The Seductive Danger of Picking Sides
How group identity is gradually eroding human connection
It was the fifteenth message from his mother. Still no reply.
By then, he had given up.
For three months, she’d been sending him memes, news clips, and forwarded posts, all praising her favorite presidential candidate.
At first, he pushed back. He complained. He argued. Nothing changed.
So he tried to set boundaries. “Can you please stop sending me anything about your candidate?” Then, more gently: “Maybe we can just avoid politics altogether.”
But the messages kept coming.
“He’s the only one who can save us. You’ll understand one day. 😘”
He read that last message, paused, and put his phone face down on the table. That was the moment he stopped replying. And for almost a year, they didn’t speak.
This is a true story from a Brazilian friend.
And yes, as surreal as it sounds, families really did stop speaking to each other over who they voted for.
It reminds me of a chilling passage from 1984, where loyalty to the state runs so deep, people begin reporting their own families. We don’t live in Orwell’s dystopia, but when political identity becomes more important than personal connection — when tribal loyalty overrides love — the logic starts to feel eerily familiar.
It’s easy to dismiss stories like this as extremes. But I think something deeper is happening.
So what’s really going on here?
And more importantly: how did we get here?
The Three Patterns Shaping How We Treat One Another
It’s tempting to blame it all on ignorance.
But in my friend’s case, that explanation doesn’t hold. His mom is smart. Educated. Capable of reasoning. So why is she getting swept into this?
I believe there are three invisible forces feeding each other — creating a kind of psychological triangle that’s shaping how people behave:
Scapegoating — the emotional release
Polarization — the narrative frame
Collective anxiety — the underlying fuel
Together, they form a loop. A self-reinforcing system that doesn’t just distort how we talk, but how we see each other.
And if we want to break the loop, it might help to understand how these forces work together.
1. The Comfort of a Villain (Scapegoating)
Scapegoating is one of the oldest psychological reflexes we have.
When a society feels stressed, confused, or chaotic, it looks for a target — someone to blame. The scapegoat offers emotional relief: a face to pin the discomfort on. A single cause to make sense of a complex situation.
It doesn’t need to be accurate. It just needs to feel satisfying.
Politicians understand this well. Rather than persuading through vision or policy, they identify a shared enemy: the government, the elite, the immigrants, the other side.
Life is hard? There’s a reason. A group to blame.
Scapegoating compresses complexity into narrative. It gives people a way to feel right, and righteous.
But beneath that emotional release is a dangerous tradeoff: nuance gets lost. We stop asking deeper questions. And even more dangerously, we stop reflecting on our own role in the system.
This idea was central to psychologist Carl Jung’s understanding of human behavior. Jung argued that individuals become most vulnerable to mass movements when they lose touch with their own "shadow"—the unconscious aspects of their personalities they refuse to acknowledge.
Scapegoating, in Jungian terms, is the externalization of our own denied darkness. Instead of facing our inner contradictions, we project them onto others.
The villain we choose is often the mirror we refuse to look into.
2. The Safety of Sides (Polarization)
If scapegoating is the weapon, polarization is the battlefield.
Scapegoating dehumanizes. Polarization builds walls. Together, they turn curiosity into risk, and compassion into something that feels almost disloyal.
When a culture becomes deeply polarized, questioning your own group can be seen as betrayal. Admitting fault is framed as weakness. Looking inward—once a sign of wisdom—is often dismissed as naïve or indulgent.
Polarization simplifies the world into two categories: us and them.
And in that simplification, something subtle but profound is lost. People are no longer seen in their full humanity, but reduced to labels.
This can be comforting in its own way. It relieves the burden of complexity. It offers a ready-made identity: a side to join, a script to follow, a sense of belonging.
You no longer have to wrestle with nuance. You just have to stay loyal.
History shows us that cultures have always feared those who disrupt certainty. Socrates wasn’t put on trial for rebellion—he was condemned for asking questions. For inviting people to examine the very beliefs that gave them a sense of order. And in a society already fractured, that kind of inquiry didn’t feel enlightening. It felt dangerous.
Maybe that’s one of the quieter costs of polarization: not just that we stop listening to others, but that we become afraid to listen to ourselves.
Because when everything is cast as a battle, reflection begins to look like hesitation, and dialogue like surrender.
And so the volume rises. The walls harden. And it’s rarely because people are evil or irrational, but because the very structure we’re standing on is designed to keep us apart.
3. The Fuel Beneath It All (Collective Anxiety)
Underneath all of it there's something more fundamental:
A culture in chronic anxiety.
We’re living through a time of massive economic and psychological instability.
Trust in institutions has reached record lows. Technology is outpacing our capacity to understand its consequences. Our attention is fragmented. And more and more, we're interacting with systems designed to exploit our emotions.
Layer on top of that our growing social isolation and the picture gets even starker.
We’re left feeling lonely, overstimulated, undernourished. And meaning slips just out of reach.
This kind of unprocessed anxiety doesn’t vanish. It has to go somewhere.
If we had space for reflection and dialogue, that anxiety could be metabolized.
But in our current culture, anxiety metastasizes into projection.
The scapegoat becomes a pressure valve. The tribe a shield. But neither brings resolution. Only a momentary sense of control.
Is There a Way Out?
In Recapture the Rapture,
shares a study on racial bias that reveals something profound:In a recent study on racial bias, researchers interviewed white householders, testing for their responses to people of color ringing their doorbell. In conservative areas, there was a noticeable increase in neutral to negative word choice by white homeowners when engaging visitors of color compared to white canvassers. They also shortened the time that they engaged the newcomers before ending the conversation and closing the door. Sad to read about, but not that surprising.
But then the team tweaked the setup: They informed the homeowners that there had been a recent discovery of alien life. Nothing especially complex about the narrative—no deep dives into Area 51 or Independence Day scenarios—just the simple fact that We Are Not Alone after all.
That nudge—to consider ourselves as humans together in the face of something weirder and even more Other, was enough to meaningfully boost openness and receptivity to strangers. White folks greeted Black and Brown folks more warmly.
Now—I’m not hoping for an alien invasion to help us get our act together.
But this study offers an important insight: how malleable our group identities really are.
The moment people were invited to see themselves as part of a broader category—humans facing something unknown—those rigid boundaries softened. People of color were no longer perceived as “other,” but as fellow members of a newly expanded us.
And that small narrative shift changed the tone of the entire encounter.
As writers we have the power to shape perception. We choose the metaphors, symbols, and stories that either contract or expand a reader’s sense of connection.
We can direct attention away from scapegoats and toward the deeper forces that drive division: fear, isolation, uncertainty, unprocessed pain. We can show how those we’re taught to see as enemies may actually be struggling with the same things we are.
By giving people a wider lens, we reduce the need to blame. And in doing so, we open the possibility of deeper empathy and shared humanity.
True change doesn’t come from attacking people. It comes from questioning the frameworks that shape them. When we dismantle flawed narratives rather than vilify individuals, we create space for something better to emerge.
Because the real work of writing isn’t to win the argument; it’s to remind us of what we’ve forgotten: that beneath all the noise, we’re more connected than we’ve been led to believe.