Our brand is divisiveness!

I highly recommend seeing the movie, Our Brand is Crisis. While the movie is fictional, I strongly suspect the theme is all too real.

For the past several years I've found myself more and more detached from our political scene, not out of disinterest, but out of disgust at the level of divisiveness that we have sunk to. We have networks dedicated to personal attacks on politicians, and worse, to presenting one sided arguments that bear absolutely no resemblance to a credible news story or heaven help us, the actual truth. There is something wrong when you have to go to Snopes to fact check CNN or Fox, or MSNBC.

I've spent the past six months going through what is essentially "team building" at our company, and I have often thought of what an impossible exercise it would be if we had the same level of divisiveness in our team. The fact is, in any worthwhile business publication that deals with building a successful team, one of the first recommendations is to eliminate anyone who brings a divisive nature to a team. Divisiveness is not constructive conflict, it's argument with the intent of causing separation between parties.

So now I am absolutely convinced that research has been done that suggests that divisiveness, by its very nature, elicits more donations, more volunteers, more headlines than constructive conflict with a goal of compromise. My guess is we didn't sink to the level we have without some puppet masters orchestrating the whole thing. I am not a conspiracy theorist, I am a pragmatist. There is money in divisiveness, there is money in creating hate and discourse.

So my point is simply this, I choose to be a centrist, I choose to embrace compromise for the sake of actually accomplishing something, I choose to abstain from making or circulating personal attack messages simply because my opinion differs from someone else, I choose to ignore the "noise of hate".  Why? Because just like divisiveness can kill a team or company, it can and will destroy a Country.

Political Polarization in the American Public