Ring In The New Year By Dialing Down The Negativity
A New Year’s Resolution
As we bid goodbye to 2017 and welcome 2018, I want to thank all of you who read Good Turns. I hope you find these stories as gratifying and motivating to read as we do to publish them.
For this last post of the year, I want to share some personal thoughts on the motivation behind creating the Good Turns project. For the most part, it’s just exactly what we say on the What is this? page—to celebrate selfless acts, and through that to encourage more of them. But we had a subtext in mind, as well: to highlight the things that all of us have in common, and through that to chip away at the narrative of tribalism that creates divisions and animosity where none should exist.
“When we focus on each other as individuals, tribal differences disappear.”
We humans are tribal animals—it is deep in our genes and our psyches. Through the evolutionary eons, those who worked together (and fought together) triumphed over those who didn’t. So by its nature, tribalism is most easily and powerfully awakened in response to a threat from others: those outside the tribe. When such a threat is real, this is a healthy response.
But there is a dark side to tribalism: the perception of such threats can be too easily manufactured (or grossly exaggerated) by those who stand to gain from the reaction. They say: “You must support our team! Terrible things will happen if the other team wins.” Soon after, they say “In fact, the players on the other team are bad people.” And we can’t help responding. Tribalism is reflexive. It’s your mouth watering at the smell of cooked meat. Ironically, the fabricated threat can easily become real, as the “others” respond by organizing to defend themselves. The world becomes more and more polarized. Team loyalty becomes prized more than principle. The painstaking work of building consensus gives way to simply fighting for victory. The victors feel justified in taking the full measure of their spoils. Generosity to the other side is minimal. The healthy dissatisfaction that motivates achievement gets transformed into resentment.
I don’t know if these are the most polarized times in our nation in my lifetime—I was four years old when protesting students were shot by National Guard soldiers at Kent State—but it feels like things have gotten pretty darn bad.
So part of what we hope to achieve with Good Turns is to provide a small antidote to the polarized, angry tone of today’s public discourse. We want to call attention to the simple truth that when we focus on each other as individuals, tribal differences disappear. We want to tell stories about people who helped others just because they spotted someone in need, not because they were on the same team. We want to fill your mailbox with messages about people at their best rather than at their worst.
There are two sides to reducing the anger and polarization: dialing up the positivity and dialing down the negativity. We hope Good Turns helps with the first. For the second, I’d like to propose this New Year’s resolution: unsubscribe from your tribal information feeds. We may not be able to stop those producing self-serving tribal messages. But we don’t have to listen. So figure out what delivers that satisfying feeling of righteous indignation—and turn it off. Don’t watch those shows. Don’t read those newsletters. Don’t visit those websites. Get your news from whatever sources seem to have the least tribal spin. Go to a party where everyone is talking about the latest outrage (that they all just learned about from the same source), and be the person who hasn’t heard about it. If you pull that off, you’ll find it easier to see that the players on the other team really aren’t so bad. In fact, they may not even be on a different team at all.
As we embark on this New Year, the entire TurnTo team and I wish you health, prosperity, love, and a bounty of Good Turns.
George Eberstadt
CEO, TurnTo Networks, Inc.
(Photo courtesy of Flickr user frankieleon)
Posted December 29, 2017
