There are two things I keep coming back to in discussions about polarisation and 21st century Western politics.

Firstly, Daniel Schmachtenberger talking about polarisation and saying (paraphrasing here) that no matter what someone believes or how absurd or wrong that belief is, they got there somehow and have a reason for believing it. It may not be a valid reason, but it's the foundation they're working from. It likely won't be immediately visible at the surface of this or that debate. They might not be able to tell you it themselves, because it's likely axiomatic and invisible for them. There's always a signal somewhere in there though, if you can pay enough attention.

That doesn't mean giving them a platform, or suspending critical thinking, but it does require us to exercise critical thinking in ways that are both kind and strategic.

Examples:
1. Winning a debate on facebook with a flat-earther achieves basically nothing against Flat-Earth as a roiling cultural belief system. Trying to understand why that same person believes it, and asking questions in good faith, does not mean accepting their beliefs or taking those beliefs seriously. Putting them on NewsNight to debate someone from NASA would be silly, but here we all are with a bunch of attention and outrage based business models.

2. Look hard enough and you can see one of the deeper Left/Right fault lines seems to be, respectively, default mistrust of authority vs. default deference to authority. If you look at those as two cultures, this difference is visible at all scales.


Daryl Davis de-radicalising KKK members:
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He was sharing a car journey with a man who at one point asserted: "Black men have a gene that makes them steal and murder".

Paraphrasing from memory of a deleted podcast:
"That's not true"
"It is, that's why black neighbourhoods have high crime rates"
"I've never hurt anyone or stolen anything, how do you explain that?"
"It's a recessive gene, it just hasn't come out of you yet but it will".

There are a lot of places to go from there, with a lot of faulty logic and factual inaccuracy to attack. Daryl didn't, instead he went quiet and a few minutes later dropped this into conversation:

"Did you know that white men have a gene that makes them serial killers?"
"NO! That's not true. That's bullshit"
"It's not, it's true. Can you name one black serial killer?"
"…"
"Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Earle Nelson, Larry Green…"
"It's not true! I've never murdered anyone"
"It's a recessive gene, it hasn't come out yet for you but it will".

Daryl ended that discussion there, moved on to talking about other things, and stayed civil. He didn't try to prove anyone wrong or right, just fed the guy's unconscious something with the same logic and different labels. A few months later, he'd left the KKK.

(blunter, but similar: a friend once told me his strategy for dealing with racist, misogynist and transphobic jokes was to immediately tell the joke back to whoever told it, but in a way that makes them the butt of it).

I keep coming back to this specific story from Daryl, because it's such an elegant piece of work. It avoids so many pitfalls I've become familiar with over the past few decades:

- Arguments that are just politeness theatre with no teeth. Chronic within Centrism and people who describe themselves as "extreme moderates", etc. They never seem to learn anything from getting their wallets inspected by the far Right. It often amounts to tone policing with no critical thought underneath it.
- "We just need to tell the [fascists/Brexit voters/some other group] why they're wrong and they'll start thinking Correctly, like us".
- Rationalists failing to understand that pretty much anything can be rationalised. As a result, often laundering pathos and ethos into what they think is, then present as, logos.
- Rationalists and others not understanding the very important difference between valid and sound arguments (both sound reasonable, but valid arguments are a super-effective way to launder bad-faith arguments if you can sneak the right propositions in. I think they'd also benefit from understanding what Gödel proved about logical systems).
- The misapprehension that cults and other extreme ideologies are an aberrant, alien thing. They're not, they're just an extension of the way all culture works. Everything in one of these works as in every other group of humans, but gets slowly dialled up to a black-and-white monoculture.
- The misapprehension that people who become indoctrinated by cults or other ideologies aren't smart. A typical profile for someone who joins a cult is someone who is quite smart, doesn't fit in, and has had the absolute shit beaten out of them in some way. Smart people are absolutely great at the cognitive backflips and dissonance required to subscribe to these belief systems. People who are not smart often can't be bothered; often at most they'll follow a crowd into a belief system then do the bare minimum to not be ostracised.

Daryl doesn't indulge in any of these errors. I suspect he had to learn some of the above the hard way, but he did start thinking about racism and hatred at age twelve when, after getting screamed at by racists in the street, he asked his mother "How can they hate me when they don't know me?". He respects the people he's talking to even when they don't respect him, and even when he has no respect for their viewpoints. He's spent his whole life trying to understand why people believe prejudiced and untrue things about others.

He supplies a person's unconscious with arguments the same shape as the ones they're making, but with different labels that are emotionally incompatible for that person. He then gently leaves it to do the work while their unconscious iterates for a few weeks or months. It's a very skilful way to disentangle faulty logic and strongly held, socially reinforced values. Logical refutation by itself tends not to achieve that.