How the thread is cut
Polarization, which is becoming increasingly evident in society, doesn’t do anyone any good. It creates a vicious cycle of growing division. It breeds feelings of weakness instead of cultivating intellectual responses to adversity. It cuts the thread running through the disparate elements that unite us and dulls the desire to look for common ground.
Conditions of intense political adversity, in particular, create a sense of emotional polarization, a trend whereby those with a different political point of view are regarded as the enemy, thereby affecting social relationships, sweeping away the informal yet critical rules of tolerance, mutual respect and moderation, and interrupting all sense of initiative in finding a common solution to local and other problems. It also destroys the drive to work together as a nation, a force that demands a united society.
Division, as we know too well, can cause mighty downfalls and violent regressions, even at the slightest provocation. These can also occur on the individual as well as the national level, as the tendency toward isolation and arrogance caused by unyielding support for a specific belief, by the certainty that we know what’s going on better than others, hamper personal progress. We lose by hunkering down in one camp. The ability to distinguish right from wrong and true from false is cultivated, in part, by exploring the reasoning behind the opposing views and ideas of people who think differently to us, the concerns of people with different philosophies, and the questions that are only partially or inadequately answered.
Greece may not be experiencing the kind of polarization that has the United States in its grips right now and has even led to outbursts of political violence, or that in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the Croatian Catholic fire service may not run to put out a blaze in a Bosnian Muslim building or the Muslims of the Bosnian fire service may let a Croatian Catholic building burn down, but we are allowing ourselves to become trapped in a downward spiral of division.
In a battle that erodes the ability of the institutions to referee the political confrontation. In confrontations that are developing far away from the corridors of power, in professional and even romantic relationships, as people may think twice about marrying a person who supports a rival political party. This may seem obvious and even reasonable – but it’s not. It is not just an indication that the country has been divided into two rival camps once more, but also that it’s sitting on a ticking time bomb.
