We all know that black and white thinking contributes to toxic polarization. Complex issues are crushed down into good vs bad, right vs wrong, and us vs them binaries, leading to tribalism and societal breakdown. This addiction to oversimplification destroys society and healthy democratic functioning. Social scientists have been tracking…

Let’s face it: we’re all ideologues to varying degrees. We all rely on heuristics, mental models, and narrative structures to make sense of the complex world we live in. Even if our ideologies aren’t explicit, we still hold implicit assumptions about the world — about human nature, morality, notions of…

There are many sincere and well-intentioned movements to depolarize America such as Braver Angels, Living Room Conversations, and Crossing Party Lines (amongst others). These groups hold workshops and dialogue events to bring people of diverging political beliefs together to listen and learn from each other, with the hope of finding…

I’ve read many books on political polarization, but Peter Coleman’s The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization is my favorite one yet. The book provides many important contributions to the field of depolarization, including Coleman’s use of complexity science to illuminate the vicious cycles and “attractors” that keep us…

This article is co-authored with Nate Coffman. This is a half-joking play on Hanzi Freinacht’s “5 things that make you metamodern.” “Meta-Ideological Chad” will be abbreviated with MIC. You can read more about meta-ideological politics and Chad centrists in this article. 1. You practice memetic infiltration Stoic podcaster Peter Limberg coined the term “memetic mediation,”…

Actually, we ain’t ideological enough… “You’re an ideologue!” shouts just about everybody these days. Social justice activists criticize the non-woke for upholding an ideology of white supremacy. Conspiracy theorists accuse “normies” of being sheep, blindly following conventional facts and narratives. Atheists criticize religious believers for falling prey to religious dogmas…

(This essay is the third in my “man” series — the other two being the Titanium and Polarity Man). “Vajra” is a sanskrit word meaning “thunderbolt” and is also the mystical weapon of the Vedic God of Thunder, Indra. …

“Polarity Man” has a couple meanings. It could be a short hand for Polarity Management, a technique developed by conflict expert Barry Johnson (which this technique is largely derived from). …

Let’s start with a definition of terms. Straw man: A distorted misrepresentation of one’s argument or position, which often involves oversimplifying it. When one attacks a strawman instead of one’s actual argument, this is called the “strawman fallacy.” Steel man: The strongest, most accurate representation of one’s argument. …