I will put evidence in quotes throughout this article, because often it isn’t true or factual scientific evidence that people collect, even though it feels that way. As a brief example, consider a person who is insecure and who holds a belief system filled with self-doubt. They pass a coworker in the hall and the coworker doesn’t look up or acknowledge them. Based on this person’s insecure belief system, this can easily become a piece of “evidence” that the other person must be angry at them, or that they must have done something wrong, or maybe that the coworker doesn’t really like them, just as they always feared. So this gets added to the pile of evidence that supports the insecurities and it strengthens those self-doubts even further, even though there clearly could be 10 much more factual reasons for why the coworker didn’t look up and say hi. Over time, these belief systems become deeply ingrained and are very difficult to change, even when the person comes to therapy wanting to work on changing their belief systems.
Political belief systems develop in the same manner in that our personalities, life experiences, and messages we hear form a set of beliefs that we then tend to hold as true, as facts. Over time, we collect “evidence” that supports what we already believe and again, ignore possible evidence to the contrary, and our habitual belief grows stronger and stronger, propped up by increasing examples that seem to confirm it.
The strategists and marketing experts for the political parties understand this and clearly grasp what some of those central beliefs are, and they provide us “evidence” for these belief systems. They tell us those resonating messages over and over again that hit us emotionally and that hit the mark for what we already believe, and we snap it up as further proof of our beliefs. What we are told doesn’t even have to be rooted in scientific fact or sometimes, even be particularly logical, because belief systems often aren’t scientific or logical. It feels true because we have believed it for so long and found so much “evidence” to support it, so a politician or radio talk show or television host can easily add to the strength of our beliefs by feeding us messages without worrying about whether that message is even factual or supportable.
There are some people who check facts and attempt to keep an open mind free of ingrained beliefs when they assess the policies of all the political parties, some people who are fairly indifferent and disconnected from politics for a variety of reasons, and some people who feel passionately at different levels about what they believe. It is the most challenging for those passionate people to consider alternatives to their beliefs or to close the divide. They don’t really WANT to! They believe that they are correct in their beliefs, that their viewpoint is the right one and that the other parties’ viewpoint is the wrong one.
These beliefs are extremely important to us, they say something about us, and they are worth fighting for regardless of whether we create more walls between us and them or widen that division. I’ve seen it play out in the social media the last few months, as people proclaim their rightness and/or the other person’s wrongness both subtly and overtly. People feel passionately enough about their beliefs that making the subtle or overt proclamations appears to be worth losing friendships or creating potentially unfixable divides.
And so the political candidates, the attacking political commercials, and our own pictures and statements in the social media results in the other side putting up their walls a little higher, in becoming a little more entrenched in their own beliefs, and that divide widens. Naturally this happens because many people, when feeling attacked or feeling that their passionate beliefs are threatened, attack back directly or simple entrench themselves passively but more firmly in anger behind their wall with the people that believe as they do.
Many people pay lip service to wanting to close that divide and come together, but what we really want is for the other side to see the light, to just get the correctness of our beliefs and come on over to our side. As long as people stand righteously and rigidly in their correctness, that gap isn’t going to be closed. But it’s difficult not to stand firmly where we are, because we are right in our beliefs aren’t we? We’ve had them for a very long time, collected a lot of “evidence” for them over the years, and had those beliefs supported and reinforced through the messages we've heard from our favorite politicians or talk show hosts. This makes it difficult, if not impossible to make any movement off of our position where we can open mindedly consider counter evidence or an alternative belief system.
And as I stated, shifting those ingrained beliefs is an incredibly challenging process that takes effort and energy, even when clients want to work on that. Those people behind the divide, behind their walls of rightness, often don’t have an interest in moving off of their positions or in hearing why someone behind the other wall believes a counter view just as staunchly. It doesn’t appear that very many politicians have a genuine interest in doing that either. And because more than enough politicians will continue to take a contentious approach, and more than enough people will maintain their belief systems in the manner I’ve described, the division in political beliefs and practices will continue, and the benefits of working cooperatively will likely not be seen.
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