One half becomes the race known as the Skeksis, who are active and energetic, but selfish and amoral. They cannot attain peace and happiness and are reduced to permanent scheming and warring in a futile quest to attain immortality.
The other side becomes the Mystics: kind and wise, but passive and lazy. They are reactive and achieve little because they have no motivation, no energy.
These halves cannot be reconciled.
---
One of my friends who is a college economics professor was telling me recently about an experience with a Chinese-American student of his. He was trying to get to know her in a one-on-one conference, but all the extracurricular activities she had listed were boring and generic: debate club, international relations club, and so on. He pushed a bit and got her to reveal her true passions: boxing, riding motorcycles, and shooting machine guns! (I promise this is a true story)
Now, in former times, I think I would have interpreted this through the lens of "conservative perspectives and experiences are repressed in higher education"--which I still believe is true, and a problem. But today I think the true problem runs a bit deeper than that. I live in a purple-red area now, know many conservatives, and travel in a variety of conservative spheres (or at least I did before COVID.
). And I have witnessed how liberal perspectives are muted in these conservative spheres. It is just like conservatives in academia.But it's not so much outward repression as it is self-censorship: the fear that if you express yourself, your peers won't approve; that you will suffer social isolation, diminished career opportunities, a smaller dating pool, etc.
We interpret the culture we're embedded within, and most of us consciously or unconsciously decide to hide some of ourselves to fit into it. But the degree of self-censorship today is astonishing. And perhaps even worse, those of us who do not self-sensor instead express the most extreme possible versions of our beliefs. The environmentalist questions the value of civilization itself. The gun enthusiast becomes a frightening militiaman. The skeptic denies that COVID-19 even exists. And so on. It's as if we've concluded that if we are going to be judged for out beliefs anyway, we may as well not hold anything back.
Essentially, the public expression of reasonableness in politics has vanished, replaced with self-censorship and extreme over-exaggeration.
This creates a public impression that people on the left and the right are more different from one another than they really are, which makes us feel like we have nothing in common. So we're left with these silly stereotypes of the paranoid antisocial god-fearing conservative barbarian who loves guns and trucks and beer and makes his money raping the environment in the oil industry and advocates the replacement of democracy with a fascist cult of personality, and the prissy nosy sanctimonious morality police liberal who feels superior for attending the opera and eating fancy artisinal food and makes too much money by publishing magazine articles about trendy artists nobody cares about.
Like the Skeksis and Mystics, we Americans have become artificially separated from one another, unable to reconcile our disparate halves to create a more harmonious whole.
---
Thankfully, unlike in the movie, no 80s fantasy magic is needed to re-integrate us.
I think what we have to do is regain the confidence to express who we really are and what we really believe--not the crazy extreme versions that our cloistering into cultural bubbles has wrought, but rather the real versions of ourselves. The genuine stuff. The warm, human stuff. Because most of us truly are somewhere closer to the middle.In reality, we are liberals who are devoutly religious or who think political correctness is going too far in academia. We are conservatives who enjoy intellectual media, international travel, and believe climate change is a big problem.
We also enjoy camping, vehicles, and weapons. We like pulpy, semi-pornographic media. We have gay and even trans relatives we're okay with. We believe abortion should be rarer and that sometimes the police have treated black people unfairly. We think Russia is a malign force on the world stage, and also that Hunter Biden is probably corrupt.
This is who we are as Americans. We just need to remember it and start practicing it again.
I think the most important way we can do this is to consciously practice not jumping to logical conclusions--both in our own views, and in how we see others. For example if you're an environmentalist, you can express that in terms of concern for the environment rather than actively trying to destroy the fossil fuel industries. If you're a gun enthusiast, you can express that in terms of a fun hobby rather than acting like a rebel militiaman. And so on. Just tone it down from an 11 to, maybe, I dunno, like a 4 or a 5.
It also means that when you hear about or meet an environmentalist, you don't assume their goal is to dismantle modern civilization and pull us back to the stone age. You give them the benefit of the doubt. As a result, maybe they'll be willing to listen to your concerns, and you'll realize you agree with most of what they're saying. Likewise, you don't assume that the person you learn is a gun enthusiast is just itching to kill people and participate in a fascist coup. And maybe you'll discover guns are kind of cool and you like them and that their concerns about unreasonable restrictions on them kinda make some sense.
Because when you assume the best in people, you encourage them to live up to those expectations, and they will naturally moderate themselves. It seems like that's what's been missing in our social fabric recently. Only then can we be reconciled to one another, and our society can begin to heal.
