go, Duke Energy emailed me on Giving Tuesday asking me to donate to their charity that helps people pay their energy bills. How generous, I thought. Duke won’t lose money when customers can’t afford their energy bills.

It’s not just Duke. PetSmart, eBay, Costco, and many other companies have “checkout charities,” where customers can round up or add a few dollars for a cause. These programs raised more than $600 million in 2020. That’s a lot of generosity—ours, not theirs.

And it raises an interesting question: why exactly are they doing this?

Research shows that being asked to give at checkout makes people feel anxious and guilty. We often can’t articulate why it feels wrong to be asked, but we feel it just the same. The answer lies in relationship norms—the unwritten rules that govern how people (and institutions) relate to each other.

The Norm Violation Problem

As I’ve written before, different relationships have different rules.

• With family and friends, we operate under communal norms—we help because we care, not because we expect repayment.

• With companies, we operate under exchange norms—they provide a product or service, and we pay for it.

You already know these rules intuitively. Imagine not paying for a restaurant meal. (Not good!) Now imagine paying your grandmother for a home-cooked meal. (Even worse!) You probably feel uncomfortable just thinking about these things. That’s exactly how norms keep our behavior in line and our relationships healthy.

When companies ask us to donate at checkout, they’re mixing up these relationship types. They want the warmth of a communal relationship and the profits of an exchange relationship. That’s why we feel uneasy.

Duke Energy and I don’t have a communal relationship. They give me electricity; I give them money. If either of us stops fulfilling our end of the deal, the relationship ends. When they ask me to donate to their fund, they’re suggesting that some customers should pay more than they owe and others less. That’s not how exchange relationships work.

But it’s also not how communal ones work. In a communal relationship, those with more help those with less. And Duke has about $28 billion more than I do. So when Duke asks me to give to a fund that keeps their accounts current, they’re violating both sets of norms. They want to look generous while asking others to do the giving.

Giving Is Worth Getting Right

None of this should be construed as an excuse to humbug off for the holidays. Generosity is good for us and it’s too important to relegate to a passing impulse in the checkout line. Giving reminds us we can make the world a little better, and it reconnects us to the abundance we already have.

As you reflect on the past year and consider how to recognize the people and organizations and places that make life meaningful, think about what you’d like others to be able to enjoy (museums, community theaters, historic sites). You might also think about the people who will otherwise do without this holiday season (nursing and veterans homes residents, people with food insecurity). Or simply think about someone important to you and what kind of charities they find meaningful.

The important part is to that we direct generosity where we feel it belongs—to people and causes that genuinely need it, not to corporations outsourcing the feeling of being human.