One Speech by This 90s Literary Giant Holds the Key to Ending Polarization in America [Archive.org URL]

Political scientist Alexander George Theodoridis, an assistant professor at the University of California, Merced, is an expert on the hyper-polarized climate. He wrote in Scientific American, “My own research repeatedly shows that partisanship for many Americans today takes the form of a visceral, even subconscious, attachment to a party group.”

The consequences are that politicians are rewarded by their base for obstructionism, while punished for working with the other side. As a result, the last three Congresses were the least productive in history.

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But there’s far more at stake than gridlock. Being preoccupied with contempt and distrust by the other side means elections results can become suspect, fraud may be ignored, and suddenly, with this new level of hatred, dirty tricks and even wholesale atrocities can be justified in the minds of some extremists.

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“Learning how to think is really exercising some control over how and what you think.”

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David Foster Wallace explains that there are whole segments of adult life that are full of tedium and frustration, which is where choosing becomes really important.

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“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default-setting — then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.”

Wallace does caution, “It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.”