Episode 037 – United We Stand: Overcoming the ‘Us Vs. Them’ Mentality in Political Discourse

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

I was shocked at the response that I got from the video and the podcast episode that I posted, where I shared my conversations with Bobby Kennedy Jr. after having a private dinner with him and spending two and a half hours talking to him about his policies and getting to know him as an individual.  For the most part, it got a positive reception from my audience.  I did not expect how many subscribers I would lose on YouTube and the negative comments that would show up.

So today I want to unpack what I think is going on in America today in terms of our political divide and in terms of the way that we communicate with each other.  Because it is a pretty dramatic shift away from what our founding fathers intended in terms of having healthy debates and conversations about topics and issues that affect us all.

How Did We Go From “Hope and Change” to THIS?

I first got into politics in 2008 with the Obama election.  Like a lot of people, I bought into the whole “hope and change” ideal that he seemed to run his campaign on.  He promised to drain the financial swamp of DC at a time when the United States was coming off the heels of the 2008 financial crisis.  But like any “good” politician, Obama turned right around and led the financial swamp creatures right back into the swamp.

Obama was also largely responsible for getting us involved in several “forever wars” that we’re still very much a part of, including the war in Ukraine and the American War in Syria, that not many people are aware of.  So again, like a lot of politicians, Obama tended to do the opposite of what he said he would do.

Then you’ve got Trump, the populist president who seemed to have some awareness of the “deep state” and wanted to shake things up with traditional American political corruption and collusion.  I personally think Trump is a better marketer than a businessman but, in any case, he doesn’t represent the values I want in a leader of the free world.  As someone who married into a Hispanic family, several of my family members are afraid of a lot of Trump’s rhetoric and what it inspires in other people, because there’s a frequency of anger and fear in much of what he says.

Then you’ve got Biden, who doesn’t seem to have much substance to say.  He doesn’t seem super clear on his own policies.  He doesn’t say much in terms of how he intends to handle things.  Much of what he says appears to be scripted.  It would appear as though he’s struggling mentally and cognitively.  So we don’t really get the full picture with Biden, which is concerning for a sitting president.

I say all of this just to give my take on the presidents who have been in office since I first started paying attention to politics.  But also to demonstrate why I gravitate towards someone like RFK Jr. as much as I do.  He’s a lawyer, a critical thinker, and a historian.  He comes from one of the greatest political family dynasties in history.  He’s an incredibly intelligent and emotionally resilient human being, which you’d think would be more common traits in presidential candidates.

Getting Back To Constructive Conversations

Make no mistake, I believe in the certainty of the goodness of the future.  I don’t think any of us should view the world of politics with a lens of fear.  I also don’t think most people have developed the capacity to have healthy conversations around politics and the issues that affect us all without attacking people on the other “side” or feeling attacked when someone has a different opinion.

I’m happy to discuss Biden and his policies, Trump and his policies, and RFK Jr. and his policies.  I’ll love you either way, regardless of who you support – so long as you can engage in a healthy and constructive conversation around it.  If I had the opportunity to sit down with either Trump or Biden for two and a half hours like I did with Bobby Kennedy, I’d do it. 

I happen to gravitate toward RFK Jr. because he’s actually talking about the most important things we should be talking about – and he’s got plans, strategies, and policies for implementing these things.  So I certainly wasn’t expecting the backlash I received on my YouTube channel or how many people would unsubscribe simply because I hosted a dinner with a guy who might become president and who has important things to say about the issues that affect us all.

I’ve said it before that the way most people treat politics is the same way we treat sports teams, except it’s worse.  The media certainly hasn’t helped.  I think we’ve been influenced to believe that this is the way it should work with politics because it keeps us divided and prevents us from having intelligent conversations.  So what ends up happening is that we treat people whom we disagree with like an enemy.  And this is problematic – it creates these dogmas and orthodoxies where everything has to be black and white with no room for gray.

The Problem With Political “Sports Teams”

It requires a significant amount of intellectual fortitude and effort to get to the root cause and understanding of what’s going on in the world – and most people are not willing to do it because it’s so much easier to just have an opinion.  

Right now it’s easier than ever to share those opinions on social media, which creates this entire collective sharing these uneducated opinions that are emotionally charged that they then take on as a personal identity of being right.  It’s ego-driven and largely the result of so many people feeling like they’re “not good enough”, so they feel the need to seek external validation. 

So what ends up happening is that we continue to spend our time or congregate around people who agree with what we agree with, which, most of the time, has no basis in reality. It’s just opinions that cause us to disassociate from other people.  Ironically, it’s other people who might actually change our opinions if only more of us were willing to disassociate from our chosen “groupthink” dynamic and engage in healthy debates.

Emotional vs. Intelligent Perspectives 

People feel a certain way about things, but they don’t do any exploration as to why they feel that way – they don’t look at the thinking. They don’t look at the intellectual component of it, question it, or open themselves to other people and ideas that may be able to provide different perspectives that may be more accurate, more aligned, or – ya know – true.

So if we really get to the root issue of our political and social divisions, what we need to realize is that, right now, there is an opportunity for us all to heal ourselves.  That’s what this is about.  Every one of us, whether we’re supporting RFK, Trump, or Biden, everything that we see external to us – all the chaos, all the problems, all the corruption, all the dysfunction, all the damage, all the destruction – is just a materialization of unprocessed trauma inside of all of us.

The degree to which we are healthy inside is the degree to which we will experience a healthy world.  So the reason I’ve been speaking my mind about politics and getting involved with the likes of Bobby Kennedy is because right now we’re witnessing a deeper level of awareness around all this unintelligence, chaos, and trauma that’s out there.

And if as a society and human collective, we want to create change, we all need to develop enough emotional and spiritual sovereignty to allow the political process to unfold.   That means we need to allow people to have their opinions and encourage us into an intelligent conversation around these topics that are important to all of us.

The Issues We ALL Care About

Chronic disease in children, trillions of dollars in debt, unnecessary wars, immigration – these are the issues that I believe ALL of us care about.  So I think it’s incredibly important for all of us to be able to discuss these ideas together and consider how the people we vote to represent us will handle these issues.  We also have a responsibility from the bottom up to voice our intelligent opinions about how we would handle things differently.  Complaining or shouting hateful rhetoric on the internet certainly doesn’t help anything.

But we’ve lost touch with this responsibility that we have as civilians of a democracy.  Because of that, right now we’re getting the government that we deserve.  Why?  Because not enough of us are grounded in ourselves.  We haven’t healed ourselves enough to be able to see through the facade.  We haven’t cultivated enough resilience or emotional sovereignty to stand undivided and to be able to address each other and these important issues from a loving place, which will ultimately facilitate the progress we want to see made.

I’ll continue going back to the idea that the solution is a changed mind. The solution is you doing the work, you healing yourself, you being in a place where no matter what someone thinks or does around you, you’re not reactive.  Religious or not, we all have the opportunity to take a “what would Jesus do?” mentality.

Observing Without Becoming Entangled

Right now the world is in a process of unmanageability.  Human beings are addicted to insecurity and are working through thousands of years of unprocessed thought patterns, emotions, and traumas.  Everything we’re experiencing right now – in politics, in the economy, in global affairs – is the materialization of this addiction and ego-driven way of being.

If more of us can reconnect with the noble principles of forgiveness, love, kindness, grace, patience, and curiosity and can train our nervous system to operate from that place, we will inevitably have the thoughts and ideas that will contribute to solving the world’s problems.

We need to be able to observe what’s going on around us without becoming entangled with it.  The way to dismantle the fear-driven mentality of the world we live in is to detoxify ourselves of fear, individually, first.  To have more faith.  To make more empowered decisions.  To resolve our limiting beliefs. To forgive our resentments.  To surrender and live life in flow and in cooperation with a power greater than ourselves.  If we can do that as a collective, we’re going to change our collective reality.