The big thing that really has me most alarmed is social media. It’s trite to say and we
all know it, we all know that the internet and social media allows us to confirm everything
we want, it’s the biggest gift to confirmation bias ever we all know that, but I only really
came to appreciate it viscerally, it was the week before the election, and because I follow
on twitter I follow a lot of people on the left and the right, and right next to each
other, literally next to each other was a video that a black journalist had taken of
a stupid white guy with a baseball cap, there was some traffic altercation and he’s just
yelling the n word at him, it’s just horrible to see. And then you look at the comments
on that, and of course people watching this video are absolutely horrified, and ‘How
can these people vote for Trump!’ and you know it’s all about how incredibly unbelievably,
awful and evil all those people are on the other side. And then right below that was
a tweet about a Yale student who for her art project, she got herself pregnant about 5
or 6 times with artificial insemination, then she induced abortion, and she used the bloody
foetus in her art project. You know it’s the equivalent of the other one for the left.
Now it was a true story, it so happens that it was in 2009 but that doesn’t matter,
on the internet it doesn’t matter, it’s just like it was presented as this year. You
look at the comments and again it’s like, ‘These people are monsters, the left is
just sick, sick, sick! And I realised when I was young, I was always on the left, when
I was young and I was a teenager in my 20’s, every month there would be a new awful thing
about the republicans and we’d all talk about how awful the republicans were, and
then next month there would be another scandal. And now it’s every minute! You know, so
if anyone uses the n word or paints a swastika somewhere in Peoria, Illinois, everybody on
the left is going to see it, and be outraged by it, and vice versa. So I think this is
our new national emergency. I think we need to be educating our children beginning in
grade school for just how perilous and difficult democracy is, and how much humility is needed.
We need to be teaching cognitive psychology, we need to be teaching psychology for democracy,
teaching humility, giving people exposure to the best ideas on both sides.