... worth the read of the entire piece ...Our Consensus Reality Has Shattered: A Whirlwind of Uncertainty Is Stirring Up Extremismhttps://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/10/whirlwind-uncertainty-landed-us-year-and-its-stirring-extremism/169174/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/year-living-uncertainly/616648/... When no clear, authoritative source of truth exists, when uncertainty rages, human nature will lead many people to seek a more stable reality by wrapping themselves in an ever-tighter cloak of political, religious, or racial identities. The more uncertainty rises, the more alluring that siren call becomes. And some Americans are responding by seeking out exclusive, all-encompassing identities that are toxic and fragile—and hold the seed of violent extremism.... “Knowledge resides in consensus, rather than in any transcendent or objective relationship between a knower and that which is to be known,” ... The more people who agree on a fact, the more we understand it to be real.
Objective reality is presumed to exist, and it may enforce its strictures tangibly—for instance, through COVID-19 death tolls and hospitalizations. But objective reality is apprehended through consensus. We do not set out, individually, to count the dead. We trust others to do it for us. When our enveloping social consensus agrees that 200,000 Americans have died, it becomes a fact. It becomes real.
Perhaps most importantly, the nature of the consensus depends on who you know. Even today, surrounding yourself with people who believe that the world is flat is eminently possible. The more people you know who believe it, the more likely you will believe it as well. But if you move, or make new friends, the consensus may again change around you.
The instability of the consensus has always presented a challenge, but in today’s globally networked world, realities collide around us every day, sometimes dramatically—even violently—opposed in their verdicts on values, opinions, and facts.
... How much engagement does it take to make an alternative fact credible? One hundred thousand retweets? Fifty thousand likes? Ten thousand shares? These numbers were within reach for virtually everyone, and even they are overkill. For some people, seeing 100, 50, or 20 is enough. In a small group—a chat room or a Telegram channel—affirmation from 10 people might be sufficient to tilt someone toward violence, because consensus is more powerful when it is found among others you trust. We listen most closely to chat members, friends, family, and colleagues. We value most dearly the opinions of people from the same neighborhood, or from the same religion, or from the same race.
... Some people are better at living with uncertainty than others and can navigate a landscape of contradictions more comfortably. But most of us will seek to reduce uncertainty by turning to the people we trust the most: people who are like us, people with whom we can identify, what social scientists refer to as an in-group.
The in-group is not a designation of power or popularity. It’s simply your group. Anyone who’s not in your group is part of an out-group. ... We identify with in-groups because we understand that they are filled with people like us—who hold similar opinions, listen to similar music, enjoy similar foods. Because they’re more like us, we relate to them more easily and agree with them more often than we do members of our out-groups.
A related effect is equally venerable, but less understood.
People who associate with in-groups tend to develop negative attitudes about out-groups. We like our music and don’t like theirs. Our food is good; theirs is not as good. This often extends to the quality of the members: Our people are better than they are.... in-groups don’t
necessarily develop negative feelings about out-groups, even when the groups are competing for resources or status. As the social psychologist John T. Jost has demonstrated,
people usually favor maintaining the status quo over changes that might benefit their in-group, an effect called “system justification.”
However, when the status quo is upended, as in a civil war, people experience massive uncertainty. When the status quo collapses, there is no system to justify. But even short of societal collapse, the system-justification impulse can fail. What happens when the status quo is not just beset by uncertainty, but is itself the source of uncertainty?
That’s when things get ugly.
... During times of great uncertainty, our need to make the world real and know what is true becomes much more urgent, and we can satisfy that need by immersing ourselves ever deeper in an in-group that offers a clear, authoritative consensus.
The social psychologist Michael A. Hogg found that feelings of uncertainty make people more likely to strongly identify with in-groups.
Michael A. Hogg, et.al,
Extremism and the Psychology of Uncertainty, Applied Social Psychology Series Book 9
But Hogg’s findings go further. People who are experiencing uncertainty tend to assign a higher value to the in-group’s most distinctive traits, such as skin color or religious practice. They are attracted to in-groups with rigidly defined rules and boundaries, and to in-groups that are internally homogenous—filled with people who look, think, and act in similar ways.
More destructively, people who are experiencing uncertainty tend to develop hostile attitudes toward out-groups, seeing them as threats, and entertaining dark fantasies of hostile actions toward the hated other. Some in-group members may go beyond fantasy, engaging in acts of violence, terrorism, even genocide.
They gravitate toward social movements that are bigoted, hateful, and authoritarian.
They become extremists.... Unemployment and poverty do not drive extremism directly. People can live with deprivation if they know what’s expected, where they fit into the picture, and how they will survive, if only barely. They can live with adversity if they can plan for it.
But when unemployment and poverty surge unexpectedly, overturning the status quo, when hopes and dreams and long-laid plans fly out the window, extremism becomes much more attractive. When uncertainty overtakes the system itself, when the system is the source of uncertainty, things can really fall apart, and it becomes difficult to know which way society will turn. ...
