“I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.”
— Attributed to Franz Kafka
Note: I have nothing against Twitter, per se, as a corporation. All social media platforms have the effect discussed below–Twitter is but one example. Video available at the end.
Is America truly sharply divided? What does it mean to be successful? What do people want from their careers?
Questions like these cut deep at the heart of our human worries. Today, there is a larger than ever disconnect between what we believe about the answers to these questions inwardly, but project externally. Our entire society seems to be living a double life. We are unwittingly complicit in enabling phenomena known as “collective illusions” to thrive–and the costs are devastating. The biggest cost? The children we raise will tragically adopt illusory public ideals as their inward beliefs (spoiler: they already are), and when they invariably fail to live up to them… well, just look around at the current state of youth mental health and self-image and the answer is clear.
Our entire society seems to be living a double life. We are unwittingly complicit in enabling phenomena known as “collective illusions” to thrive–and the costs are devastating.
We live in a time when small vocal minorities seem to define the status quo. It would be one thing if they spoke reason alone, but–glaringly–that is false. “It’s a matter of distribution,” is what my organizational behavior professor used to say. There will always be outliers in a sample set, but the issue, today, is that the outliers have supplanted the average in influence, and so we have a weird situation where there are 2 averages. A real average that reflects people’s true (and usually private) thoughts, and an illusory average that reflects the forced conformity of the data set to the outlier values. Whether viewed from a statistical or societal lens, this is nothing short of insane. However, considering how loud the outlier voice is, today, it is no wonder that the majority of Americans think ‘most people’ would believe the country is sharply divided, and perhaps but one supreme court decision away from civil war pt. 2.
The sheer volume and dominance of the outlier voice (often radical), amplified by social media, gives the illusion of representing the view of the majority. On Twitter, for example, 80% of the tweets/interactions are generated by 10% of the user base–yet the public erroneously thinks of the platform as a societal litmus test for all issues. Novel phenomena like this, fueled by the sheer abundance of media and discourse outlets we have today have thus enabled collective illusions to form on scales never before seen in history, and the stakes are commensurately higher than ever before. And it’s not just in America. Not to pick on them, but Japan, for example, has a culture that unhealthily encourages this exact type of cognitive demarcation to the extent that distinct terms have emerged: Honne and tatemae, meaning true self and outer facade, respectively. The bottom line is simple. The only way to protect ourselves, our children, and our societies from the dangers of conforming to ‘illusions of consensus’ is to create, encourage, and protect the conditions for free discourse, and then actually go out there and authentically engage with the people around us.
It also wouldn’t hurt to get off Twitter and touch grass once in a while. You just might find out that there is much more that is uniting, rather than dividing us.
I encourage you to watch and share this video. I admire what the folks at Populace are doing, and I believe any person would find value in watching this great video.
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