It’s been a stressful couple of years of pandemic and climate change. That has been contributing factors to the political violence we’ve also been seeing, and people are losing their jobs and homes, and cities are being shelled, while others are still sick in respiratory diseases and many are mourning.
The offscreen life is definitively not the same as it was before.
Tensions are high online, too. One of the things that can raise tensions and escalate arguments is the feeling of not being heard. Let’s take climate change as an example. It’s frustrating to the point of absurdity that politicians and lobbyists keep delaying and selling out the future.
When it comes to social arguments, cleavage points, and wedge issues, same thing. All this communication technology has not helped us communicate. It helps us find like-minded companions, become aware of how our own situation sucks, but not resolve things or express them in a way the other side can understand. We’ve not found ways forwards in synthesis. That’s not to say that the truth is halfway in between right and wrong—it isn’t—but humanity is increasingly choosing barricades over reconciliation.
Reconciliation and compromise does not have to land at the midpoint: for example, if one side wants to kill the other and the other side just wants to live, the reconciliation isn’t to kill half. That sort of sloppy job makes no-one happy. We need to figure out how to live on this blue marble together.