The harmful effects of our polarized political and social climate result, in part, from the function of anxiety as a general central nervous system alarm, which makes the brain look for threats.
Young people are particularly susceptible to the negative effects of polarized thinking. Lacking sufficient life experience, they can easily mistake anxiety about a political or social policy for anxiety about love and friendship, and vice versa.
In the best of times, young people have a low tolerance of intellectual ambiguity and disagreement, which can undermine their relationships. Low tolerance of disagreement and ambiguity is normal in the developing sense of self, when feelings of certainty are more important to emotional coherence than intellectual analysis. But in turbulent times, when focused on things they can’t control, like politics and social policy, they feel powerless, which makes them irritable, intellectually rigid or superficial, and less likely to sustain close relationships.
Intolerance of different perspectives and high emotional reactivity affect many Americans in our times, but it’s especially intense in youth who tend to think in absolutes or extremes. Couched in ideology, polarized thinking, with its inherent biases and blind spots, inevitably deteriorates relationships, if not blocks them altogether. For any close relationship to succeed, we cannot have the mindset of, "I will only love you if you agree with me."
Red flag disagreements are those that devalue, dismiss, or disrespect.
Under stress, we tend to see the world through the lens of our core vulnerability—fear or shame—and make projections onto others based on them. The immature prefrontal cortex is prone to use projections as shortcut judgments. Projections make it impossible to see others as complex people, independent of our feelings about them.
Political beliefs are preferences that should be grounded in basic humanity and moral character. When they are not, disagreements seem like personal assaults, even abuse.
It’s especially hard for generations raised with social media to grasp how it amplifies stress and magnifies disagreements, and that it cannot adequately address the enormous complexity of social problems.
All the above contribute to the alarming rise in anxiety and depression among young people.
How to Escape
I believe that political and social polarization will reach a tipping point when rejecting groups of people for any reason becomes too exhausting. In the meantime, if you want to escape political narcissism, be more curious than judgmental. Look for what you can learn from different perspectives, rather than reasons to reject them. Look for what is true, even among what you regard as falsehoods. Replace polemic thinking with dialectic analysis, which synthesizes the best of all positions. Don’t settle for the superficial and heavily biased information contained in labels.
Recognize that the crucial characteristics of functional close relationships are compassion and kindness, not political or social agreement.