The Seduction of Being Right

Many years ago a friend of mine who studied the Middle East gave a talk in which he spoke about how the radical fringes of each side, both the Israeli and the Palestinian, functioned to potentiate each other. The extreme actions of one side served as evidence to validate the extreme views and actions of the other side. This dynamic is present in every polarized situation, whether it is between countries, within countries, within organizations, or even between two people.

Once we become polarized, our beliefs and opinions of the situation tend to increase the gap between us. Part of this is due to the confirmation bias—the tendency of our minds to seek out information that confirms our opinion and to ignore information that would bring our beliefs into question. All of us want to be confirmed in our position. Much as we might not want to admit it, we like to be right. If I think you are out to get me, then I will notice and interpret everything you do and don’t do as evidence to support my theory. It feels good to be right.

One of the most challenging parts of confirmation bias is that it mostly operates below the level of our awareness. Most of the time, most of us think we are seeing the world as it is. From the perceptual point of view, I am rarely aware that I am creatively participating in constructing the world I see. The fact that I am paying attention to some features of reality while ignoring everything else is usually hidden from me. One researcher estimated that there at 8 billion bits of information available to us at any moment and we can only process approximately 8!

It turns out, that our input awareness apparatus, our senses and our brains, are woefully outmatched by the richness of the cosmos. One confirmation of this (and notice I’m presenting bits of evidence that confirm the rightness of my position) is that when we slow down, it is often possible to see and sense more about where we are than we had previously been conscious of. When you are looking into the world, any place you start turns out to be more interesting and complex and interconnected than you had previously imagined.

In my work as a life and leadership coach, I find that wherever we start our coaching conversation leads to everything else, including the center. The particular issue you are dealing with at this moment, contains everything else that has ever happened to you. When we look closely at the world we are encountering, we can begin to see both our part in creating whatever is here as well as the choices available to us that had previously been hidden.

I’m thinking of all this because of the ongoing polarization of our country with Trump’s relentless assertions of election fraud. Some people say Trump is really a sadist—that he enjoys the pained reactions of liberals like myself when he does or says something outrageous. Certainly some of his followers delight in his outrageous behavior that is so upsetting to us New York Times and Washington Post type people. There is some release from feeling ignored and powerless in this quickly changing society.

And the primacy of conspiracy theories—about the election, about Q-Anon’s wild assertions of a deep state that is running child slavery rings that only Donald Trump knows about and can truly fight—these are believable to many because they fit our human psychological need to be right. When we are upset by the actions of those we disagree with, there is something thrilling about imagining our worst fantasies.

Ross Douthat of the NY Times put it this way last week when he wrote of:

a fantasy in which your political enemies are poised to do something unbelievably terrible — like all the right-wing militia violence that liberals expected on Election Day — that would vindicate all your fears and makes you happy in your hatred. (bolding added)

Being confirmed is a wonderful and dangerous thing. The workers at security check-in at the airport, there must be some excitement and sense of confirmation when they actually do uncover something of danger. Given how rarely their search uncovers anything more than too much shampoo or a Swiss pocket knife I wonder how they stay awake and alert through the endless lines that used to be a normal feature of airports.

So how do we stay alert to the damage and potential hazards Trump continues to pose to democracy and to our country without falling into the world of emotional whirlpool of happy hatred? How do we stay focused on what incremental steps are possible right now rather than the many fantasies that swirl around us?

Peter Block, author and organizational consultant, once said ‘If you want to change the world, change the room you’re in.’