We’re pretty much halfway through the decade, and it’s been a tumultuous one to say the least.
Our social isolation never seemed to end. It’s really, really hard not to live in a bubble. I know I have my own echo chambers, and that they’re partially self-inflicted. With isolation comes distrust.
I’ll be honest here. I grew up straddling different cultures. I have the privilege of being well-travelled. And yet, the beliefs and behaviors of many people in my country and around the world make no sense to me.
I can understand fragments of it. The failure of the status quo and the desire to tear down all systems and to start over. The fear of being rejected for saying the wrong thing. The anxiety around the cost of living and all that. I look at how the median income in the US sits below 40,000 and I’m far less surprised that people are upset.
If this were simply a scenario of a few megalomaniacs abusing an excess of power, that’s one thing. It’s something the world has seen over and over. The part that’s been more disheartening is how much of that has happened because it’s what the people wanted. At scale, at critical mass, it seems like people have opted for cruelty.
You can have the exact opposite opinions from me on nearly every issue and still feel this way. When you believe you’re on the side of justice, you have to contend with the fact that about half the people you encounter might as well be chanting, “yay, injustice!” The cultural divide in the country almost always sits at 51-49%, and when it teeters the other way, it feels like the steering wheel is being jerked.
Back when Twitter was Twitter, the most exciting follower I managed to pick up was Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2021 from the Philippines.
I celebrated her award with a portrait, and gained a Nobel Prize winning follower as a result. Pretty cool, huh? Since I’ve long abandoned that platform, I need to brag about that somewhere!
Maria Ressa is pretty familiar with authoritarian rule. The Philippines’ past president was just arrested by the International Criminal Court for extrajudicial killings and the current head of state is the son of their dictator from the 1980’s. His literal junior.
Among travelers, the Philippines is often lauded as the most warm, welcoming, friendly places you could ever visit. It just doesn’t seem too reflected in recent leadership tastes.
Ressa’s work has also included coverage of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, another dictator. She’s closely covered ethnic violence in West Kalimantan, religious violence in Ambon, and the devolution of social media in the 2010s.
The places where she covered violence were often full of people who always seemed kind and humane as individuals, but she noticed how that quickly eroded with groupthink. In her words: “that was always the answer when violence broke out. The force of the mob destroyed individual control, giving people the freedom to be their worst selves. What I was seeing in Indonesia was something I had seen in the Philippines and someday would see in countries around the world.”
In her observation, people seemed to transform in a group setting, usually for the worst. I’ll bet there are helpful evolutionary reasons why we’re like this, but like the notorious Milgram Prison Experiment found, a role and an outside authority often gives people permission to be their worst selves.
“Those experiments would come to my mind again later in the context of social media: how easy it is to rile up a mob against a target.”
Several years ago, a friend and I were taking a minibus to go from Johannesburg to eSwatini, or as it was called at the time, Swaziland.
I was putting my friend in touch with a child care project there, following the verbal directions of another friend. These verbal directions included steps like, “Go to the yellow gas station. From there, find the dirt road and keep going up.”
Where we were going, things were apparently simple enough where everyone would know what that was.
We arrived in the main city of Mbabane late at night, however. Bopping around in search of “the dirt road” didn’t seem like the best idea.
That’s when a fellow passenger from the minibus told us she lived in town and invited us to spend the night.
Daisy lived in a rather comfortable home. I stayed in what had been her son’s room before he moved away. She prepared us tea and made us dinner and told us all about the places she wanted to travel to. Ethiopia was at the top of her list. The coffee, she explained.
To my friend and I, the idea of inviting two foreign strangers from the bus who clearly didn’t know what they were doing to spend the night seemed like such a big and unusual act of generosity. For Daisy, it seemed like a pretty natural conclusion upon seeing people in need.
This is just one of dozens, perhaps even hundreds of stories I’ve accumulated of being on the receiving end of generosity, particularly while traveling and in some sort of vulnerable state. I’ve experienced this sort of thing too often, too many times, and too consistently to not have some sort of persistent belief in people.
I do believe there’s some sort of human instinct to help. I’ve seen it called into action. I guess I’ve just also come to believe that what we’re capable of, for both good and bad, is pretty damn elastic.
Groupthink is pretty wild.
There’s some pretty fascinating, occasionally scary, and psychologically complex stuff going on when it comes to groupthink and the mob mentality. Because humans are social creatures, and because our survival was linked to our connections and social skills, our sense of belonging takes precedence over many other things.
And this isn’t all bad. This is the same science behind why certain moments in sports can feel so transcendent, or why a choir of blended voices can feel completely magical. It’s unfortunately also led to internment, genocide, and other large scale atrocities.
What is there to do in light of this knowledge? Here are a few approaches I feel more strongly committed to:
• Refusing to deal with people in the abstract – Using a person’s group-status as a shorthand for who they are is so common. In a lot of my marketing work, it’s common to “build a persona of a Gen-Z audience member,” and so on. And that has a time and place. But in the wrong context, you risk creating an us-versus-them dynamic and turning those you disagree with into caricatures. This is ultimately unhelpful when it comes to building a better world.
• Recognizing the ways in which people are products of their environments – If a few circumstances around my birth and upbringing were different, I might not hold many of the beliefs I hold dear, and the same can be said of anyone! If this is a helpful perspective in keeping you from vilifying someone, use it!
• Being a pattern breaker – In an era of division and echo chambers, it can be easy for many people to be cloistered or private about their opinions. And I know safety will vary from person to person, but overall this creates a world where the only people who vocalize opinions on certain topics represent more extreme views and louder voices. You never know when you’ll force someone to reckon with the fact they’ve been told people who think like you are evil… but you actually seem pretty normal.
I had a friend with an absolute gift for seeing the best in people.
A few years ago we tragically lost her in a car wreck, but one of the attributes that I remember best is her knack for treating each person like the most aspirational version of themselves. I’m pretty sure that her decision to treat each person like they were the fully realized version of who they could be made each person she interacted with better. It was the gentlest but strongest form of accountability.
As I’m writing this, I also realize it isn’t a far cry from a Mr. Brown’s quote in Paddington 2. “Paddington looks for the good in all of us, and somehow he manages to find it.”
Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler proposed the Three Degrees of Influence Rule in 2007. Their discovery showed that everything we do ripples throughout our web of relationships. If someone is feeling a bit of economic anxiety, there’s a greater than 50% chance that their friend is feeling it, a 25% chance that their friend’s friend is feeling it, and a 15% chance that their friend’s friend’s friend is there too.
But this works for more than emotions. Behaviors like smoking, conditions like obesity, and postures like hope could also spread like this. When you take the time to deliberately express one of these emotions or decisions, its likelihood of spreading increases significantly.
I don’t want to make some grand philosophical statement about how humans are ultimately good or our moral defaults. Based on the actions I’ve seen, I’d say we’ve got some range.
But it does helps me to treat others with more love and healing when I remember the good that each person is capable of. And I do believe that if we all approached each other with more generous assumptions, especially those most different than us, our world would actually transform.