Divided We Fall

I think it’s fair to say that we’re all decent, hard-working people. We get up every morning and do something that is expected of us. Some of us go to school. Some go to work. Some, nothing at all. Each of us is just trying to get by and just be decent. 

There is a lot of anger right now – you can feel it just about everywhere. Some of it righteous, some of it misguided – most of it somewhere in between. Some people act on those frustrations in a way that is productive. That’s admirable. They take to the streets in protest, they occupy their campuses, they organize, they fight. They demand change. As sociologist Émile Durkheim observed, there is a powerful emotional energy that arises when people come together for a shared purpose. A collective effervescence that can be harnessed to extraordinary heights. And then there are those who are counter-productive. I do not find them to be admirable. They belittle the activists. They squirrel away in their far corners of the internet and do their best to spread those tumors of hate that occupy so much space within their minds. Social psychologist Henri Tajfel argued that this “us vs them” mentality arises from our very human need to boost our own sense of identity and self-esteem by putting down those we see as different.

But most insidiously, there are the opportunists. In this landscape shaped by an “us vs them” mentality, it is these nearly clandestine forces that actively seek to fuel division for profit. Anger spreads like wildfire online – a 2018 MIT study found that false news travels six times faster on Twitter than the truth. Is it any wonder that far-right media outlets and political movements lean so heavily into stoking fear and outrage against “the other”? It’s good for ratings. It brings in the donations.

And corporations have taken notice. Brands are all too eager to exploit our societal divisions for their own gain. Researchers have found that Facebook ads highlighting partisan conflict receive more engagement – and companies are happy to oblige if it means more clicks, more sales. Never mind if their stand for social justice is skin-deep. As long as we’re too busy fighting each other to notice their bottom line, they win.

I think it’s fair to say that we’re all decent, hard-working people – so I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe that such antagonism is our natural state. But are we too far gone? Is a desire for decency too high an aspiration that’s just out of reach? 

Absolutely not. 

Here is a list of things that I think are true: 

1.) People are not selfish 
2.) People are not greedy
3.) People are not lazy 
4.) People are helpful 
5.) People are caring 

when

SCARCITY IS NOT FORCED UPON THEM.

I think it’s fair to say that we’re all decent, hard-working people. If we weren’t, society would have never formed. Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously studied cooperative behavior across cultures, finding that humans have a universal tendency to “teach our children to share, to put the needs of the group above their own, and to cooperate” (Mead, 1967). Evolutionary biologists have long argued that our capacity for empathy, mutual aid, and collaboration is what enabled our species to survive and thrive (Nowak & Highfield, 2011).

Forced scarcity, then, is antithetical to human nature – otherwise we would not be here. As economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir have demonstrated, the condition of scarcity itself taxes our cognitive bandwidth, leading to worse decisions and a reduced ability to plan for the long-term (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). In other words, poverty begets more poverty, not due to any inherent failings of those experiencing it, but because of the immense mental burden it imposes.

This current model – late stage, end stage, kick you while you’re down and stomp on your neck stage capitalism – is wholly at odds with the nature of our existence. Political theorist Wendy Brown has written extensively on how the logic of neoliberalism has eroded our democratic institutions and sense of shared humanity. “Neoliberalism,” she argues, “is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity – not only with its machinery of compulsory commodification and profit-driven expansion, but by its form of valuation” (Brown, 2015). In a world where everything, including our very sense of self, is reduced to market value, is it any wonder we feel so disconnected from one another?

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Anthropologists like David Graeber have documented the myriad ways in which humans have organized their societies throughout history – from gift economies to mutual aid networks to commons-based systems of resource management (Graeber, 2011). These practices, based on principles of reciprocity and shared welfare rather than competition and individual gain, are not relics of a primitive past but a testament to the enduring resilience of the human spirit. If we can learn to recognize and value all the ways we cooperate and care for one another in our daily lives, perhaps we can start to build an economy that does the same.

And that’s all wonderful. It’s really great. I still have to go to work in the morning. But you know what? That isn’t even the issue. I want to go into work today and I want to go into work tomorrow (but not the next day because that’s Saturday). And I want to do that because I really do believe that I am decent and that I am hard-working and I take a lot of pride in what I do. But I do have an issue with being underpaid. I have an issue with the taxes from my already light paycheck being used to fund a genocide. And I have an issue with a system that is broken beyond repair yet designed in a way to make me feel like it’s my fault for not being able to do anything to fix it.

But hey, at least I’m a decent, hard-working guy, right?