So far, I have stayed clear of politics in what I write here. But politics is about leadership, and great leadership is about learning to leverage polarities, whether we call them that or not. In this post, I do not endorse any political party and only intend to share a different way of thinking about how politics might function that I find inspiring. I hope that you do too.
Leading up to mid-term election day in the US, it has been interesting to hear the different perspectives amongst various people I know, especially those who have changed how they are voting since the last election. A theme that I keep hearing from the blue voters is “yeah, but protecting our democracy needs to be our top priority”. A theme that I keep hearing from the red voters is “yeah, but putting and end to this anti-liberal authoritarianism needs to be our top priority”.
It is interesting how what one person views as democratic leadership can be viewed by another person as authoritarianism. I have been thinking about how both perspectives have a grain of truth in them, and how our real problem might be just that our whole political system operates under the assumption that our problems must be solved with either-or thinking.
The either-or frame forces us to pick a side on each issue and try to win by persuading others with the most convincing argument. When this is how the game is set up to be played, naturally we will try to glorify the strengths of our own perspective while demonizing the weaknesses of our opponents’ perspectives. At its worst, it starts to become less about standing for something we really believe in and more about looking for something to conveniently stand behind as a way to attack our opponent. Issues become pawns in the game instead of sacred causes to serve.
When we all know that we all play the game this way, it introduces an element of inherent distortion into our conversations, along with an element of inherent distrust. The dirtier it gets, the more justified we feel in our own attempts at distorting perception to our advantage, and the further we are willing to go into causing harm in the name of averting harm. This, I find alarming.
For example, it alarms me that some people seem to think it’s worth risking real harm to our democracy in order to force necessary change upon it. It also alarms me that some people seem to think it’s worth silencing the diversity of perspectives and gaslighting their complaints in order to protect our own interests.
Could it be that these opposite perspectives represent the two sides of a polarity, creating a vicious cycle that feeds off of itself? What if our aggressive words and actions are precisely what is making it more likely that others will write off our perspective and fail to hear the validity of our complaints? What if the censorship and gaslighting are exactly what fuels the anger that poses the very threat to our democracy that we say we want to protect?
What if the fear that our democracy will be harmed is the main reason that others resist including our perspective, and if we learned to share our perspective in a less threatening way, we’d actually have better luck creating the change we want to see?
