Thomas Ungar is a professor in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto and a staff psychiatrist at North York General Hospital.
With the holidays fast approaching, I’m sounding the alarm. Our society is regressing – dangerously. While everyone is fixated on political polarization, we are missing the more important issue: our downward, dangerous drift from civil and mature discourse to a more primitive level of social functioning.
What most of us see in public discourse – all-or-nothing thinking, poor impulse control and a host of other emotional limitations – I am seeing, increasingly, with patients. It doesn’t matter whether they are to the right or left in their political thinking. The results are the same: workplace feuds, broken marriages, severed friendships and/or worsening relationships with adult children.
What’s different in recent years is not just the volume of these personal tragedies – it’s also people’s tragic unwillingness, or inability, to mend their fractured relationships.
Many may feel fraught with worry about words said around the recent U.S. presidential election or the current polarized climate in Canadian politics – words that can’t be taken back.
As a psychiatrist, I’ve come to believe that political positioning is less damaging to people and even societies than the inappropriate expression of political passions – in either direction. I call it the Great Regression.
Regression is a term used in psychology to describe a downward drift in a person’s emotional coping strategies, cognitive style and interpersonal skills. Sigmund Freud thought of it as a decline in defence mechanisms – a declining ability to weather the ups and downs of everyday life. Regression can describe individuals, but also societies, such as Nazi Germany.
While we obsess over the left-right polarization that is ripping apart families, we ignore the vertical axis that describes our emotional regulation. At the top of this axis are the well-adjusted, peaceful and psychologically adaptive ways of being. At the bottom are the most regressed and dangerous ways of functioning in society.
We can only see the full landscape by superimposing the left-right axis on top of the vertical one. And we need to develop a pop-culture language to describe that up-down axis, so that people recognize the inherent regression in a political opponent before they contribute to it.
It’s a natural part of our psychology: Under the right stresses, we all regress at times. Part of my job in psychotherapy is to help guide someone up the ladder to healthier, more flexible coping mechanisms. In short, to more adaptive ways of experiencing the world and interacting with others.
But what happens when society at large appears to be regressing? Maladaptive cognitive and psychological processes may engender certain ways of thinking: all-or-nothing reasoning; viewing people as caricatures; a refusal to accept truth or facts (psychiatrists call this psychotic denial); or a tendency to respond with impulsive behaviours to emotionally charged situations. These characteristics manifest in projection, accusations, scapegoating and the dehumanization of others – especially in the toxic soup of social media.
After the Second World War, some Germans recognized the Nazi era as a collective insanity, or a dream that they finally awoke from. Closer to home, some participants in the culture wars seem to be having a similar awakening. Washington Post reporter Ruby Cramer has written extensively about the story of Joe Morelli, a man sentenced to prison time for uttering death threats against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. In an interesting twist, Ms. Cramer learned that Mr. Morelli, while in custody at a New Jersey federal prison, had an enlightening conversation with a fellow inmate – a Jan. 6 rioter named Patrick Stedman. Despite the enormous political gulf that separated them, the two men found common ground in the impulsivity and primitive defences that drove their crimes.
The Great Regression is a full-out threat to civility, peace, democracy and humanity – a social and public health emergency, or what some have called a social death spiral. And I’d like to offer this plea from the therapist’s chair: We’re so distracted by the left-right axis that we haven’t understood the deeper problem of regression, which is a truly dangerous aspect of polarization.
To be clear, I’m not calling for anyone to water down their cherished ideals or strong political beliefs. But I am asking that those swept up in the culture wars take time to consider these questions: Are you no longer able to be friends with people who hold differing views? Do you dehumanize your political opponents? Do you believe they wish you and your family harm? Do you wish them harm? And are you able to consider the other side in a political debate – even though you strongly disagree?
These are all signs, in my view, that you may be drifting downward on the Great Regression axis. It’s important to catch yourself before you descend to regrettable actions such as destroying relationships, or creating a toxic work environment.
Gaining self-awareness of our processes can be life-improving. It helps us mend fences with family members, develop deeper friendships and get along better with colleagues. At one time, our leaders and institutions – not just political, but in all facets of life – were role models of emotional regulation. In a regressed society, we see fewer healthy examples in public life. That’s why I believe individuals must begin to look at their own position on that up-down axis, painful as it might be. The ability to identify and resist regression in ourselves and others is a great power, and an opportunity to help heal our society’s emotional health.