Many of us recognize the danger of toxic polarity in America, stoked by powerful conflict entrepreneurs: politicians and media on both ends of the political spectrum. Conflict entrepreneurs are parasites. Parasites glom onto their host, stealing its nutrients until the host dies.
It’s easy to feel helpless. But that’s depressing and disabling. Let’s not give into those feelings. Let’s look for a more emotionally intelligent approach. For the survival of the American experiment, we need to overcome toxic polarity.
Reflect on this: The Los Angeles Dodgers won the 2024 World Series. Their active roster had 26 players.
Do you think that the 26 players on the 2024 Dodgers all voted for the same presidential candidate? Do you think that all of them feel the same way on such issues as abortion, immigration, foreign policy, and taxes? Of course not. These 26 men, while teammates, are also individuals with their own thoughts, experiences, preferences, and beliefs.
Sport psychologists tell me that people on championship teams overcome differences to achieve common goals: a title, and bringing the best
out in each other. The only way to do that is for members of the team to create a set of invincible relationships, relationships that cannot be broken by people who might try to set teammates against each other. This doesn’t mean that team members don’t have differences. It’s just that they value their relationships and common goals enough to not let differences become the poison that will kill their dreams and aspirations.
Maybe the Dodgers and other championship sports teams can teach us something about overcoming differences for the common good. Isn’t America far more important that a sports title?
A surprise about politics in America: Research by Peter Coleman, Ph.D., social psychologist at Columbia University, shows that Americans sort themselves into seven political categories from left to right across the political spectrum. Despite all the noise they make, only 14% of Americans occupy the extreme ends. And yet they pretty much run politics these days. They gain influence through appealing to emotions. Destructive ones. They create the illusion that there are stark differences between us, and that ill-defined “others” are our enemies. They do this to incite anger and fear toward the mythical “other side.” Politicians do this to win votes and power. Media does it to win ad revenue. Never mind the damage done.
To preserve our country, we need to empower the 86% of people in the middle, people who are willing to listen to, learn from, and accept others rather than hate them for having different ideas. The goal is not to get everyone to agree. The goal is simply to understand and respect each other enough to work together rather than support a process that destroys both sides.
How do we empower the 86%? It would be natural to think first of doing what they taught us in school. Line up the two arguments. Then use logic to see which is right. We see this all the time in political ads, speeches, and articles.
It doesn’t work. Why? First, this approach is a zero-sum game, where there is a winner and a loser. But no one wants to lose! People wind up clinging ever more tightly to their original beliefs. And second, as useful as logic is, people largely make decisions, and take positions, based on their emotions. Yes, that’s a hard pill to swallow. But that doesn’t make it any less true. While well-meaning people are busy using logic on each other, conflict entrepreneurs are winning the game by appealing to emotions that set us against each other.
How can we appeal to emotion constructively, to gain cooperation rather than opposition? We begin by creating relationships as strong as those among championship teams. Team members have to come to know their team mates well enough to trust them and their intentions.
A relationship built on trust prevents honest differences from becoming divisive. Members of championship teams learn from each other, integrating different ideas and techniques. Think of it this way: The Dodgers have pitchers, catchers, outfielders, infielders, pinch-hitters, etc. Depending on their roles, players see the game from different perspectives, and they use those differences to make everyone smarter.
Learning from the Dodgers how to be champions for the American Dream means that we need to create relationships with people who are different from us, so that we can integrate their 
perspectives with ours. Republicans and Democrats need each other because neither group has all the answers.
This may sound good, until you begin the hard work of implementation. How do we actually make this process successful? The key is to use emotions constructively, that is, to use Emotional Intelligence (EQ). EQ is a set of learnable skills that empower people to do impossible things.
Logic on its own fails. Emotions on their own fail. But when logic and emotions work together, magic can happen. Each EQ skill, in its own
way, integrates emotions with logic, which is when people operate at their best. Here are just a few examples to show how EQ skills can help us build invincible relationships:
- Emotional Self-Awareness: This skill empowers us to know when we might be having an unintelligent emotion. Are we getting caught up in fear when there really isn’t any significant danger?
- Empathy: This skill helps us better understand another person’s position and what is behind it. To work together, we have to know what others want and need. Team relationships aren’t one-sided. Pitchers need to understand catchers.
- Stress Tolerance: This skill helps us manage the stress that having to deal with different ideas creates. As Henry Ford said: “Thinking is the hardest work there is. That’s why so few people do it.” (Ford was not a warm and fuzzy guy.) So if you decide to engage in this work, your stress level will go up a bit. But you will be rewarded.
- Self-Regard: This skill ensures that our egos aren’t so fragile that we can’t admit we don’t know everything. (What a relief not to have the burden of always having to be right!)
A blog post doesn’t have enough space to develop these ideas fully. My new book, A Little Book to Save Humanity, goes into enough detail to make these ideas usable, and yet is short enough not to put you to sleep. You can read the introduction here.
Should you wish to order a copy of A Little Book, you can click here. To order the complete set of exercises for each of the 16 EQ skills, click here.
We can start with ourselves. As the people we interact with experience for themselves what this feels like, many will find that it feels so good that they won’t be able to keep themselves from spreading it. Democracy will thrive when guided by the 86%.
