When we feud over Trump or Brexit, it’s easy to believe our in-group is the lone voice of sanity. But our tribalistic clashes send us spiralling deeper into the void

I have come to think of it as the Vortex: the psychological whirlpool into which I can feel myself getting sucked almost every time I open Twitter, or Facebook, or any of the websites devoted to chronicling the mendacity and stupidity of the world – by which I mainly mean politics – in 2017. This metaphor is slightly self-serving, since it suggests not a failure of self-discipline on my part but an external force so strong I could hardly be expected to resist it. Still, that’s how it feels. Once the waters claim you, you’re no longer really in control.

At the very edge, the Vortex exerts only a gentle pull, which usually manifests for me as the thought that catching up with the news might be a relaxing break from writing or household chores. Or it’s the inner voice arguing that having finally persuaded the baby to take a nap, I deserve the small pleasure of a few moments on social media. It’s rarely relaxing or pleasurable in practice. But by the time I remember that, the current is too strong: I’m already firing off sarcastic one-liners, vigorously favouriting posts from people intelligent enough to share my opinions, or else actively searching for updates from commentators whose views, I know in advance, will render me livid. By this time, my stomach muscles have tightened and my jaw is clenched, which is the point at which some people erupt into sweary tirades or vicious personal feuds. But that’s not really me. Mostly, my ranting continues inwardly, sometimes for hours, so that I can easily find I’ve spent an entire session at the gym, or a trip to the supermarket, mentally prosecuting a devastating argument against some idiotic holder of Bad Opinions who will never have a clue how much I cared.

I realise you don’t need me to tell you that something has gone badly wrong with how we discuss controversial topics online. Fake news is rampant; facts don’t seem to change the minds of those in thrall to falsehood; confirmation bias drives people to seek out only the information that bolsters their views, while dismissing whatever challenges them. (In the final three months of the 2016 presidential election campaign, according to one analysis by Buzzfeed, the top 20 fake stories were shared more online than the top 20 real ones: to a terrifying extent, news is now more fake than not.) Yet, to be honest, I’d always assumed that the problem rested solely on the shoulders of other, stupider, nastier people. If you’re not the kind of person who makes death threats, or uses misogynistic slurs, or thinks Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager ran a child sex ring from a Washington pizzeria – if you’re a basically decent and undeluded sort, in other words – it’s easy to assume you’re doing nothing wrong.

But this, I am reluctantly beginning to understand, is self-flattery. One important feature of being trapped in the Vortex, it turns out, is the way it looks like everyone else is trapped in the Vortex, enslaved by their anger and delusions, obsessed with point-scoring and insult-hurling instead of with establishing the facts – whereas you’re just speaking truth to power. Yet in reality, when it comes to the divisive, depressing, energy-sapping nightmare that is modern online political debate, it’s like the old line about road congestion: you’re not “stuck in traffic”. You are the traffic.

And by “you”, of course, I mean me. (And you too, though. Don’t try to wriggle out of this one.)

The most basic characteristic of the Vortex is a fundamental disingenuousness about what it is we’re doing when we visit social media forums to engage in political debate – a disingenuousness no less evident in the output of many professional pundits and columnists. We may tell ourselves we’re there to inform people, or to get informed, or to try to persuade those who disagree with us. Much of the time, though, our real motives emerge from the phenomenon psychologists call “in-group bias”. We want to telegraph our good standing as members of certain groups to other members of those groups: the anti-Trump resistance, say, or people who think Brexit is lunacy, or opponents of homophobia, and so on. We want to feel the warm sense of bonding that arises from endorsing a fellow group member’s opinions, or best of all from having our own opinions endorsed, through “likes” or other positive feedback. If the world is going to hell in a handcart, we at least want to feel we’re travelling in a big group of friends. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we want to make those who don’t belong to our portfolio of in-groups feel bad: to shame them, or just to wind them up. (You can call all this “virtue signaling” if you must – but please be advised that this simply identifies you as a member of the right-leaning tribe whose members like to think of themselves as so hard-headed and rational as to be immune to such things. In other words, it’s virtue signaling.)

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The psychological literature is full of vivid demonstrations of the power of in-group bias, often involving children: in one typical experiment in Beirut in the 1960s, psychologists divided 11-year-old boys at a residential camp into two groups, each consisting of five Muslims and four Christians, and labelled them the Blue Ghosts and the Red Genies. It wasn’t long before fighting broke out – involving knives stolen from the camp kitchen – not along Lebanon’s tortured Muslim-versus-Christian axis, but between Blue and Red. The study had to be abandoned.

Of course, your bias against Donald Trump and his supporters, to pick the obvious example, is much less arbitrary than that. But if it leads you to be motivated primarily to make Trumpists feel bad, while making you and those who agree with you feel good – rather than to change people’s minds, or bring about specific political objectives – it’s still in-group bias. For instance, take the way critics of Trump sometimes reply directly to his tweets. (To be clear, I never do this. Except sometimes.) What’s their motivation, really? They’re surely not hoping to convince him to start acting decently, nor usually to convince his supporters to desert him. Rather, they’re seeking validation from fellow Trump-dislikers who see their replies – plus, in the best case, a few satisfying outbursts of rage from the “Make America Great Again” crowd.

You could argue that preaching to the choir like this, whipping them into a greater frenzy of indignation, isn’t totally pointless, since it might energise them to take constructive action. But the psychological evidence for this is decidedly mixed. Anger, stoked repeatedly over the long term with no tangible evidence that anything is improving, seems as likely to trigger “learned helplessness” – the sense that whatever one does, the daily outrages will persist, making activism pointless. Meanwhile, the evidence that this sort of angry tribalism makes political consensus harder to reach – while boosting the fortunes of demagogues – grows more persuasive by the day.

Frankly, it’s unnerving to examine too closely the kind of people we become in the Vortex. For one thing, there’s the embarrassing tendency to end up angrier at people closer to you on the political spectrum than those much further away, perhaps because an in-group’s integrity depends on closely policing its boundaries. (Going by my emotional reactions alone, I’m apparently far crosser with the Brexit propagandist Daniel Hannan MEP than I am with Isis.)

Yet another sign you’re trapped in the Vortex is the phenomenon that’s been labelled “position creep”, in which otherwise sane people adopt, then feel obliged to fight for, the sort of black-and-white, nuance-free stances they’d never defend in calm conversation over cups of tea offline. Did Clinton lose the 2016 presidential election because of sexism, or Russian interference, or Trump’s racism; or was her own dispiriting centre-right policy platform to blame? It was all of them, obviously: such a small number of votes made the decisive difference to Trump’s electoral college victory that the absence of any one of these factors would have changed the outcome. But in the Vortex, apparently, you have to pick one, then work yourself into a frothing rage on its behalf, frequently in response to a counter-argument that almost nobody actually seems to be making – such as that sexism played no role at all or, conversely, that Clinton shouldn’t have to accept any of the blame.

Except, rereading the foregoing paragraphs, I find I’ve slipped back into doing the very thing I’m criticising: picking on people whose arguments I consider foolish, at least partly in the hope that they’ll recognize themselves in my words, and feel bad. That’s the thing about the Vortex: try to talk about it, and unless you’re careful, you just get sucked back into the worst excesses of it. You find yourself rudely denouncing people for their lack of civility. You start seeing confirmation bias in everyone except yourself – which is, needless to say, a case of confirmation bias. And you begin to manifest one of the key symptoms of tribalism: the growing certainty that people on the other side are behaving awfully tribalistically.

None of this began with the internet. The increasing fractiousness of online debate is one thread in a long and complex story about the rise of political partisanship, and a far older one about the human passion for inter-group enmity. (As Andrew Sullivan pointed out in a recent New York magazine essay, for the overwhelming majority of human history, tribalism was the only way of life anyone knew; arguably, we’re just heading back to our default state.) But the modern-day “attention economy” could hardly be more expertly engineered to make things worse. News organisations dependent on online advertising constantly face the temptation to make their stories more anger-inducing, and thus more compulsively shareable, than the facts may warrant. And social networks have no business incentive to do anything other than pander to our basest urges. If what you really want to see, as measured by your online behaviour, is posts from obnoxious people being obnoxious – or posts from people you admire mocking other people for being obnoxious – then that’s what you’ll see, even if some higher part of you would prefer not to get dragged into all that yet again. Without social media, I can virtually guarantee I’d never have felt a moment’s outrage about the ramblings of many figures of the American alt-right, because I’d never have heard of them to begin with.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to accept our own complicity here, I suspect, is that it seems to imply a kind of moral equivalence. To accept that you might be behaving online in an unhelpfully tribalistic way, when those on the receiving end of your attacks include bigots and even neo-Nazis, seems to veer close to saying you’re no better than a neo-Nazi yourself. It might even be mistaken for an argument in favour of reaching political consensus by splitting the difference: the “Very Fine People On Both Sides” theory, according to which Nazis and anti-fascists just need to learn to get along. But none of that follows. You’re right, and the Nazis are wrong. The problem, in the Vortex, is that forcefully expressing opinions you know to be right doesn’t seem to bring the world any closer to the way you’d like it to be.

And this, surely, is the most frustrating and consequential feature of the Vortex: all too often, the scorn and outrage we unleash there does little but boost the very people and viewpoints we were hoping to damage or defeat. Twitter zingers from prominent liberals in response to the latest Trump travesty have notably failed to lessen the daily stream of effluvium from the White House. But in some incremental way, they almost certainly do cement his supporters’ conviction that liberals are sneering at them – they are sneering at them, after all – which was a centrepiece of Trump’s campaigning, and which risks delivering him a second term. Shame and humiliation, used against large constituencies of people, mainly just has the effect of increasing their adherence to their views, until such time as they’re in a position to humiliate us back.

For a different demonstration of this counterproductive pattern, recall the notorious case of the Google “anti-diversity memo”. Whatever your opinion of its contents, it’s hard to deny that without the global tsunami of condemnation that greeted it, its author, James Damore, would not have achieved the status of alt-right hero he now enjoys. Or, rather, doesn’t enjoy: Damore has explicitly repudiated the alt-right. But that barely matters. Once this kind of animosity cycle is up and running, it is self-sustaining. So the writer of the memo would like to clarify or revise a few points? His detractors would like to add nuance to their critique? Sorry. The Vortex doesn’t care about such things.

If you, like me, would like to spend less time in the Vortex, you have two basic options. One is to go cold turkey: to disconnect from social media, avoid the news, and pretend none of this is happening, except where it directly affects our own lives. I’ve tried that, but it never lasts long, partly because a complete personal ban on social media and online debate turns out to function, for me, like banning your kids from watching any television or eating any sweets: it makes the prohibited thing seem far more thrilling, so my self-restraint wilts, and I find myself bingeing more vigorously on the witheringly sarcastic sequence of insults that will finally end Steve Bannon’s career.

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The more challenging alternative is to cultivate the ability to scrutinise your motivations in real time. To identify the surge of glee at the prospect of sticking it to your enemies as it arises; to notice when the real motivation behind a tweet is that you’re bored, or feeling slightly lonely, or because you’re desperate to focus on something other than work. This is one interpretation of the overused concept of “mindfulness”, and part of the thinking behind Mindful Resistance, a project established recently by the American author and journalist Robert Wright in an effort to combat what he sees as the counterproductive emotionalism of opposition to Trump. In succumbing to outrage, Wright argues, we inadvertently help him – by allowing him to distract us at will, and by impairing our ability to understand, and thus address, the motivations of those who voted him into office. “We need to respond to each day’s news about Trump wisely,” he explains. “With moral clarity and forceful conviction, but with awareness of the way overreactions to his provocations can play into his hands.”

It’s surely worth a try. But it’s no use merely endorsing it in theory, or writing articles like this one, urging others to act more mindfully. The only thing that counts is: next time, when you feel the first pull of the Vortex, in the brief moment when you still have the option not to spiral down into anger and scorn, will you find it in yourself to resist? Will I?