New Communication Skills Can Bridge the Political Divide and Address the Extreme Polarization Threatening Democracy
“60 Minutes” is on in the background as I begin to think about polarization. The topic is Google’s Bard, the new generative AI e-technology whose compositions will soon compete with doctoral dissertations and Shakespeare. It will be able to research, compose, reason, plan, play, “feel,” and participate in conversations. It also makes things up, a phenomenon the creators call “hallucinating.” It was referred to as the most important invention humanity will ever make.
We can argue if the emergence of this technology is more wonderful or more dangerous, but the question I will pose is different. Is homosapiens outsourcing its humanity?
If machines are becoming more human, humans seem to be becoming more robotic. Pills put us to sleep, keep us awake, help us concentrate, and help us perform sexually. We can change our bodies to fit our gender identities. However, we seem to be increasingly rigid and polarized in our beliefs, with little motivation or ability to solve intergroup conflicts. Social media has allowed us to withdraw into “identity groups” that concretize and reinforce differences. Dehumanizing screens invite aggression to surface. “How can a conservative talk to a liberal?” seems like a problem a chatbot could solve but a human seems unable and unwilling to try.
I’ve been a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst for almost half a century, and I've watched this “outsourcing” phenomenon happen in my field as well. When I began my residency in 1975, people were willing to commit to intensive, expensive treatment to help them explore their drives, conflicts, organizing symbols and metaphors, and defense mechanisms that resided in the depths of their unconscious and interfered with their ability to love and to work. The intense, daily engagement with the analyst was the catalyst for change.
Now we offer “pills and skills” paid for by insurance. “How can I help myself feel and do better?” has transitioned to, “What can you give me to make me feel and do better?” Mental health problems, including adolescent suicide, have reached epidemic proportions. Treatments derived from neuroscience, while useful for many and essential for some, have become our first choice for suffering individuals; human connection and meaning not required.
Our species has developed to the point where we can cure malignancies, fly to Mars, and communicate instantly across massive physical divides. But we remain unable to bridge divides between people who come from different psychological centers.
I believe that “isms” and “phobias” aren’t just about superficial differences like skin color, clothing choices, where we worship, and whom we love. They’re about deep psychodynamic differences emerging from different personal andcultural histories and different thinking styles. One person’s need is another person’s fear. Individuals think using different levels of abstraction; one person’s metaphor is another’s literal reality. Large group dynamics are enormously powerful.
We advocate using empathy as a bridge across divides, but that effort fails under many conditions. If one group sincerely believes that the other group is deeply defended, aggressive, destructive, and maybe evil, the other group attributes the same dynamics to the opposing side, and their behaviors directly impact one another, how far canempathic imagination take us?
Individuals who can tolerate paradox seem impotent to effect change, while people on the extremes rise to the surface and hijack efforts at dialogue. In the dehumanizing arena of the internet, we ridicule and argue, block and unfriend, in ways that have become socially acceptable. But it’s not just happening on the internet. The mainstream media is equally divided. News anchors on networks like FOX and MSNBC spend much of their time demeaning the perspectives of the opposing side.
This is the psychodynamic and political background that led me to seek tangible ways to bridge the divide by creating the Waging Dialogue Project in 2020. I agree with Vamik Volkan, MD, the psychoanalyst who consults on the world stage, that we all live under sociopolitical “tents.” We paint symbols on those tents, symbols that represent our group’s “chosen traumas” and “chosen glories.” These create enduring intragroup loyalties and trigger aggression against outsiders. However, getting to know outsiders breaks down the aggressive impulse, effectively “If you talk, you don’t kill.”
In my field, connecting with the psychological pain of another is often lifesaving, while being psychologically annihilated can be devastating and lead to violence against self or other. I believe the same dynamic holds true on the world stage. If people who have very different firmly held perspectives could begin to talk, not only would they be less motivated to annihilate each other’s humanity and policies, they would understand each other in more accurate and nuanced ways and begin to solve problems together.
Hurling epithets using “isms” is prejudicial, polarizing, and aborts dialogue and insight. If you experience someone as racist, sexist, homophobic, or antisemitic, using other language to explain how you feel will be much more effective. Find ways to talk to and with that person, not at, about, or against them.
But “talking” is complex, especially on a level playing field where the pain exists in the space between both parties and one individual isn’t being paid to heal the pain of another. Proven techniques address the need to actively listen and repeat back what the other person is saying before adding a different perspective and to tolerate the coexistence of opposite ideas and feelings, skills that are critical to bridge deeply felt divides.
Waging Dialogue is working to apply these ideas, which are grounded in psychoanalytic theory and practice in a number of behavioral sciences, to a new place, one that is tearing our society apart. It involves working with both conscious and unconscious forces, recognizing that the factors that frame our political positions are driven by many things having nothing to do with politics. Teaching people to “talk” in a new way will lead superficial efforts at dialogue into deeper, unexplored territories. If we can imagine a structure and a theory to frame them, these explorations can become exciting and empowering rather than impossible and treacherous.
Waging Dialogue’s pilot project has been exploring whether different approaches to dialogue can, in fact, break down polarization. Our immediate goal is to bring together people from different sides of ideological divides and invite them to talk about a charged topic in front of an audience. In the past three years we have hosted quite a few dialogues and begun to develop a model that we hope can be replicated, studied, and developed.
The juxtaposition of “waging” with “dialogue” is meant to call attention to the fact that superficial efforts at empathy aren’t enough to bridge real differences. In any dialogue, difficult feelings will arise and will need to be expressed by one side and tolerated by the other so that new questions will be invited to surface. Hearing “your worldview has no right to exist” can be experienced as a gut punch, one that can be mitigated but not avoided.
Theoretically and philosophically, the presence of an audience makes the arena into a “tripartite structure.” The audience represents reality, morality, and society. It can be experienced as a set of friends and enemies, a teacher, a parent, a God; an entity at once supportive, curious, and critical. Because that “someone” is watching, it motivates both parties to be true to themselves, true to their dialogue partner, and just-plain-true at the same time. But that’s theoretical. In reality, two people talking over a cup of coffee is fine. The key is being open to really listening and having the tools to get past the rough spots that are inevitable when two people with vastly different world views are trying to find common ground.
These dynamics came alive in a conversation Waging Dialogue hosted between me and Bobby Powell, a MAGA supporter and a former marine trained as a journalist who hosts a far-right radio program, “The Truth Is Viral.” He was at the Capitol on January 6, filming people he believes are members of Antifa and the FBI, organizations that he believes planned the event.
My takeaway from the experience is the same as Bobby’s. He wrote, “Though we have significant political differences, I view Dr. Maher as a friend; simply because she was willing to sit down and learn about me as a human being as well. I have not found this to be the case with the majority of leftists I encounter who instantly hate me because I belong to the class of ‘privileged’ white men whom they would prefer disappear from the planet.”
I think of the first step in a new dialogue process as analogous to the first step in a psychoanalytic process; building trust and inviting curiosity and empathy. Present dialogue models tend to focus on the content of differences and argue in a style that resembles either a debate or a parallel presentation of ideas. Those efforts tend to arrive at dead ends.
In individual psychoanalysis, the presenting problem or symptom is resolved closer to the end of the process, rather than at the beginning. I predict that the same thing will happen in addressing polarization. For example, Bobby and I didn’t discuss his belief that the election was rigged. He knows I’m highly doubtful – I’ve joked that we “lefties” aren’t smart enough to rig an election without being caught – but it’s okay to keep that question open.
These days the most disturbing problems stare us in the face and interfere with the work of empathy (partially because they excite the media who emphasize them). If we put these conflicts off to the side and address the humanity of the other at the start, the more outrageous societal symptoms will be resolved, or slowly disappear without needing to be spoken about, later. In essence, building the trusted connection first is critical to finding common ground on the thorny issues about which we disagree.
After the anxiety lessened and trust developed, I discovered that some of Bobby’s ideas, e.g., about transgender issues, health care and immigration, made more sense than I had anticipated, especially when he was able to ground them in personal experience. I found myself coming up with a bridging idea about abortion as well. Many new pathways for further dialogue began to open. He shared our video with his large right-wing audience, and I shared it on my psychoanalytic listserv. We were both proud of it.
Following the dialogue with Bobby, I shared it with a panel of psychoanalysts to get their impressions about what we had learned that could be useful in framing our approach going forward. After reviewing the dialogue, each panelist showed segments of the original video and began a discussion of the themes apparent in the chosen segment.
Many insights emerged that will inform the dialogue methodology, including:
The importance of focusing on process more than content in an initial interaction.
The need to tolerate another’s point of view and meet at the level of shared humanity even if the content is triggering or inaccurate.
Benefits of having ground rules versus free dialogue and the need to respect different styles in relation to the structure of conversations.
The extent to which personal experiences color political views.
The realization that kindness and empathy don’t change minds, but can soften polarization and tolerating the coexistence of opposites allows for creative solutions.
Recognition that respectful listening led to a shift away from anxiety, and, later, to friendship and mutual enjoyment.
Learning that teaching about differences doesn’t work as well as getting to know others who represent those differences.
Waging Dialogue’s focus is to develop tools to enable better communication across ideological divides, interpret society’s resistance to believing that reversing polarization is possible, and excite others to join the effort. The dialogue process is identifying structured theories and techniques that are effective in crossing the political divide but these won’t be solidified until closer to the end of an iterative process similar to that referenced in my book, Catalysis: A Recipe to Slow Down or Abort Humankind's Leap to War.
My long-term goal is to start a movement — a movement that I sometimes refer to as “Uncancel Culture”. If we’re going to refind our shared humanity and supersede robots in addressing human problems with depth, complexity, and empathic imagination, we will need to find new ways to engage effectively with different or threatening others. We can’t outsource these efforts to robots or to political leaders. Individuals can and must begin to make these efforts.
We hope to catalyze a process that widens and deepens at the same time. By “widen,” I mean that we intend to spread the word until the idea goes viral and a movement begins. Communicating across divides is hard work, but once the idea catches hold, people will realize that engaging with threatening others can be as much fun as a difficult video game. In the political process, challenging political leaders to see the perspective of their opponents will be a critical element. The ability of our Body Politic to see clearly out of right and left eyes at the same time, adapting to one another with one side dominant and leading, is a metaphor I find useful. Our movement will lead to the election of leaders who can demonstrate this ability.
"Deepening" refers to exploration of the intersection of one person or group’s conscious and unconscious forces with those of others, and the symptomatic precipitants that emerge from these sometimes toxic “chemical” equations. Differentiating valid ideas from idiosyncratic personal dynamics, imagining a repertoire of effective responses, addressing the interweaving of large group dynamics with the dynamics of individuals, and developing and testing hypotheses designed to transform destructive forces into creative ones, will prove to be as deep and as complex as rocket science. This may eventually develop into a new academic field.
Currently, Waging Dialogue is setting up other dialogues to discuss topics like systemic racism, antisemitism, sex and gender, guns, abortion, and religion. These will help us refine the dialogue process and determine which approaches work best in addressing the specific dynamics of breaking through toxic polarization. We are currently affiliated with the ListenFirst Coalition and seeking to ally with other dialogue and bridging organizations as well as academic institutions (including a program with the Bay College Civics Corps).
Eventually we will be able to teach our children a new “language” — the ability to read and respond appropriately and effectively to the psychological communications of the other. They will learn, not just how to be "nice", but how to respect different thinking styles, defenses, fears, desires, traumas, individual and cultural histories, and conscious and unconscious forces, enroute to a more complex understanding of themselves and others. We may always be a “killing species”, but we can learn to think more and react less. We can learn those things from one another, not from our robots.
About the Author:
Alice Lombardo Maher, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She graduated from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Psychoanalytic Association of New York affiliated with NYU Langone Health. She is founder and director of Changing our Consciousness (COC), a non-profit organization dedicated to the emergence of a new language for communication across psychological divides. Alice founded COC and its educational arm, Emotional Imprint, to develop tools that can be shared with young people. She co-created two documentaries on mental health stigma, “How to Touch a Hot Stove,” and “Daniel, Debra, Leslie (and You?).” Her most recent project is Waging Dialogue, dedicated to the emergence of effective communication across interpersonal and intergroup divides. Her book, Catalysis: A Recipe to Slow Down or Abort Humankind’s Leap to War, was published in 2018.