How Do You Share a Country With People Who Reject Reality?

We've hit a point where two groups of

people can watch the exact same video of

a woman being killed and walk away with

completely opposite stories about what

happened. What struck me about the Renee

Good killing wasn't just the brutality

of the act itself. It was the official

response and then the comment sections

afterward. Everybody who's been

repeating the lie that this is some

innocent woman who was out for a drive

in Minneapolis when a law enforcement

officer shot at her, you should be

ashamed of yourselves.

>> People aligned with the current regime

looked at the same footage and saw

obvious self-defense, obvious necessity.

People outside that orbit saw an obvious

execution by the state. And that's not

normal political disagreement. That's

not like I like higher taxes and you

like lower taxes. That's a fracture in

what counts as empirical reality, what

counts as a fact. Historically, that

kind of split shows up in pretty dark

places. So, you can think of the stab in

the back myth in VHimar, Germany, where

a huge chunk of the population insisted

that Germany hadn't really lost World

War I. It had been betrayed from within.

or the lost cause narrative after the US

civil war where an entire region retold

slavery as benign and the confederacy as

noble against mountains of evidence and

in each case the point wasn't just we

disagree on policy it was we live in

different worlds about what happened and

that's the kind of break the Renee good

reaction is signaling now so the

question isn't just was this shooting

justified and in my view it was

unequivocally not justified side. It's

what does it mean for a democracy when

lethal force by the state becomes an

optical test for entirely separate

realities. So what if the core political

divide isn't actually left versus right,

but people who can tolerate ambiguity

and discomfort versus people who can't?

A lot of research on authoritarianism

finds the same pattern, which is people

with authoritarian leanings tend to have

very low tolerance for ambiguity. They

want clear hierarchies, simple rules,

and sharp boundaries between us and

them. Ambiguous situations, new norms

around gender, shifting racial

hierarchies, changing demographics don't

just feel confusing, they feel

threatening. That internal panic gets

externalized as a demand to make the

world simpler again. Get rid of the

strange people, shut down the confusing

practices, and punish the ones who break

the old script. In a pluralistic

democracy, difference and ambiguity are

baked into the cake. You're always

encountering people, beliefs, and bodies

that don't fit your template. For some

people, that's uncomfortable but

manageable. For others, it's almost

intolerable. And that's where you start

to see attraction to strong men, purges,

and fantasies of cleansing violence. So,

when we talk about a temperamental

minority that can't easily live in

pluralism, that's what we mean. Not that

they're evil by nature, but that their

nervous systems are constantly

screaming, make this stop when they

encounter ambiguity or discomfort.

Without emotional regulation skills and

self-insight, which let's admit most

adults struggle with, but this

temperament in particular, this can

easily cause major issues inside a

diverse society that is constantly

changing. There's a brutal little

paradox at the heart of any free

society, and that's if you tolerate

people who want to end tolerance, you

eventually lose the whole thing. Can a

democracy safely include people who

fundamentally don't believe in

democracy? At some point, the answer has

to be not without limits. Carl Pauper

called this the paradox of tolerance. A

fully tolerant society, he said, cannot

be tolerant of movements that seek to

destroy tolerance itself.

for

and in

that doesn't mean that you put people in

prison for bad opinions. It means you

draw hard lines around actions and

organized projects. Post-war Germany is

a good example of this. It bans

explicitly Nazi parties and can dissolve

groups that aimed to overthrow the

democratic order precisely because it

learned what happens when you let

anti-pluralist movements capture the

state. In the US context, that's the

unresolved problem. We've treated it's

just another opinion and it's an

organized attempt to end democracy as if

they belong in the same bucket when they

don't. One can be tolerated. The other

if you let it run will eventually shut

down everyone else's voices. So the real

question isn't should we tolerate people

we disagree with. Of course we should.

The real question is where do we draw

the line when a movement's explicit or

implicit goal is to eliminate the

possibility of disagreement at all? When

we get to the other side of this, the

hardest problem maybe won't be rewriting

the laws. It'll be living with a

permanent minority that struggles to

function in a pluralistic world. When

this project eventually collapses, as

authoritarian projects tend to, we'll

still be left with a sizable minority

whose psychological profile doesn't

magically change. They will still

struggle with ambiguity and still prefer

rigid hierarchies and still feel

existentially threatened by visible

difference. That means any viable after

has to do at least three things. The

first is to build hard legal and

institutional limits so that

anti-pluralist movements can't easily

seize the state again as postwar Germany

has done.

>> [snorts]

>> The second is that we need to invest

early and deeply in teaching ambiguity

tolerance. How to live with discomfort

without immediately reaching for

elimination. Third, create exit ramps

for people who are leaving authoritarian

spaces that don't require them to endure

total humiliation or social death.

Because if the only options are

domination or annihilation, people will

cling to domination. This is not to

excuse the harm that these people have

done and are doing. Anyone committing

crimes and atrocities should be held

fully accountable. But for those who

want to get off the rage carousel, there

should be ways to do that that don't

feel like total psychological

extinction. [snorts] None of that is

clean or easy. But it's more honest. The

project isn't just stop this. It's how

do we design a society that can survive

with a permanent fearful anti-pluralist

minority without letting that fear run

the whole show again.