Will you let politics, algorithms, and echo chambers divide you from those you love?

Transcript below!

Hey everyone, it’s November 3rd, election day in the US and I have this message, okay?

I’m reading a lot and I’m experiencing this with friends and family and people online that say that they have had irreconcilable rifts over differences in political beliefs this season.

Now, 2020 sucks so much already, why would we make it worse by disowning family members? We have sons not talking to moms because one is a Trump supporter, one’s a Biden supporter, okay? When we allow these political differences to divide us, what we’re doing is we’re being played by algorithms on social media, that profit for these companies at the expense of dividing us. The more divided we are, the more we click, the more we sit in our echo chamber and we’re willing to forgo longtime friendships and family relationships because of a difference in belief around politics.

That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard and yet it’s happening en masse. We have one of the most divided feeling societies at a time of crisis, partially because our media and our social media have fomented this and we have been played. We’ve been manipulated by the algorithms and by people who would profit off it. If you can’t understand why a loved one or a friend feels differently than you about politics, if you just can’t figure it out, you have you it can’t be anything, but they are a bad person and therefore do not deserve me in their life.

If that’s how you feel, that is a failure of your imagination. That is a failure of your understanding and that is a failure of your compassion. That is entirely on you. You have been played by deep human conditioning that they’re exploiting and now you’ve damaged this relationship. How about this? How about we approach people, loved ones and others who have different beliefs than us with an understanding that people are trying to be good using the tools and the resources that they have.

That there’s a reason they believe what they believe and it’s not because they’re an evil person in most cases. And if we start from that understanding, we can show love and understanding while still disagreeing. And we can have civil discussions about even politics and religion and the things, race, the things that purport to divide us, we can have civil discussions that advance both compassion and understanding. And if you’re gonna influence, if you wanna influence somebody who you think is thinking something that’s not productive, well, then you better come from a place of love and understanding because attacking their belief is gonna cause them to entrench. So you’re not even being effective.

Now today, people are going and voting for whoever they believe in. I think it’s honestly in the way, it’s a false choice, it almost doesn’t matter because we’ve set up these two partisan divisions. In reality, we are Americans, we’re citizens of the world, we’re human beings, we share commonalities. We differ on how to get to the goals but I think for the most part, our goals are even the same. So let’s look at our fellow human beings with some degree of understanding and love. Let’s heal these relationships that have been divided by forces that we don’t control, but that control us clearly if we let them.

And today, November 3rd, tomorrow will be a different day. People will be freaked out no matter who wins. Today’s your chance to reframe how you are gonna respond to your loved ones and to yourself. All right, guys? I love you, share this video and we are out.

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