Comments by "SsjC" (@ssjcosty) on "Can a divided America heal? | Jonathan Haidt" video.

I think Trump is quite divise to be honest. He verbally berates the "liberals" and threatens them, he pits his supporters against the "enemies". So I don't think that the progressives/socialists etc. will find peace if Trump gets reelected, but instead I think the divisions will become even greater, maybe even lead to a civil war. I know I might sound like a doomsdayer, but the past few months have been quite surreal and tensions have escalated so much on both of these ends of the political spectrum. Jonathan Haidt makes a really good point about how currently the parties have become very "pure" and hence completely divided, where you have mainly socially conservative in one party vs socially liberal in another. The ideal would be to have these parties mixed, or maybe have multiple parties with similar political power so that there can be more of a mix of ideas and values.
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@johnhorton5627 Thanks for taking the time to write this, I appreciate it. I guess he, like many, lives in a bubble. Regarding "cancel culture", I think what's happening is that a lot of people (progressive, liberal) who were at the receiving end of narrow-minded Christian attitudes hoped that we would be far better than them, that we wouldn't shun and shame people like the Christians do, but it turns out that the people who were supposed to be better than that are now basically doing the same - shunning and canceling. And I get it, it's frustrating, especially for someone who lives in that context in Academia where we should be able to explore the world without being afraid of public opinion. And another thing that differs is how a lot of this now happens with immense speed via social media. Before, if you were a public figure (e.g. a book author) and said something controversial, it might have been published in a newspaper on page 20, or as part of an interview published in a literary magazine, but the impact of your words wouldn't propagate to everyone like it happens today, and you wouldn't have thousands of people immediately commenting on what you said nor harass you online for it. Laurie Penny, the British feminist writer, once talked about how whenever she makes a TV appearance or says something on Twitter, she gets thousands of vitriolic private messages, including many death threats. That must suck and I can see how someone who has that happen to them or their friends would end up taking a stance on it and talk about it publicly.
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@amythompson6431 Communism was literally a progressive idea at the time, because it was a (relatively) new ideology that seeked to overthrow the traditional political status quo, in the name of progress. Of course, communism was authoritarian, not liberal, but that doesn't mean it wasn't progressive. It's just that what they did in the name of progress was really bad.
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But you are doing exactly what Haidt is warning us of - thinking in simplisting terms of evil vs. good. When the real problem is that it's about different cultural views on things. The differences in culture do erode trust, which is a problem.The humanist proposition is NOT that we are all basically good, you are just drawing a big fat caricature of what you think is humanism at this point. In a few very short words, Humanism is an understanding that we humans are the ones who have the responsibility to find ways to work together and treat each other well. But humans are not good or evil, they're just humans, who can and do a lot of positive but also harmful things, can be wise and ignorant, can be peaceful and warring.
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He's not an idiot. I come from an Eastern European country, and we suffered greatly under an authoritarian communist regime, only to have a violent revolution which led to a political disarray and a really wild transition period full of corruption and destruction, but managed to progress beyond that to a point where we are a functional democracy. All these politics had real consequences for real people. But it is very very useful to be able to look at political spectrums like Haidt does and try to consider multiple points of view. Without this, you only end up with a polarized divided society and you're bound to repeat many of the mistakes of the past. We can only succeed by working together, not by perpetually fighting between ourselves, and we cannot succeed that if we are unwilling to understand each other.
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@johnhorton5627 I don't see how it is a waste of time. Not everybody has to be concerned with everything - look up the fallacy of relative privation. If I want to learn about economic growth, wages, incarceration rates etc. I will simply go to other more relevant sources.
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