The Real Driving Force Behind our Harsh Divide

By

Bill Cottringer

“It is not the things in life that bother us, but rather our opinions about these things.” Epictetus.

    The older I get, the dumber and smarter I feel. Dumber because of making so many assumptions about the truth of some important things in life, without challenging the accuracy and impact of these assumption; and smarter, because I am finally starting to catch on that many established truths are built on faulty assumptions that go unchallenged for too long.

     As a trained Psychologist I have always been very interested in my own and others’ thinking, feeling, believing and behavioral interactions and outcomes in interpersonal relationships. For far too long, I wrongly assumed that thinking drove feelings and behaviors and so if you didn’t like what you were feeling or doing, then all you had to do was change what you were thinking. By the way, this is still a very popular theory.

    The problem with this “theory” though, is that it doesn’t hold water. What is finally becoming more apparent to me, is that thinking actually impedes behavior and so, it is the feelings we have about what we may be thinking, that actually provide the energy to get things done with action. I once came across the intriguing saying above by the early philosopher Epictetus. He said, “It isn’t the things in life that bother us, but rather our opinions of these things.” Now at this juncture of my own life, this makes more sense than ever. We try to think rationally about the things that happen in life, but when they are either too good or too bad in consequences, our feelings take over and silence our thoughts into submission.

     Let’s put this new theory to a litmus test and see how it can help us better understand the harsh political divide going on feverously in our country of which everyone is painfully aware. A paradoxical fact of life is that we humans have both differences and commonalities. Unfortunately, it is the differences that we focus more on because we are driven to understand and control things for our sanity and amusement. And, often having strong feelings about these differences, they become even more visible and different, causing increased feelings and the actions they usually bring. And then of course these actions cause reciprocal reactions from the ever-increasing feelings of the actors and reactors.

     Political parties obviously have different agendas and voters have different hopes and fears about these agendas on both sides of the divide. Some hope one party will deliver us to the promised land, while the other party will take us to the gates of hell. Of course, both sides of this counterfeit coin are convinced their choice on heads or tails is truer than the other side’s. To further the differences within both sides of the divide and the divide itself, people vary with the degree of time and effort they allot to feeling vs. thinking airtime.

     Focusing on differences doesn’t help healing the divide, so maybe it is time to start thinking rationally about the things we all have in common and feeling less about the differences, especially the unwanted annoyance and anger. So, what do we have in common as the best starting point to begin to heal the destructive divide? This is the seemingly unsolvable dualistic war between our thinking and feeling brains. We all think about the values we want to pursue, but it is our feelings about these values that heat up or cool down the order in which we actually carry out the pursuit. If we feel more positively about things like love, wisdom, and spirituality, while feeling more negatively about wealth, security, and adventure, the order and the intensity of the pursuit is set in motion. And of course, any differences in values or feelings about our chosen ones, just aggravate the divide further.

     You are now probably asking, what is the common problem we all have that we can all work on to start healing the divide—once we set aside our differences and embrace our common denominator? It is managing the war that is going on in our minds between our thinking brains and feeling brains. We either under-think or under-feel, or over-think and over-feel, but never seem to have a healthy balance between our thinking and feeling. There is a very good reason for this, which is so much a part of us we can’t manage the distance needed to see it.

     The real culprit behind all problems we are experiencing is the poor communication between our own thinking and feeling brains, in order to achieve a healthier balance between the two and get better outcomes and consequences in the things we do or don’t do. And when you get up close and personal with this common problem, you begin to understand what is causing it to be a problem. You see, the two faculties of thinking and feeling talk to you in much different languages, and so no real meaning and understanding occurs between the two. They act separately instead of in harmony.

     The bottom line here, is that none of us can have any genuine hope or authentic happiness, until we have a peace settlement between our own thinking and feeling about the things that happen in life. This requires thinking to learn what it’s like to feel strongly about a rationally chosen value and feeling to learn what it is like to think about a strong feeling about a rational value. In other words, each brain function needs to access empathy about what the other one is doing, and why and how. This is obviously a difficult challenge—for our thinking to learn our feeling’s language and our feeling to incorporate some of thinking’s language—but most things worthwhile are difficult. Who knows, we may have set-up this showdown just for a surprise ending, which I hope we will all get.