Healing the Culture Wars–One Conscious Conversation at a Time

We hold the power to heal the polarization poisoning our conversations.

New Pioneers, Artwork by Mark Henson

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The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude. — Viktor Frankl

We find ourselves at a truly unique moment in history. This year’s election along with our other complex challenges are shaking up society and putting our relationships to the test.

Here's the good news. We hold the power to heal the polarization poisoning our conversations.

The latest neuroscience shows that the brain is designed to rewire itself with conscious thought–opening up to new ways of seeing and making sense of our lives and the world.

This essay challenges all of us to tap into our deeper consciousness, examining the beliefs and narratives fueling our collective struggle to heal polarization. We also explore inspiring remedies and stories that build strong communities and reimagine activism for a healthier society.

What’s beyond entrenched divisions and familiar narratives?

Shifts away from polarization are already happening. Researchers in Poland found that people from across the political spectrum feel much more empathy and openness to dialogue on the divisive abortion issue than their elected leaders do. Journalist and author Batya Ungar-Sargon traveled all across America, engaging with everyday people to understand their views on politics, culture, and the economy. Communities across the country were more diverse and open to viewpoint diversity than she had previously thought.

Contrary to mainstream media narratives, she found deep consensus on the most important issues between working class Democrats and working class Republicans.

This shared humanity can break through even the deepest divides. Jane Goodall attributed much of her success as an activist to building meaningful relationships with the corporations and scientists contributing to animal welfare abuses and environmental destruction. Black musician Daryl Davis befriended hundreds of KKK and white supremacists with love and acceptance, leading these individuals to disavow their allegiances and thus unravel generations of hate.

Enemy soldiers from different sides of war have come together in profound forgiveness and solidarity–even in the face of moral and ethical complexity. From gang members on opposites sides of the game to countless victims and perpetrators of war and genocide, The Forgiveness Project has gathered hundreds of inspiring stories of people who are ending the cycles of dehumanization in society.

At PEERS and WantToKnow.info, we’ve been advocating for a wake-up call on polarization since our founding in 2003. Over the years, we’ve captured profound stories of people bridging divides and embracing an ethic of love in their activism and society.

Truth becomes true in community. The social order hungers for a center (i.e. spirit, soul) that gives it identity, power, and purpose. America, and all cultural entities, are in search of a soul.
— Howard Thurman

The Greek word agape was a moral imperative defined by Martin Luther King Jr. as the willingness to go to any length to restore and strengthen community. King declared that he had decided to love. He testified that love is the highest good, and “the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.” He called on the “creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness."

An ethic of love affirms what we fear, what we are against, what we don't like, and what needs protecting. Yet love also invites us to move beyond resistance and fear. Love challenges us to take responsibility for translating our sense of injustice into creative possibilities for a world beyond the distresses of oppression and fear. Instead of viewing the work as a conflict between “us” and “them,” we engage in a principled struggle to collaborate and build authentic relationships regardless of our differences.

How an Ethic of Love Can Reshape Activism and Society

Being a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you revolutionary. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that achieves power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not consciously adopted different values.”
― Chinese American civil rights and labor activist Grace Lee Boggs

Social activist and poet bell hooks frequently wrote about the need for a strong love ethic among progressive communities and activists. She observed how many people resist domination only when their own interests (or the interests of their tribe) are threatened, rather than seeking a broader transformation that ends all forms of oppression and domination.

For instance, she highlighted how the Black Power movement of the sixties, which initially sought to foster love and inclusivity, shifted towards a focus on power through the use of domination and force. This led to an increasing emphasis on identity politics, which fractured social justice movements into one-dimensional issues and individual group identities like race, gender, political tribe, or class. Broader economic and social justice goals that could bring us all together beyond tribal grievances were sidelined.

Going deeper, the profound grief and pain rippling throughout society was suppressed and replaced with militant activism that avoided the appearance of being weak or powerless, and prioritized material goals over building a strong community. As Joanna Macy, a thought leader on environmental and social transformation, once reflected, “the refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.”

When the US government infiltrated and manipulated these activist movements, these communities turned against each other instead of towards each other. Would this have happened if love and community had been at the center of these progressive efforts to build more collective power? King once said that “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination. The ability to acknowledge blind spots can emerge only as we expand our capacity to care about the oppression and exploitation of others. A love ethic makes this expansion possible.
— bell hooks

When opposing views are treated as existential threats, it becomes more acceptable to use domination to assert moral or ideological superiority. The aim isn’t genuine understanding or resolution, but rather to critique, silence, or "win" against perceived enemies. This dynamic feeds into a deeper fear of losing power, identity, or societal influence, making domination seem necessary to protect one's worldview from being challenged or destabilized.

This consciousness often operates below the surface, even when we have good intentions and a deep commitment to democratic principles. Yet its impact on the social polarization we're feeling is clear.

The hardest thing is facing yourself. It’s easier to shout “Revolution” and “Power to the People” than it is to look at yourself and find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t … when you pull the wool over your own eyes, your own hypocrisy. That’s the hardest one.
– John Lennon

Culture wars are creating massive, unhealthy tensions within progressive organizations. These critical groups are facing an unprecedented standstill because they’re spending too much time fighting each other. The social minefields within the broader culture wars have resulted in a growing number of people self-censoring, including experienced medical professionals who fear cancellation for discussing their views on treating children questioning their gender identity.

Perhaps this is an appropriate response to how relentlessly we’re bombarded with harmful and simplistic labels like white supremacists, woke left, sheeple, anti-vaxxers, anti-science crusaders, conspiracy theorists, racists, transphobes, misogynists, and countless others.

These labels reduce us to ideological constructs, sabotaging authentic communication by stripping away context and nuance. The end result is that we’ve become more counter aggressive, defensive, and fearful of each other. When we weaponize labels to discredit or make others wrong, we marginalize and alienate people–reinforcing an "in-group" versus "out-group" mentality.

Traveling peacemaker and founder of nonviolent communication Dr. Marshall Rosenberg once said that “the more people are trained to think in terms of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness and badness, the more they are being trained to look outside themselves—to outside authorities—for the definition of what constitutes right, wrong, good, and bad.”

I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other. – Martin Luther King Jr.

Transformational leader Meg Wheatley teaches us that labels result in us knowing less about each other, but assuming we know more.

Some initiatives attempt to foster understanding across our divides, yet still use divisive labels that diminish this goal. One example is Ground News, which promises to help people fact-check stories and spot media bias by categorizing news from a variety of sources as Left, Center, or Right.

While Ground News claims to uncover partisan biases, this approach actually reinforces partisan biases by assigning more importance to partisan labels than to the content of the news. While it’s valuable to see what different political sides are reporting, genuine media literacy involves more than sorting news into partisan boxes. Concerns about vaccine safety or censorship aren’t solely “far-right” issues, and addressing war or racial injustice isn’t limited to the “left.” Viewing issues through a partisan lens keeps us confined to ideological boxes and distracts us from understanding the multifaceted nature of complex societal issues.

As these traditional touchstones of meaning in life, family, faith, friendship, community, have been on the [decline] in recent decades, more and more people have found their ultimate meaning in political issues. Now it’s easy for people to feel like their very identity is being assaulted because of that disagreement, because their identity has been misplaced in a public and political issue. Democracy depends on reasonable, deliberative discourse and conversation and debate. And if people are constantly being thrown into fight or flight mode, we’re not doing democracy well. We’re not doing life together very well. We take one aspect of who a person is and extrapolate that: “OK, that’s all I need to know about who you are and what you stand for.” But that’s so reductive and it’s degrading to the dignity of the human person. – 'A disposition of the heart': Exploring the power of civility to heal divides, Christian Science Monitor

Braver Angels creates intentional spaces for Red and Blue participants to better understand one another's positions and discover their shared values. This work has produced transformative outcomes in bridging divides. While it plays a crucial role in society, it still gives power to labels and defines our interactions based on those labels.

I imagine a future where simply being present with each other becomes the ground for our interactions. Meeting each other in the moment, human to human, we co-create connections from an open space: Curiosity. Wonder. Taking deep breaths. Noticing something we haven't noticed before. Trusting the process. Austrian-born Israeli philosopher Martin Buber describes this quality of presence: “Every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you.”

The Consciousness Shift That Brings Us Together

I’ve collaborated with a lot of different personalities, across diverse efforts and social movements. I’ve spent countless hours talking with people across the political, religious, and cultural spectrum. As a result, I no longer feel hopeless about our future.

Here are the core insights I've come to trust deeply:

It’s not our differences that divide us; it’s the judgment about our differences.
People and issues are far more complex than the labels and boxes we often place them in.
We all want to be seen, heard and acknowledged.
Things move at the speed of trust.
Creative energy and authentic dialogue explodes when we focus on the values that we share.

Smith College Professor, feminist, and civil rights activist Loretta Ross built unexpected yet transformative relationships with Ku Klux Klan members and incarcerated men convicted of serious crimes against women. Over the years, much of her activism has focused on healing cancel culture: the readiness to alienate and dehumanize a person on the basis of their beliefs. Instead of calling out, she offers tools and insights to call people in with love and respect. When asked what is lost when we lose nuance in a world where everything is seen as either black or white, here’s what she had to say:

The biggest loss is depth. I think there’s a tendency to oversimplify because we are exhausted by the thought that things may not be as they appear. In our hairy life, where everything is trying to grab our attention, we tend to gravitate towards those things that simplify life for us.

The second is the loss of integrity and a sense of self. Calling in is not what you do for other people—it’s what you do for yourself. It gives you a chance to offer love, grace, and respect, and to showcase one’s own integrity and one’s own ability to hold nuance and depth. People mistakenly think that you’re doing it because you’re trying to change somebody else. That’s not possible. People have to make the decision to change themselves. But what you can do is provide them an opportunity to do so.

And since we don’t have the power to control and change others, the only power we’re left with is self-empowerment: the power to choose how we walk through the world. In this sense, calling in is a conscious decision to not make the world crueler than it needs to be.

We’re all capable of using a technique I call “the mental parking lot” where you temporarily put aside any visceral reactions you have to what others are saying. It’s a technique that requires you not to pay attention to your reaction but rather to devote your focus and respect to the person you’re talking to.

It’s hard at first because many of us want to get into a debate and persuade those with opposing viewpoints that they’re wrong. But quite often, if you can achieve that technique of parking your own reactions and giving them attention—this can be done by using simple phrases like, “tell me more” or “how did you arrive at that conclusion?”—then you get a glimpse into their life’s journey that has cultivated this perspective. Generally speaking, once you extend an invitation to a dialogue, then you condition them to better listen to your perspective.

Instead of a fight, you have a conversation.

Imagine if we radically shifted our conversations to frame every issue or topic in ways that bring us all together and highlight our common values. A new consciousness that integrates the best of the intellect (ideas, stories, beliefs, our version of the facts) with the relational world. To relate is to get present with others, relax our fears, listen, and ask questions to deepen the conversation.

This may not always produce perfect results. Yet if enough people take the risk to relate to each other differently–to take the dehumanization out of our interactions and not see each other as enemies–we just might create new possibilities and choices we couldn’t see before.

A wave of local democracy is sweeping across Europe. Assemblies are public meetings where local people get together to discuss and decide on a specific issue, without political interference or hidden agendas. These assemblies can help us fundamentally rethink how we make decisions in our society, and create strong, active communities in the process. To survive ecological breakdown and the collapse of our failing economy, we need both, urgently. The culture war has gained a lot of ground. Overcoming these divisions is one of our biggest, most pressing challenges. Through assemblies, it’s possible to form self-organising communities where we lift each other out of the conditions that these ideologies prey on. Where we are forced to work alongside people we disagree with or even dislike, and organise positive initiatives that feed us, lower our energy bills, give us purpose and contribute to a stronger community spirit. Our assembly ground rules ask us to look for what we have in common, and there is a wealth of agreement to be found if you care to look for it. – 'Empowering and healing, people’s assemblies are the future of democracy', Positive News

In our conversations and in our actions, we can begin noticing where we fall into dualistic thinking (either/or, us vs. them, left/right) and do our best to understand and have compassion for ourselves and others. We can bring our focus back to the collective and democratic values that bring us all together–values that are less about politics and more about helping each other thrive. Let’s end these culture wars together for the health of our communities and planet.

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WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

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