If I Were Them, I Would Be Them
How teaching kids nuance might be the only way to break America’s cycle of outrage
A couple of years ago I listened to an interview with Dr. Gabor Maté, and there was a line that has stuck with me ever since:
“If I were him, then I would be him.”
He explained further:
“If I were them, with their life, I wouldn’t just act like them — I would be them.”
Regardless of what you believe about nature vs. nurture, this rings true. Every action we take is the result of genetics plus environment. That guy who cut you off in traffic? If you’d had his childhood, his wiring, and his stressful morning—you’d be cutting people off too.
This, to me, is a powerful framework for empathy. And right now, nowhere is it more urgent than in politics.
The Rise of Affective Polarization
Scholars call it affective polarization. Unlike ideological polarization (policy differences), affective polarization is about emotional dislike and distrust of the other side.
In the U.S., feelings toward our own party have held steady (around 70–75% positive), while views of the opposing party have collapsed—from nearly 50% favorable in 1990 to barely 20% today. Democrats dislike Republicans more. Republicans dislike Democrats more. And the vast majority of Americans now tell pollsters the other party is a “serious threat” to the country.
This isn’t uniquely American. The same patterns show up across Europe, South America, even Canada and New Zealand.
How the Machine Learned to Feed Us Rage
Talk radio discovered it first. Until 1987, the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to air multiple sides of controversial issues. When it was repealed, partisan talk exploded. Rush Limbaugh didn’t just build an audience—he taught the industry something critical: outrage keeps people tuned in.
Cable and blogs perfected it. By the 1990s and 2000s, Fox News leaned right, MSNBC leaned left, and blogs like DailyKos and HuffPo entrenched their audiences. Both sides learned the same lesson: anger drives engagement.
Then algorithms made it inescapable. Facebook, Twitter, and their feeds didn’t invent outrage—they optimized for it. By 2016, the machine had discovered that fueling anger kept you clicking more, checking more, scrolling more. Every iteration of the algorithm got better at extracting your time, attention, and trust.
But here’s what we’re only beginning to understand: this isn’t just changing what we think—it’s changing how our children’s brains develop the capacity to think at all.
Why Kids Can’t Afford This
Not long ago, we drove past a truck with a Trump sticker. From the back seat: “Can you believe that jerk?”
It stopped me cold.
Children are already vulnerable to black-and-white thinking—their brains literally haven’t developed the capacity for nuance yet. They overhear the news, our conversations, the radio. They absorb not just our politics but our disdain.
And now we’ve built machines that exploit this vulnerability at scale.
The dopamine hijack hits differently. Adult brains have more prefrontal regulation; kids don’t. Early evidence suggests that teens exposed to polarizing content show heightened emotional reactivity and weaker regulatory control—brains trained for reaction over reflection.
Echo chambers multiply natural biases. Children are already prone to assuming everyone thinks like them; algorithmic curation reinforces that tendency. Research indicates that teens raised in these bubbles show significantly less cognitive flexibility when asked to consider alternative perspectives.
Binary thinking gets locked in. Ages 8–14 are critical for learning nuance. But algorithms reward absolutes—“DESTROYED by facts” outperforms “thoughtful analysis.” Early studies point to measurable changes in areas of the brain linked to complex reasoning when kids are steeped in this environment.
No downtime to process complexity. Pre-2007, kids had more mental breathing room for daydreaming and integration. Now, “continuous partial attention” leaves little space for deeper processing.
The result: just when kids need help learning to hold shades of gray, the most powerful machines ever built are training them to see the world in black and white.
What We Can Actually Do About It
If there’s one antidote to the binary thinking that drives polarization, it’s teaching kids to hold complexity. And the research shows it’s not just possible—it's measurably effective.
Social-emotional learning programs boost empathy and self-regulation. Students gain the equivalent of 11–13 percentile points over peers—not just emotionally, but academically.
Philosophy-for-children approaches measurably improve critical openness and reflective skepticism. Kids learn to question assumptions rather than cling to absolutes.
Metacognitive training—teaching kids to think about their thinking—increases curiosity and the ability to ask deeper, more empathetic questions.
Visual arts education enhances creativity and social-emotional growth. Every medium that asks kids to hold multiple perspectives builds the very muscles that algorithms are trying to atrophy.
And that’s all well and good from a societal level. But, in the moment, it’s important to speak up when our kids exhibit this us-vs-them mentality. To provide an immediate interrupt to the binary thought patterns.
How I Talk About This With My Kids about Politics
Here are the touchstones I keep returning to:
Economic fear is real. The middle class wasn’t an accident; it was built through deliberate policies after the Great Depression. Since the 1980s, we’ve systematically dismantled those supports. When families work brutally hard and still can’t make rent, that fear makes them receptive when someone says: “Yes, you’re getting screwed—and it’s them screwing you.”
We’re being fed anger on purpose. Every screen, every feed, every “breaking” segment is engineered to rile us up. It’s not neutral. Someone profits from our outrage.
Empathy is the only way through. If we were them, with their life experiences, we’d believe what they believe. We’d vote how they vote. We’d be them.
The machine wants our kids to inherit our rage. But every conversation in the car, every dinnertime discussion, every pause after a scoff at a bumper sticker is a chance to build something different.
Where This Leaves Us
Because if our kids inherit only our outrage, the cycle continues. Polarization deepens. Trust erodes. Democracy withers.
But if they inherit our capacity for nuance, if they practice empathy instead of disdain, we still have a chance.
That chance doesn’t start in Washington or Silicon Valley. It starts in kitchens and carpools, in classrooms and bedtime stories. It starts every time we remind our kids—and ourselves—of the hardest truth:
If I were them, I would be them.
And if enough of us remember, maybe we can start to break the cycle.