It’s an understatement to say that America is in crisis. A big chunk of us are unhealthy, depressed, in debt. Unhappy. On top of that, we’re more politically divided than we’ve been in my lifetime.
There are benefits to being an American, a mountain of freedoms being one of the biggest. We should be thankful for our unprecedented ability to choose, but we struggle. Turns out that having a bunch of options hasn’t helped our predicament. In some ways it’s made it worse. In a 2021 Economist/YouGov poll, “freedom” ranked lowest as the thing people are most thankful for.
We have everything we need to be happy, but instead, we’re angry, so much that scientists are beginning to track our ever-growing rage while politicians fan it for personal gain and social media spreads it like hot butter. There’s money to be made here; our emotional state trumps things like science, empirical data, and the rationality that might help us vote more clearly, and many of today’s politicians and others will gain from our growing lack of objectivity.
Most Americans, especially American Christians, will tell you that their anger is justified: there is a large group of people and/or circumstances standing in the way of whatever’s needed for a general sense of happiness. We are being cheated out of something and therefore should be angry.
That’s not true, of course. Sadly, we interact with our blessings the way a spoiled child interacts with theirs. Regardless of the fact that so many of us have everything we need, we still feel like we’re the victims of some injustice, only seeing what’s missing at the expense of everything else and desperately needing someone to blame.
I don’t mean to oversimply our issues, they are rooted in many things that come part and parcel with a wealthy, Western lifestyle. But this problem is ours to solve, not a politician’s, and we’re compelled to take a deeper look at the contributing factors so that we might embrace a deeper level of responsibility.
I don’t believe that we’ve simply become spoiled and/or that we’re just not thankful enough. We’d certainly be a greater nation if we could manage to adult a little better, but there’s something that runs deeper that might change everything if we could address it.
I’ll illustrate with a personal encounter:
As a former pastor, I’ve dealt with many congregants over the years. At every church I served, there were people who were committed to the overall community, and people who weren’t. Every time I took a position, it became easier to identify who was who, i.e., the people who’s agenda was focused on others, and the people who’s agenda was focused on themselves.
I have a unique perspective here because, much as I hate to admit it, my agenda has frequently been dominated by a similar self-focus.
I can tell you that “other-focus” people seem to share one fundamental common ingredient with “self-focus” people: self-esteem. How these people viewed themselves seemed to determine their posture towards the community. People who enjoyed the most peace about who they were tended to have space to serve others while people with an opposite self view tended towards an opposite agenda: they were typically harder to deal with, experienced more anger/dissatisfaction with the church, and tended to recruit other self-esteem sufferers to their cause, many times creating a significant fracture in the church.
America’s anger problem might have a similar root.
Low self esteem affects everything. Psychologists who study this phenomenon assert some serious side effects: sensitivity to criticism, excessive preoccupation with personal problems, anger, hostility, anxiety, and depression are all said to have low self esteem at their core.
Allegedly, a bunch of us struggle with this.
It’s frequently noted that 85% of the world’s population suffers with poor self image, the average American being no exception.
An impaired self-concept adversely interferes with a person’s ability to find happiness, and over 80% of my clients are struggling with feeling some level of unhappiness in their lives. Taken together, the relationship we have with our self-concept can invariably prevent our ability to achieve our overall desired level of satisfaction and happiness in our lives.
Some have strongly suggested that this problem has wormed its way into our political arena. In her 2018 book Uncivil Agreement — How Politics Became Our Identity, John Hopkins University political scientist Lilliana Mason suggests a deep correlation between low self-esteem and strong emotional partisanship. If you’re wondering how politics in American got so unbelievably emotional, Mason has a compelling theory, implying that our self esteem problems lie at the core.
Mason’s not the only one to suggest such a correlation. Christopher Federico, political psychologist at the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota, has suggested that our sense of personal identity often derives from the tribes we identify with. As soon as we view ourselves as a member of a large group, it affects the way we think about everything:
“You like members of [your] group more than others. You want things to reflect favorably upon your group. You’re biased toward believing things that reflect positively on your group…”
Ultimately, if I attack, villify, or critique your politican(s), you’ll take it personally if a poor self image is driving your politics.
You’d think that our growing tribal factions would help us feel better about ourselves, but they might be doing the opposite. Researchers in India suggest that people with strong tribal affiliations experience more problems with self image than people who view themselves as more independent.
For the legion of us with self image problems, all of this research suggests that the vote we cast isn’t so much for policy and the preferred future of America as it is for our suffering sense of identity.
Lilliana Mason is convinced that the majority of political debates in the US are “identity debates masquerading as policy debates.”
I agree.
When we vote, we might be voting for the legitimacy of ourselves more than anything else.
If you’re looking for a good definition of bad politics, there you go.
For us Christians who struggle with self esteem – and we are legion – this is especially problematic. We’re convinced that our anger is justified, that it’s time to accuse and condemn the people who don’t think like we do, to support the increasing population of politicians who see fit to unleash hate speech of Hitler proportions.
What might be happening instead is that, at baseline, we don’t like who we are, so we scour the earth for something that might alleviate our lack of self-appreciation. Once we find it, we condemn anything that threatens it, and endorse with much emotion anyone who supports it. But this doesn’t help us feel better about us, so the problem grows. The more we invest our identity in whatever, the stronger our emotional affiliations become, making us complete suckers for the leaders, influencers, and media outlets who seek to gain from our undying devotion.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Rest assured that the anger that stems from all of this is patently unjustified and in need of a brutal audit.
Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash
Unfortunately, it’s easy to not like who we are as Americans when Donald Trump has so much power and The Big Lie is so pervasive. We even have Big Lie believers being elected to positions as secretaries of state, where they will have the power to enforce their view of things. It’s frightening.