I’m also someone who really doesn’t like a lot of interpersonal drama or personal confrontation. I love a good discussion, but free, intelligent discussions about theory and ideas. And everything is so personal and has such massive stakes for everyone’s identity, I just don’t feel like there’s much safe territory left for someone like me who, for some perverse reason, likes to be a contrarian to all positions.

So yeah, I’m too afraid of what other people may think of me, as well as too afraid of what I’m doing to myself, to feel comfortable in the majority of modern media these days, including social media. And it’s typical of my personality to want to retreat and sort everything out before being willing to interact with the world. The problem is, the world is too big to figure everything out and have all the answers. New problems and challenges arise daily, and I could easily spend all my time retreating and just trying to sort out the latest issue that disturbs my peace.

So there’s a good motivation and a bad one for pulling back inside me. But since I’ve been spending so much time pulling back, I figured I may as well at least share something about the small number of things that have drawn me out. I’ve been reading a lot, and I’ve been trying to figure out what the various books I’ve been reading have in common. And I think I can put my finger on it. They’re almost all people who are pushing back against their own apparent “side” and are willing to criticize the mistakes of their own party, faith, discipline, race, class, sex, or culture. Not in the way of a vindicated savior or liberator or revolutionary, not in a way that makes you feel good because you’re scoring points against the other side, but in a humble way that is willing to confront your own side’s mistakes because you really love it and truly see its strengths and want it to succeed and become something bigger and better and more complete. And that isn’t always easy. It’s easy to criticize what you hate and don’t require, it’s much harder to criticize what you love and need and believe in.

Not that it’s all about criticism, in fact I think part of our problem today is that it’s so much easier to articulate what’s wrong with someone or something than extoll a compelling positive vision for what you’re trying to achieve. Explaining what you’re against often just creates enemies, it’s explaining what you’re for that creates followers.

Still, I love a contrarian, someone willing to swim against the current in the interest of knowledge and exploration. Even when they’re wrong, you tend to learn something about the position they hold, or your own, from their approach. I’m terribly interested in people who can find the problems within themselves and want to defeat those problems where they live, within ourselves, because they love the truth and trust it more than they trust themselves or their identities and loyalties. It takes a lot of courage to stand up to your enemies, it takes even more courage to stand up to your friends, as Albus Dumbledore said. Or, to quote an older source, wounds from a friend can be trusted. And your closest friend is usually yourself.

That’s why I find thinkers like Neitsche and Sarte and Camus so compelling, despite them residing at an opposite end from the positions I usually take. They provide something real to cut my teeth on, a real challenge that makes me find the strengths and weaknesses within myself.

It took me a while to define my own theory about politics and perspective, and it took a lot of wandering through the rantings of both sides to realize the truth. Everybody was right. Or maybe everybody was wrong. Basically, to a certain degree, everyone is right about their concerns about the other side, the danger really does exist and is very realistic. And everyone is right about the good qualities and intentions of their side. Everyone does have some constructive ideas and insights, and everyone is right about how they can see the other side driving the ship toward the rocks. I remember when I suddenly saw and truly understood and believed that everyone was right about everybody. It changed my life. And then I started to see that the real problem wasn’t the other side, per se, but the atmosphere for expression, the medium, the overall environment that pushed one side or the other or both toward more or less complimentary or oppositional, or healthy or pathological, or balanced or extreme versions of themselves. And right now both sides are not doing great.

The thing is, in America, we have a remarkably even (despite all our history) divide between parties, and a power balance that mostly just rocks back and forth. So what this tells me is that we’re really dealing with is a divide larelgely based around broad personality factors, differing strategies for handling life, that are distributed fairly evenly. I won’t bother going into the specific characters of thos divides, but what it really means is that you fundementally can’t eliminate the other side or discount their contributions or concerns.

The values and concerns of one side might need to be balanced against the values and concerns of your own, but actually defeating or removing them not only isn’t desirable (it would deprive us of essential and necessary qualities humans need to thrive), it wouldn’t really be possible (because a certain percentage of humans possess those qualities by nature). So you would have to kill or deport half the country, and constantly find and eliminate anyone born with those traits, which wouldn’t really make for a better society.

Having said that, we do need to seek to confront the most extreme, unbalanced, pathological versions of those personalities, to some degree on the other side, but more urgently within our own. We really only have authority over ourselves, and the best way to lead is by example. So our crusade should, ideally, focus on finding the best version of who we are, not on finding the worst version of what other people are.

So I don’t think we need to get rid of conservatives or liberals, and I don’t think we can. We just need to get rid of the worst versions of those super-personalities, starting with ourselves.

So, having said all that, who have I been reading or listening to lately that I would place on my short list of interesting people worth hearing from? Well, here they are. They’re an odd group (who would likely make some people from both sides angry for different reasons). And in fact I disagree quite a bit with most of them about lots of things. But here they are. None of them are perfect, but I think if you could find a way to at least hear what they have to say and understand it, sympathize with their perspectives a little, it would go a long way toward shaking up your ideas and making them a bit more complex, as they have with mine.

Thomas Sowell

Walter Williams

Shelby Steele

Jason Riley

Glenn Loury

John McWhorter

Jonathan Haidt

Douglas Murray

Daniel Gardner

Jen Twenge

David Berlinsky

Gaad Saad

Steven Pinker

Jordan Peterson

Erika Christakis

Janice Fiamengo

Stephen Fry

The Hoover Insitution

The Rubin Report

The Manhattan Insitute

ReasonTV

Admitting I enjoy these folks is probably going to get me branded as an alt-right maniac by a lot of people, and that’s fair. Part of my theory of knowledge is that you’re always going to find problems and mistakes in any single source, and you have to learn to think and be flexible in your judgements if you want to navigate understanding with any real thoughtfulness. There’s no person so perfect that they’ve got everything right, and everyone will seem like a maniac to someone. And in every manic there’s usually a kernel of wisdom to be gleaned. These are just some of the maniacs I’ve enjoyed lately.

Any actual alt-right people out there might wonder why my list includes so many people who are Jewish, liberal, black, gay, female, atheist, etc. I’ve got a couple libertarians on there too, and to be honest that’s one of the things I struggle with too because I have a very hard time getting on board with libertarianism. I just think these are all smart, disruptive, thoughtful people who have something to offer that’s worth considering as a curative to a lot of what’s out there. I think (mostly) these are the sort of people who could criticize both sides of an issue and aren’t obviously a loyalist right or left wing thinker. They’re people who could easily be ignored by both sides. Or in some cases they’re a more complex or less typical or more interesting version of a more typical ideology (unusual conservatives or unusual liberals).

I’m an extreme Trump critic, and it was very hard for me even to listen to people discuss his appeal in some of these venues, but trying to understand was one of my goals, and I think I learned a lot from it. I was able to sympathize with and make sense of their viewpoints a lot better. It is a little easier for me to hear those arguments from people who were liberal and crossed over to conservative than it is to hear them from loyal conservatives.

Similarly, it’s easier for me to hear about faith from agnostics like Peterson and Berlinski than it is to hear from popular religious scholars. It’s easier for me to hear about race from former black panthers. It’s easier for me to hear about capitalism from former Marxists. It’s easier for me to hear about conservatism from former liberals. The journey these people have had to take and the fact they came from an opposing position adds some texture and perspective that I value, even if I don’t embrace all their positions.

If I had to pick a single place to start, it would be Jonathan Haidt’s work in “The Righteous Mind” and Jordan Peterson’s psychology lectures on personality and politics. I think those together add some legitimacy to my personal theories (based on experience) on politics and personality. Together, they provide legitimate grounds for why both sides have something to offer and are worth listening to, so we can curb our excesses, avoid our blind spots, better understand the aims and concerns of others, and have a better understanding of what it is we and they really have to contribute. Once that door is open, there’s at least the possibility of positive growth.

The hardest thing to understand about people (me included) is that they’re all people. They’re all complex. They all have some strengths and insights, and they all have some weaknesses and blind spots. We can’t afford to make one dimensional heroes of ourselves or one dimensional villains of others, whichever side we stand on. We genuinely can’t afford it, America can’t afford it, humanity can’t afford it. We need all those conservatives, we need all those liberals. And if we fail to be aware of our value, or the value of others, or the potential of our own pathology and not just that of others, we’re doomed to miss out. We need all of our country, and all of our country has the potential to helps us or to harm us.

As it is, it seems like right now there’s just something broken with the whole system we’re operating in. It’s convincing all of us were the best and that everyone else is the worst. It’s driving us in an endless battle of distorted perceptions and infinite reactions and counter-reactions to feed our pursuit of one another. It’s stealing away our health and social lives and virtue and offering us some sort of junk food substitute. And we’re afraid to stop eating because we’re starving, and we don’t know what we would live off if we stopped. But in a purely practical sense we need to ask ourselves, did the world really get so much worse since 2011, or did something change about how we connect to the world, and is it possible that it’s doing something bad to us under the guise of giving us what we want?

And right now I’m a little tired of being the person who says “that’s not really that unreasonable a concern” about what liberals say about Trump and getting looked at like I’m a degenerate. And I’m tired of being the person who says “that’s not really that unreasonable a concern” about what conservatives say about Biden and getting looked at like I’m a degenerate. Get off your high horses. Everyone has reached just as dangerous of depths as everyone else, in my opinion, and everyone has just as much potential to contribute and be helpful and valuable.

The line dividing good and evil cuts down the heart of every man, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said. This is one of the most essential truths of all history, the core moral truth of Western Civilization. The idea that whatever and whoever we are, however good or powerful we are, whatever our history, whatever our position, whatever our intentions, whatever our abilities, there exists within all of us the potential to have those things go terrifically right or terribly wrong. And any excuse, whether power and privilege or the lack of it, can give us sufficient reason to embrace our darker potential, and either could just as well be the means to lifting us up.

There isn’t any inborn moral determinism that guarantees us our status and makes us either unassailably righteous or unredeemably corrupt. Neither victory nor victimhood, neither powerlesness nor privilege, is determinative of the moral status of us or anyone else. In any way. We are what we are, and we can be the good version of it, and we can be the bad version of it (and most of the time we’re being a little bit of both, and in a large complex society the greatest likelihood is that our institutions are also being a bit of both).

And ignorance of our potential for either is terribly dangerous. We will miss the good we could do, and we will miss the evil we risk. There is no ideological purity, no personal immunity; instead, we must always think of “there but for the grace of God go I”.

And as long as we can’t admit that our side is getting (or even has the potential to get) a bit sick and distorted and pathological, for the sake of resisting the pathology of the other side, all we’re going to do is accelerate the race to the bottom. And we won’t even realize we’re doing it. And then we’ll all cut each other’s throats, tear the whole fabric of society to bits, and get to start over again with the sort of reset that comes from complete catastrophe and the loss of the treasured institutions that we all built together and inherited together.

So that’s my soapbox. As usual, I’ve taken so long to say it, that it will have far less impact than it would if I could have been a bit more pithy. Oh well. I have an odd personality type. I’m an Enneagram 5w4, and when it comes to the Big 5 personality traits I’m off the charts on Openness. So my personality exists over a vast gulf in human perspective known as “the void”. What’s actually in the void? I can tell you. The void in the cliff that people who go too far off one side or the other and meet no help from other side fall off of. It’s the depth of disease and despair that all human personality can slide down into if they go too deep into themselves. The only way to stand over the void is to bridge it from both sides and meet, hand against hand, force against force, pushing together, in the middle.

The sucky thing about living in that personality space, an an individual, is the temptation to fall into it with both feet, from both directions, as it were (even as the species does socollectively) . So I find myself troubled with the psychic burden of feeling myself falling in from both directions, and being troubled on every side by watching other people falling in with me from both directions. It’s pretty depressing, and it’s even more depressing because people standing on both sides look at me and point out that, from their perspective, I’m standing in the worst pits of their opposition. And I have no idea how to live with it. Because from my perspective no one is safe. Everyone around me seems to just be descending slowly into the same indistinguishable depths. No one is safe. If experience has taught me anything these last few years, it’s that no one, however reasonable and nice and well intentioned, is safe, and second, that there is no obvious ultimate limit to just how far down things can go. No limit to how bad it could get, how far people could be taken in their pathology. It’s history in action. We are like all other humans that have come before us.

Archimedes, speaking of the potential power of a lever, said “Give me but a firm place to stand and I will move the Earth.” We are all capable of being moved with the right level, the right fulcrum. And right now we’re building bigger and bigger levers and fulcrums than ever, thanks to our media. We all have the potential to be moved to either health or disfigurstion. We can’t take that vulnerability away from ourselves, nor that power. All we can do is learn to admit it to ourselves, and to seek that little bit of pushback that will help to restrain our excesses, that little bit of appreciation that will help us receive the gifts of others, that little bit of awareness that will help us see the paths we walk and where we steer too hard into or away from the wind, that little bit of wisdom that pulls us out of the advantages and limitations we each face to something just a little bit higher, more complete, more balanced, than what we are alone.

Let me not, to the marriage of true minds, admit impediment. Right now we’re admitting a lot of impediments. We need a wedding of the minds that make up our nation. We’re like a house in a bitter marriage, heading toward divorce. Each of us trying to save the marriage by burning the other out of it. And we’re letting ourselves drift further and further apart from the state of truth that would allow us to meet. Yes, there are terrible, almost insurmountable differences. Yes, the dangers each of us present, that we see in one a other, are quite real. It’s a terrifying prospect, because we all hold such equal dangerous potential. But that similarity is also our strength. The same line divides all our hearts. Not one from another, but from ourselves. We are all together in our danger. And we are together in our potential to help one another too. The line that divides us isn’t between us, it’s within us. Within all of us. And if we can just see it, if we can attend to it, where we live, within our own hearts, we can begin to inch back toward our meeting.

Among the these people I listed I have seen hopeful signs. I’ve seen people atheists uniting with the religious to share concerns and hopes, people coming from different sides to meet in the middle and share insights. And I hope that’s something that can continue. I’m not optimistic. But I wish to be.

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