Polarisation Quotes

“When there is mutual shadow projection between individuals, groups, or nations, each side has an unconscious investment in the other playing out the projected evil so as to prove their own self-righteous innocence. What ensues is a vicious cycle that ensures that neither side has to look at their own darkness. This dynamic fastens the two sides together, as if in their mutual projections there is an elastic band tying them together, and this dynamic becomes self-reinforcing. As such, it gives both parties clear justification to feel victimized by the other as well as continually feeding the diabolical polarization in the field.”
― Paul Levy, Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World

“During "happy times" of peace dependent upon social injustice, children of the privileged classes learn to repress from their field of consciousness the uncomfortable ideas suggesting that they and their parents are benefitting from injustice against others. Such young people learn to disqualify and disparage the moral and mental values of anyone whose work they are using to over-advantage.
Young minds thus ingest habits of subconscious selection and substitution of data, which leads to a hysterical conversive economy of reasoning. They grow up to be somewhat hysterical adults who, by means of the ways adduced above, thereupon transmit their hysteria to the next generation, which then develops these characteristics to an even greater degree. The hysterical patterns for experience and behavior grow and spread downwards from the privileged classes until crossing the boundary of the first criterion of ponerology: the atrophy of natural
critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals.”
― Andrew Lobabczewski

“You're supposed to believe all of the same things as your friends and allies. These days, everything is a battle, and so you can't give any credibility to your opponents' views. Even when you do understand where your opponents are coming from, you're not supposed to say so.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“political order, and political decay, presciently drawing attention to perceived faultlines in American society. the American political system has decayed over time because its traditional system of cheques and balances has deepened and become incessantly rigid. with sharp political polarisation, this decentralised system is less and less able to represent majority interests, but gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activist organisations that collectively do not add up to a sovereign American people.”
― Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

“All we do is disguise our weak politics behind a powerful bureaucracy and disguise our powerful bureaucracy behind weak political decision making.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“I am motivated in part by the radicalising realisation that I am often carrying out the biddings of a system I dislike, by the frustration that overcomes me when I realise I am acting more like a policy than like myself.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“In the Dangerous Game, differences in race, religion, culture, and diversity that we have celebrated as strengths in the past are weaponised, leaving us divided and vulnerable to the ideas and agendas of others.”
― Gregg Braden, Pure Human: The Hidden Truth of Our Divinity, Power, and Destiny

“There are social injustices in the world that need our attention and care. Real and lasting solutions, however, cannot happen if we attempt to solve them as divided families, polarised communities, and as a species that believes we cannot be redeemed from the horrors and atrocities that have been part of our past. The Dangerous Game attempts to reduce the power of the common bonds that have connected us in the past, while weaponising the differences or "flaws" that burden us in the present.”
― Gregg Braden, Pure Human: The Hidden Truth of Our Divinity, Power, and Destiny