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We haven’t lost our values. We’ve lost each other.
America’s polarization crisis is fueled by fear, social media outrage and distorted perceptions, but real relationships can rebuild trust, belonging and community.
By Terry Kyllo | FāVS News Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
Everywhere I go, I hear the same anxiety.
People are worried about polarization. About loneliness. About whether democracy itself can hold. I hear it from pastors and farmers, from software engineers and retired schoolteachers, from progressives and conservatives, from Christians, Muslims, Jews and people of no religion at all.
And at nearly every gathering, someone asks me a version of the same question: “What if the other side really is trying to destroy everything we care about?”
Here is what haunts me about that question. Every group asks it. About every other group.
Nearly every group in America today experiences itself as the last faithful party to our social contract — the basic moral agreements that make shared life possible. Fairness. Honesty. Seeing other people as human. Nearly every group privately keeps those agreements. And nearly every group is convinced the others have torn them up.
They cannot all be right.
In fact, the research on what scholars call the “perception gap” shows they are almost all wrong. Each side imagines the other as far more extreme than it actually is. We are not afraid of our neighbors. We are afraid of caricatures of our neighbors.
We fear caricatures, not neighbors
Where do the caricatures come from? Not from an accident. Three engines produce them, and none requires a villain — only incentives. The economics of attention reward threat, because threat holds our eyes. Social media algorithms reward outrage, because outrage is engagement — so the most extreme 1% of every group gets presented as the portrait of the whole. And political incentive rewards fear, because fear mobilizes and raises money.
Run those engines in every direction at once and you get what I have come to call a 360-degree dehumanization machine. Every group is genuinely slandered. Every group is shown the worst of every other group, on every screen, every hour.
Proximity breeds compassion
But the machine has one weakness, and it is a big one: It depends on distance. The caricature only survives as long as it goes untested. The moment real groups of real neighbors sit down together, stereotype has to compete with reality — and at close range, reality wins.
Which means every shared table is sabotage.
Of course, some folks are behaving poorly.
For 10 years, through Paths to Understanding, I have watched ordinary communities test the caricatures and watched the caricatures lose. That decade of evidence became a book. It is called “The Society We Deserve: Rebuilding Trust, Belonging, and Our Life Together,” and it comes out Aug. 25. Over the next four weeks, I want to share its heart with you — starting with its most hopeful claim:
Our crisis is not so much a failure of values. It is a failure of relationships between groups. And relationships can be rebuilt. And as they are, we find our values and common values again.
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