The Great Moderation
We’re full of surprises. While we’ve always mixed up our public and private personas, always swallowed hard before expressing our true opinions in public, you’d think that in a world of overwhelming platforms upon which each of us can have a voice we could finally say what we mean.
Apparently not.
Some examples: In private more Roman Catholics support abortion rights than people with no religious affiliation; the oldest of us, those born before 1945, are more in favor of spending tax dollars to combat climate change than younger generations; Generation Z is way more conservative than the millennials; almost no one thinks communism is a good thing; even fewer people support Hamas; and only single digits of every racial, income, and political identification group think the media tells the truth.
I’ve always been obsessed with demographics, and I believe that, even in a world in which truth is elusive, probability can get you very close to what is real. Math can filter out noise and hand us confidence about how people feel about key issues, even when people don’t feel safe about how they express themselves on contentious issues.
The authors of a sweeping report called the Social Pressure Index use some pretty complicated math to ferret out the difference between what people say in polls and what they actually believe in private. The results are astonishing, and give us great insight into why polls have become so unreliable.
They also give us great insight into the never changing fact that Americans are a lot more moderate than any survey of public opinion or news report about polarization indicate. Ironically, a culture of taking sides we don’t fully agree with leads us to a place whereby our refusal to honestly express ourselves leads us to honestly believe we’re more divided than we actually are.
There is the consequence of not telling the truth. And there is where truly radical ideas that very few identify with take hold and overwhelm detailed, reasoned discourse. We turn from each other while, in private, we have so much in common.
People with mental illness are uniquely qualified to understand our difficult relationship with the truth. On the one hand, those of us who have experienced psychosis know how the brain can manipulate our senses and present to us a world very different from the one everybody else experiences. A world that feels completely true in a manic episode is a world that is merely false to those around us. On the other hand, we also learn that the truth need not be told. Sometimes it’s very damaging to tell the truth. It is inadvisable to reveal that you have a mental illness in many situations. Much better to keep that truth to yourself if you want to fit in and have a chance at almost any measure of success.
Which brings me back to the Social Pressure Index. People have always concealed truth in order to fit in. But what people have traditionally tried to fit into has been a moderate middle, a uniformity, a compromise in which we can work, raise families, and live well. In some strange way, possibly because distrust in everything from experts to the government is so rampant, our relationship to the truth has changed. Now to fit in we find ourselves expressing ever more radical views in support of an ever more limiting society while in truth we remain part of that very broad middle that the media seems to imply doesn’t exist anymore.
So we end up with a world where more people say they have a mental illness than actually do. We realize that our uncertain but uncompromising public persona is crazy, as are so many of the ideas we attach to, as are so many of the leaders we emulate, as is the idea that we’re more different than we are alike. Yes, there are things we should keep to ourselves. Every thought need not be expressed. But if we find ourselves in a great contradiction between what we believe and what we say, we must stop and consider how this impacts our relationship with others, and how it can gravely damage our relationship with ourselves.
We’ve created this world where anyone can fully express who they are and what they believe to anyone who cares to read or watch it, and instead of honestly expressing ourselves we are becoming publicly more radical just to fit in. Information is at our fingertips, everything is available, and we’re compelled to chose the simplest, least thought-out unverified content to form our opinions. In private we know what’s true to us, and we intuit that others are good, too. But when we scroll, comment, and share some beast awakens and our truth falters. We’ve created a world of infinite possibility and connected community, and into this world we take the worst of us.