THE REALLY REAL REASON THAT THINGS SO SEEM POLARIZED
Depending on your bias, the blame for the divide in the country is clear. It's Fox News. Or CNN. Or Republicans. Or Democrats. Conspiracy theorists. Atheists. Immigrants. Communists. Fascists. Kevin. And while I don't find any productive energy going into finding "fault" for the sake of finding someone to blame, I think most of these attempts to find the origin misguided. In fact, the truth has been in front of us the entire time, not hiding whatsoever.
The first reason is money. I realize that this can be seen as a lazy answer since, after all, money is the root of all problems. However, in this instance, I mean that money, and specifically the pursuit of money, is the problem. Let me elaborate.
The founding fathers were wise in assuring the right to a free press. This is the "watch dog" of a democracy. However, perhaps the founding fathers were naïve to assume that there could ever really be a free press. Or, perhaps they all had a merry chuckle assuring the right to a free press when they absolutely knew there could never be such a thing.
I am not a journalist or press historian, so I can't tell you about how revenue for news outlets grew into what it has become, but I do know what that revenue for just about every news outlet in the USofA is advertising. The "free" press is dependent on businesses who want to get the word out about their product or service. This creates two big problems: 1) News organizations are dependent on finding businesses that want to be associated to their news. Advertisers frequently pull spend from news outlets with whom they do not want to be associated. News outlets are therefore incentivized to report on news that advertisers are comfortable with. 2) But more importantly, advertisers want to maximize the investment of their advertising dollars. The basic theory is that the more eyeballs see their ads, the more revenue this will drive. Outlets are thereby incentivized to report on news and present it in such a way, that it will maximize readership. The free press is really anything but free.
If news outlets are then driven to create content that gets widely consumed, it begs the question of which content is more likely to do this. The answer lies in our biology. Our brains have evolved to prioritize fear above everything else. It really only makes sense. Who can be thinking about what would make us more happy if we are about to be eaten by a lion? Fear drives our fight or flight instinct (or in my case the play dead instinct). Our biology tells us to pay attention to our fears first. So it makes logical sense that any news that plays into our fears will get the most attention - whether rational or not.
On top of this, in the information age, crafty spinsters, hucksters, politicians, and celebrities have realized that the more outrageous the story, the more coverage (and eyeballs) one will receive.
Our biology can be "blamed" for yet another reason that things seem so divided. As humans we are capable of managing about 165 (give or take a few) relationships. Anything more than that just becomes noise. It is often believed that human intelligence is responsible for their rise to the top of the animal kingdom. While intelligence has played a significant role, anthropologists will assert that the ability to cooperate with one another has really been the primary reason. But the number of 165 seems to be the limits of that cooperation. After that, people become "the other." If you combine this with how are brains are hardwired to react to fear first, it is no wonder in today's over connected world that we seem so divided.
