The Cost of Losing Common Ground

More than ever before, our voices have been democratized through technology. While this is cause for celebration, it also highlights the need for accuracy in reporting the truth. Ensuring our political discourse is infused with the truth is crucial to address our society’s problems and to canvass potential solutions. Truth is also necessary in order to assess each other’s political conclusions. Without truth, we will be left bickering in the dark due to misunderstandings, drawing distinctions where there may in fact be no differences.

As truth is necessarily a collective process, the possessor of truth must be allowed to integrate it into our shared reality through dissemination, followed by genuine and robust critique and verification.

Our modern technologies are very powerful in spreading (mis)information at a rate never before seen. Other technology we possess also now has the power to destroy the entire world multiple times over. This is a potential recipe for disaster.

While technology has flattened the hierarchy of the publishing process, it comes at the cost of a weakened vetting process. Now, a single idea may spread at the speed of light. But with such power for propagandizing comes a responsibility to ensure our facts adhere to reality. This responsibility is collective, but it must necessarily be discharged individually, through the choice to share facts and to abstain from censuring opposing views. It is important that we fully grasp the importance of this responsibility, so we may adopt it quickly: catastrophic threats to truth – such as AI deepfakes – loom in the near future that require us to begin instilling the habit of free discourse.

A concerning trend already underway is the production of online echo-chambers, driven by the mainstream news and social media. Algorithms replicate what we already believe, limiting our exposure to opposing views and reinforcing our biases. Worse, we ourselves actively silence, ban, and delete opposing views. We effectively remove dissidence from our own sphere of existence, believing the resulting uniformity of opinion is confirmation of truth rather than ignorance. Both the Left and Right political ideologies are guilty of this, but especially the Left, which is explained further below.

Exceptions to this censorship and isolation come in the form of individuals who actively seek and spread balanced, well-informed viewpoints. But most of our news feeds ignore them: the algorithms instead promote louder voices, which are rarely wiser. As Mark Twain once said: a lie can travel the world several times over before the truth has had time to put on its shoes. Similarly, our news feeds prioritize biased, bombastic posts over tempered, measured analyses.

These echo-chambers are created both by consumers and content creators. Creators, like algorithms, replicate their audience’s biases. Creators therefore eventually morph into a caricature of themselves: the Left-leaning ones become archetypal bleeding-hearts who are emotionally-driven sympathizers of the oppressed, while the Right’s creators become unforgivingly rule-based and harshly authoritarian. In this process, each side removes all nuance from their echo-chambers. Each side is left with a narrative that is a patchwork of selective facts which lead to a pre-approved set of moral outcomes: the Left says all cops are bastards and all ICE agents are nazis, without exception; whereas the Right says all law enforcement behaviour is always legitimate and an entire protest movement can be disregarded due to a few bad actors.

While social media could be used to disseminate insightful posts, it is rare and requires a demographic of level-headed consumers. Such consumers can only emerge if the political climate is fertile with objective facts; from that point, we can then properly derive moral conclusions. Having the benefit of reflecting on accurate facts allows us to determine which political content is biased versus worthy of sharing. In other words: for good posts to spread, we require good judgement; for good judgement, we require not only wisdom but also an accurate factual picture of the world. However, gathering facts requires reliance on trusted sources. Due to our sources already being biased, we are reduced to working with a partial picture, rendering us ill-suited to judge which content has merit.

As noted, both sides’ bias is evident if one observes the emphasis that has been placed on facts convenient to that narrative. Both sides indulge in this tactic of evading information that may create ambiguity for their narrative. The consumer is then left to piece together the entire puzzle using most, but not all, of the required pieces.

While some consumers do respond by conducting their own ‘deep dive’ research, this takes time and skill, which many unfortunately lack. Next, they require further resources to disseminate their findings, which many audiences are not receptive to – hearing facts from someone on the “other” side requires invoking a mutual trust that we have forgotten.

Our current distrust of the Other is antithetical to robust discourse: without viewing the other side’s argument, we can never have a full picture of our problems and their solutions. We exacerbate this process by labelling each other as traitors for being “friendly” to the other side: to merely entertain the notion of listening to the Other has become akin to treason. The defensive response to this fear of reputational censure is intellectual confinement.

In addition, we keep to echo-chambers also out of fear of our own worldview being questioned. If we accepted that the Other possesses knowledge that we lack, we would inevitably question why our own sources of truth omitted this information. We might wonder: why did MSNBC erroneously report that Rittenhouse “crossed state lines” with an illegal gun? Why did the DHS incorrectly report that ICE agents in Minneapolis were being run over by murderous protestors? If other sources were consulted, these inaccuracies would be instantly proven false. This process of cross-contamination shines a light on the darkness our allies have created: it makes us rightly question why our own trusted sources – with whom we feel morally aligned – did not provide an accurate picture. This is deeply unsettling. Therefore, it is rare for alternative sources to be consulted, leaving the deep divers to be ignored. The culture therefore remains in an objectively fractured state, where each side possesses a fraction of the truth.

A solution is to invest time to listen to the Other to glean the knowledge that is missing one’s own worldview. A concern with doing this is that you’d find inaccurate sources, thereby replacing your ignorance with misinformation: again, Twain’s words prove their relevance: “If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do, you're misinformed.” But the benefit of branching out to other content creators is that it helps to humanize the Other: once you realize Rittenhouse’s defenders genuinely believed he was in danger, you may not view the Other as crazy Nazis, but instead as proponents of a self-defence doctrine. Understanding the context of the Other’s conclusion is only possible by understanding the factual matrix they are functioning within.

We see our parallel worlds manifest in their reactions to each publicized event. Was Charlie Kirk’s killing moral? Was the BLM movement a peaceful protest or riot? Was Kyle Rittenhouse justified? Was George Floyd another example of an innocent man killed due to racism, or was he an ex-con and was high on drugs while attempting to use counterfeit currency? Was Jonathan Ross liable for murdering an innocent, lost, confused suburban mom, or was he genuinely afraid for his life from a moving vehicle run by aggressive agitators?

Every political event has been memorialized with a completely different factual narrative. The interesting aspect of political judgement is that we apply them to conclusions, rather than the thought process that led to it. But for that thought process to be understood, you must be in possession of the same set of facts. For example, if I say “Kyle Rittenhouse was justified in shooting those protestors”, the Left views me as sanctioning cold-blooded murder, whereas the Right thinks I have commended Illinois’ self-defence laws. This single proposition – of Rittenhouse’s innocence – leads to wildly different judgements because the judgers are in possession of very different facts. Some are of the opinion that he crossed state lines illegally with a gun and shot at a crowd of protestors unprovoked; whereas, others believe he came to the state initially unarmed, then later responded with lethal force to rightly protect his life. As a result of varied facts, two people with very similar moral frameworks arrive at two diametrically opposed conclusions. Their conclusions are at odds because of their knowledge, not their morality. Yet we judge their conclusions, not their morality. (Admittedly, sometimes divergent conclusions emerge from differences in morals.) To avoid these awkward encounters, we have come up with a poor solution: a social rule that bars us from discussing religion or politics. However, that rule will no longer do, as the tenor of the conversation is reaching a fever pitch.

The point is that the key to discovering truth is to begin at common ground. If two groups cannot agree on facts, then we lack the foundational prerequisite to have a conversation about morality.

Here, a considerable amount of blame lays with the Left, which has become extreme recently. They adopt an anti-speech position for anyone not within their own tribe. Attempts to converse go awry because the Left rejects our culture’s views on free discourse. Unfortunately, this throws the baby out with the bathwater: the Left forgets that the process of speaking is exactly what would reveal the best course forward for their stakeholders, i.e. the working class. (Ironically, the allowance of discourse is precisely what allowed Leftist ideas to be disseminated in the first place.) In a stubborn act of contradiction, the Left believes anything that is produced from the system is tainted, including the very process of sharing ideas with others.

This mindset flies in the face of enlightenment philosophy and the Western tradition, which have in general attempted to outline a viable structure of government that reins in state power, emphasizes personal autonomy, and provides rights to public discourse. This notion of a free and fair exchange of ideas stems from the scientific tradition of enquiry and the general principle that the individual is sovereign.

This traditional acknowledgement of the role of the individual and the importance of their speaking rights generates creativity and novel ideas. It is self-evident that any new body of thought necessarily requires an individual as a contributor, whether working independently or collectively.

As such, if one is barred from freely speaking or listening, that denial is akin to saying the individual cannot contribute to the overall corpus of society’s knowledge. This short-sightedness halts knowledge generation, detracting from solving our problems. There is an arrogance inherent in this anti-individual, anti-speech stance. This position of the Left is a result of characterizing the world as being in a perpetual state of emergency, which justifies the dehumanizing and uncivil behaviour we have seen employed against their opponents – all for the greater good. (Regrettably, the Right has also adopted these bad habits.) The Left does so by employing various propagandizing tactics to achieve its end, including no-platforming and cancel culture.

Unfortunately, the political Right has started to play along, albeit differently. The Right believes the value of free speech was instantiated in the past through formal democratic means and therefore earns the title of legitimacy. Therefore, the Right urges us to defend the inertia that old habits have brought into the modern world. In essence, it argues a high bar must be met before old habits are undone, with the assumption they were originally established through rigorous trial and error. This opposition is further justified in light of the fact that the Left provides no reasonable replacement or alternative method of generating solutions.

The solution to these political ideologies is to remind ourselves that we are individuals, who have the capacity for free thought, and who retain the right to participate in discourse – whether as speakers or listeners. It is only through reaching across the political divide that we can begin to understand each other’s moral frameworks, re-humanize one another, and begin the long, arduous process of truth-seeking. Our planet’s continued existence may depend on it.