Almost every politician accuses the other of polarisation, and if only they would stop doing that, the political debate would be inclusive and substantive again. Simple, isn’t it?
The word “polarisation” originally comes from French, meaning “to give an electrical charge,” a purely technical term. Today, we use it to describe the growing social tensions that have rapidly increased in recent years. Polarisation has become a widespread concern.
The Institute for Social Research recently warned that “Dutch people are increasingly worried about the hardening tone of debates and dislike the constant arguing in Hague politics.” However, a government campaign in January 2023 suggested that it’s not the politicians but the people who are responsible for polarisation. The campaign offered advice like “Count to 10 when you feel you’re about to say something unkind.”
But a blame game won’t work. Polarisation is something much more profound. It’s an independent force, a reflection of the current zeitgeist. As long as we treat it as merely a behavioral issue, we won’t be able to address it effectively.
Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist refers to the collective mindset or (sub)consciousness of a specific era. It reflects how people think, feel, and behave during a particular time. Zeitgeist includes high-level concepts like values and norms, but it also shows up in everyday things like fashion and food trends. For instance, wearing hats was common until the 1950s, and in 1964, a meal without meat was unthinkable. But now, both of these ideas have changed. Similarly, women’s suffrage, which we now take for granted, was not even a consideration in 1883.
Looking back, we can often identify the zeitgeist of a specific period. For example, the term “Victorian” immediately conjures up images of England’s strict dress codes and formal etiquette in the late 19th century. In the Netherlands, the 1950s bring to mind the smell of cooked Brussels sprouts, evoking images of a conservative, stuffy way of life.
However, understanding the collective consciousness of the present is much more difficult because we are part of it. We are the zeitgeist. You can’t observe something you are identified with, just like you can’t observe your own loneliness while you are lonely. To do that, you need to have some distance. Similar to the individual consciousness, it’s likely that a significant part of the collective consciousness operates unconsciously, making it hard to fully grasp what’s happening around us right now.
Because of this, it’s plausible that we don’t fully understand polarisation. Surely, we all agree that polarisation is a negative thing, but it’s still growing nevertheless. Perhaps something deeper, hidden in the unconscious part of our zeitgeist, is fueling it. What are we missing? What is our blind spot? Maybe we can uncover it if we look openly at the phenomena of our time?
The Emergence of Modernity
The social shift toward modernity began in the 1960s and 70s, symbolised, for example, by a phenomenon like The Beatles. It felt liberating to leave behind the narrow, stuffy confines of old family ties, religious institutions, and small communities. We waved goodbye to God and embraced the idea that people, both men and women, could control their own destiny. Through individual freedom, rational thinking, and the advancements of science and technology, people believed they could shape their lives.
Cultural expressions during this time—through bright colors, bold shapes, and new music—reflected a burst of creative energy. For many, it really was an intensely liberating experience.
Modernity was built on the idea that all these free individuals would live in harmony, guided by equality and rational thinking. The belief was that through reason, people could organise society in the best, most efficient ways—economically, socially, and culturally. This was the ideal of the “homo economicus,” where personal growth, happiness, and prosperity would naturally follow. This belief wasn’t entirely naive, as humans have a great potential for good, but at least it was incomplete.
The Zeitgeist Today: The Ambivalent Self
However, the individual has now become ambivalent about the benefits of modernity. Because there was something we missed. After all, true freedom can only exist within certain boundaries. While we all value equality, we also need some form of structure, and thus, differentiation. Just as individuality can only be experienced if there is also community. And furthermore, reason alone cannot provide meaning or emotional depth. “1 + 1 = lovely” isn’t a thought that rationality can accommodate.
What seemed obvious—that the essence of modern consciousness was individual freedom and that all these free individuals would create a perfect world—doesn’t hold up. Even after living out our freedoms, we still find ourselves unhappy, and the world is far from perfect.
Today, our dreams of a modern paradise seem distant. We flood therapists’ offices and numb ourselves through consumerism—whether it’s gaming, sex, or drugs. We laugh through our despair on Instagram, and we ridicule others on reality TV, forgetting that we’re really mocking ourselves.
The ego, the modern self, has become the dominant identity of our age. But this self is not satisfied with freedom alone. In fact, freedom often feels like a burden. The self is only happy when it receives external validation and miserable when it doesn’t get enough “likes.” The core misunderstanding of modernity is this: the essence of our age is not individual freedom and rationality—it’s ambivalence.
Ambivalence and Polarisation
The ambivalent nature of the self has huge consequences for how we live together and communicate. Its impact is so significant that we’re only partly aware of it and struggle to fully understand it. Polarisation is one of the results of the ambivalent ego, but there are other effects too, like how we perceive truth, responsibility, conspiracies, and even the direction of society. To make sense of these, we must look at them from a broader, systemic perspective within the Western zeitgeist. When we do, what do we see?
What is Polarisation?
The ambivalent individual craves attention, feeling good only when it receives it. Thanks to technology, billions of people worldwide are connected, each with a voice that wants to be heard. As a result, the sheer volume of voices and the chaos they create is growing. We’ve developed tools that amplify these cries for attention—social media being the most obvious example. These platforms multiply the reach of individual voices almost instantly, but they also strip opinions of context, breaking them into isolated fragments.
This has turned all those opinions into a massive, swirling mass of noise. Because of the speed, lack of context, and sheer volume, these opinions have become almost meaningless. In this swirling vortex of information, it’s natural that the most extreme voices get pushed to the edges. Extremity is the only way to capture attention. Another natural result is that extreme positions provoke opposing extremes. This vortex has an empty centre, and as the extremes grow further apart, the centre becomes larger and more hollow.
Some potentially serious consequences of polarisation
– The centre collapses. The phrase “the centre cannot hold” from William Butler Yeats’s post-World War I poem “The Second Coming” sums it up. The centre, that which connects, that which bridges, is disappearing. And consequently, the whole ecosystem threatens to break down.
– Dialogue is disappearing; dialogue is a meeting, and principally it takes place in the middle, in a position where you at least want to question the extreme view. But that middle is no longer there.
– Values and interests, substantive choices, disappear as topics of conversation. Extremity is characterised by its own energetic law, where polarity becomes an independent force. It becomes more important not to facilitate the opposite pole than to make one’s own substantive considerations, even if this leads to an obscure and irrational point of view. This irrationality is inevitable because the position is obviously inauthentic and reactive.
– Individual freedom, celebrated in the 1970s as liberation from the shackles of coercion of the collective and the liberation of the individual, is increasingly developing into the tyranny of the individual.
– A unifying principle is missing, leading to many impasses, delayed decisions and half-hearted compromises. A binding, higher-order principle is needed to endure the abrupt, short-term adjustments on the way to a collective transition with a realistic and tangible perspective.
What is truth, and what is conspiracy?
In today’s whirlwind of opinions, the line between truth and falsehood is becoming increasingly blurred. When opinions are presented in isolation and at scale, they lose context and meaning, making it difficult to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not. This is a serious problem, but it’s also a reality we now face.
Truth and falsehood traditionally rely on a larger, shared framework to help us differentiate them. But the modern ego, focused on its own needs and expressions, operates independently of any greater framework. The ego values its own truth and competes with others for attention. In this chaotic environment, we must ask: can truth and falsehood still be defined and separated? Do they even exist in a meaningful way anymore?
Another mechanism is at play: attention. Whatever gets the most attention starts to feel like the truth. As long as you capture the public’s attention, it becomes tempting to stir up emotions or even lie. Indeed, attention creates reality.
This chaos also explains the rise of conspiracy theories. While real conspiracies exist, many are simply projections of personal alienation. We imagine hidden plots where there may be none, seeing enemies like “the politicized judiciary,” “the deep state,” or the farmer as a “wealth-driven nature killer”. We just see them as villains in our minds.
Conspiracies arise when we project our own confusion and subjectivity onto others. Both sides of an argument become utterly convinced of their own rightness and confused by the other side’s “wrongness.” There’s no longer any shared understanding. We peer at the other side through the thick glass of our own beliefs, unable to grasp their perspective. This lack of contact breeds suspicion.
What is Responsibility?
Taking responsibility or being accountable means there is a standard against which individual behavior, such as political or managerial actions, can be measured. It implies the existence of a higher, collective framework of meaning that helps us judge actions.
However, for the ego, self-reflection is a personal matter. Whether it’s about a crime, a political mistake, or a change of opinion, the assessment is purely subjective. Each person interprets their actions based on their own perspective and circumstances at the time. What seemed reasonable in that moment still feels justified later, even if opinions or situations have changed. It’s like choosing to vacation in a luxury Parisian hotel one year, and in a Swiss mountain caravan the next—it makes sense personally, but it’s hard to justify by any more significant standard.
The ego doesn’t accept a wider frame of reference. Personal opinions and actions find their own validation internally. This makes polarisation endless and limitless, as the ego is only accountable to itself. Consequently, when someone else tries to hold the ego accountable, it’s often seen as crossing a boundary, which the ego refuses to accept. Any criticism, even moderate, might feel like a personal attack for the ego, leading to further division. The result is an exponential rise in boundary violations and emotional injury, especially for the fragile egos.
We Are Determined, but Directionless
One of the critical traits of the ambivalent, attention-seeking ego is its lack of a solid foundation. Everything feels uncertain and constantly shifting, much like how fashion trends and political movements nowadays come and go.
For many decades now, we have been without an external, God-given direction. And the ego itself lacks any internal guidance. Any plan or intention we try to create depends on external validation: “Do you see me? Am I doing well?” This makes any movement conditional—whether it’s a personal plan or a political ambition. The mindset is fundamentally “no-unless” rather than “yes-if,” which means there are always more reasons to say no. Without an internal direction, the ego’s default is negative.
This lack of direction also explains the rise of ideologies and expert-driven authority. Or this absence of direction leads to feelings of helplessness, which can sometimes swing to the other extreme: overly decisive actions. We see this in moments of assumed political powerlessness, where politicians may even suggest bypassing democracy in the face of urgent issues. When we have no internal compass, we turn to ideologies or authorities for truth. Leaders, in their desperation, may make hasty decisions, pushing forward with policies that lack consideration of costs, social impact, or sustainability—choices that a local football club treasurer wouldn’t even accept. We then seem out of the deadlock of the no, but the momentum remains undirected, but now deployed forward.
Where Does Our Attention Go?
The specific way the ego expresses itself, therefore, explains polarisation. This same principle helps explain where our attention goes. Rather than observing, the modern individual tends to project their need for validation—the “see me, hear me” mentality—onto their surroundings. Indeed, in a fragmented world, only small, disconnected details capture our attention. The ego focuses on what it can identify with. This is the evolution of Descartes’ idea of “I think, therefore I am,” transforming into the ego’s view of “I see what I am.”
This explains why we focus on trivial things like politicians’ personal lives, hairstyles, and hobbies rather than their policies. We’d rather focus on celebrity Kim Kardashian’s latest dress than on serious global issues like the war in Ukraine. The obsession with influencers, and the desire to become one, is another example of where our attention goes. The term “influencer” perfectly represents our desperate attention-seeking urge because our personal observations and integrations only matter if our projections find a destination.
Meanwhile, the big stories, deep conflicts, and critical global shifts slip pass our awareness. We casually judge centuries of history through our shallow, trendy lenses. Slow-moving crises unfold right in front of us without us even noticing. This is similar to how, in the 15th century, South American natives didn’t notice Columbus’ ships because they had no concept or frame of reference for “ships.”
In Conclusion
Polarisation is the destructive acting-out of the ego seeking attention on an individual level, leading to a self-reinforcing symptom of modern consciousness on a collective level. It’s driven by the fragmentation, speed, and meaninglessness of today’s flood of opinions. As mentioned above, it is inherently negatively charged because it is ambivalent. It cannot easily be manipulated or swept away. To truly understand polarisation, we need to look at it from a systemic perspective, not just as the result of individual behaviors. Once we take this wider view, it becomes clear that polarisation is far too complex to blame on just one person or group.
This also makes it evident that you can’t solve the problem with simple behavioral fixes like “count to 10.” Such advice doesn’t work because it doesn’t address the root causes. In fact, this kind of advice is also a symptom of the same ego-driven consciousness, it focuses only on details and individual issues and ignores the larger, slower forces that are really at play.
Codes of conduct and censorship will not help us deal with polarising speech. They take us back to the era before the Enlightenment and individualisation. Suppressing social symptoms is rarely a sustainable strategy. It only leads to new tensions in the social ecosystem, leading to new symptoms.
Just as grass does not grow faster by being pulled, consciousness does not grow larger when manipulated. It can be stunned, frightened, seduced, and blocked, but it can not be destroyed, because consciousness is the essence, the power of life itself. It will continue to unfold, with or without our consent, with or without our powerlessness. And consciousness has no plan and no hurry.
There are no easy solutions to the harmful effects of polarisation as a phenomenon of our time. However, any imaginable solution to any imaginable problem begins with a proper diagnosis. And by letting go of illusions about the malleability of life and the world. And then, when we are able to observe the world as it really is, life will answer us.