I feel like starting this out with a few examples of people getting into heated arguments about politics, but we all have those examples in our head, don’t we?
There’s the postal worker who was knocked out by a retired police officer. Drivers running over various protestors. There’s the protestors and counter-protestors for say, Black Lives Matter rallies. These are some of the easier examples that come to mind thinking of people generally, but also thinking of my personal world, the family members who don’t talk politics (or religion) because they know it’s upsetting for others and eventually themselves.
This article isn’t about BLM or any particular protest, but about the phenomenon itself of,
Why do people get so worked up over arguing politics that they are willing to hurt — even kill — others?
In a nutshell: you have an idea about What's Going On and encountering people who are telling you "no, your idea about What's Going On isn't really What's Going On" is received on a nervous system level as a threat. It attacks your sense of trust, your sense of reality.
That’s why politics and religion are named together as things you never discuss at the dinner table. Dinners, like sharing food in olden times, is about bringing people together.
Why ruin that with your certitude about human nature and what life is meant for and what someone you don’t personally know thinks, says, or believes?
Your ideas about what's going on came from somewhere. Was it the newspaper? The internet, your friends or family?
You took the time to take in that news, that’s an investment. You maybe got it from a source you liked, a source you often listen to and invest time and limited brain energy into.
So when someone disagrees with you your nervous system receives it as an attack on your sense of trust in your sources.
What if your ideas of What's Happening is about something you already believed, something you may have thought for a while, something you spent a lot of time talking about with people who agree, and reinforce, your ideas?
You saw a meme about abortion and already thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
Now someone you get into discussion with is saying No, you're wrong. Well what's wrong?
The piece of information you remember that you conjured in your head and consciously expressed and shared in that discussion? That’s a powerful attachment we overlook.
Or are they saying your belief system and sense of self is wrong? That’s the most intensely personal, isn’t it? How you see yourself, as invariably a good person navigating the world caring about what goes on.
To explain this, a good civics education would teach how there is a fragility with attaching our sense of selves to our inherently fallible opinions of What's Happening.
What's Happening, What's Going On beyond our physical experience, our sight and touch, requires trust that what we are being told, the information we receive, is good information.
Good information is accurate, in describing what's happening, the who when where what, and if it explains the why or how, that it knows what it's talking about.
We do this all the time.
We trust certain sources over others. In your early life this may have started with watching TV news when your parent(s) did, you may have read newspapers and experimented with The Economist during your insufferable phase.
We live in interesting times.
The narrow scope of what TV news covered and how it covered it, explaining what's going on to people lied to us about the Iraq War, encouraging popular beliefs that were not based in accurate readings or quality explanations of why or how.
At the same time, the internet has enabled an individually-tailored exposure to what's happening, with all sorts of consequences.
Getting news about the world may have started with word of mouth, from peers and family and neighbours and town criers, then the printing press came along, then the telegram, radio, television, and finally internet. Soon we will have a metaverse.
Each iteration of spreading news about What's Going On changed the pace of and availability of news. It changed how we absorbed information, particularly when we mix sound and images. Finally it changed our sense of trust, because of how tailored news is on social media.
And through it all, civics education suffered within public education’s decades-long defunding.
The place we are now is a stage in this evolution. There is no final stage.
But it can all end when people attach so much of themselves to their ideas of What's Going On that they are willing to kill each other over it. That’s how society can unravel.
In other words, society can unravel because what do you do when all you get is news confirming how bad things are and all those bad things happening to you and loved ones and a "world" you have so much attachment to is being harmed by bad people?
People are willing to hurt each other, cut off family, disown kids, block hospital entrances, show up to school board meetings, vote for bad leaders, because our brains produce cocktails of self-beliefs inspired or agitated to action.
Acts of charity and domestic terrorism spring from the same place: attachment in What's Happening, self-beliefs in our values and agency, and what we choose to do about it.
So it goes.