Why Do We Focus So Much On The Extremes?

Let's start here, with this 纽约时报 article.

In there:

One of the main reasons is that their Congress, which ought to be a global beacon of liberal values, continues to succumb to self-inflicted paralysis. How else can it be that fewer than a dozen lawmakers from the outer fringes of the Republican Party are holding one of the world’s oldest democracies hostage to their wildest whims?

We could also look at this article.

In that one:

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth College , captured in an email the conflicting forces at work as the next election approaches: “Americans see the collapse of safety in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco and blame the entire Democratic Party for the policies of a fringe extreme.”

We talk a lot, and I mean a lot, about the extremes on the left and the right. Apparently everyone wants children to be gay (right accuses left), and every male is a toxic bigot who wants women to pop out nine children and serve him sexually at the same time (left accuses right). These things get so much attention. But like, most people do not live in these extremes. In fact, most studies have indicated that 93% of Americans want the same general things for their lives.

In there:

The researchers then cross-analyzed the data in every way they could to determine which groups of people around the world are the most similar and dissimilar. In all, they ran over 168,000 comparisons and found that, on average, people’s values were 93.3% the same. Of all of the comparisons, only 0.66% of them produced results where populations were more dissimilar in their values than they were similar.

So why does this happen?

The easiest way is that media is consumed by making people look and click, and insane, extreme and negative things get people to look and click. It’s always been ironic to me that large brands, who are entirely driven by some ideal of the brand they created in their brain, want to advertise on platforms so driven by hatred and division, but dollars speak more than morality, so I get it.

We are also, generally, negative people.

In there:

Humans experience an average of 60,000 thoughts a day. That’s one thought per second in every waking hour. Amazingly, 95% are the same thoughts repeated every day. On average, 80% of those habitual thoughts are negative, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

So that’s some of why the “extremes” appeal to us. Plus, it’s easy to discourse around “us” vs. “them.” It gets people on your side faster, and “tribes” are readily apparent, and those things comfort our Neanderthal brains.

The problem is obvious, tho: with so much focus on the extremes, half of America ends up hating the other half of America.

It’s easy to pin all this stuff on Trump and his rhetoric, but lots of people are guilty of it: far-left wokeness that has no end game, Trump, media executives, people who fan flames for likes/clicks, generalized stupidity around discourse, etc, etc. We’re all to blame a little bit, honestly. We tend to group things in binary terms and assign ourselves to tribes, even if our real goal is to pay all our bills and get the kids to Pee-Wee practice. It feels like an increasingly-fraught time to live and breathe as an American, even if in some ways it’s the best time to ever be alive.

What do you think? Is there a path to pay less attention to the furthest 3% on each side?