Choose Your Side: Living With Political Polarisation

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Choose your side

Following the last few weeks writing about peace, I’ve found myself somewhere I hadn’t quite expected: increasingly aware of what it means to live within polarisation.

As uncertainty about our future intensifies, along with the debates about what’s driving it, we’re constantly being told to choose a side.

It’s led me down all sorts of rabbit holes, questioning my own beliefs, challenging my assumptions and reconsidering where I stand on an exhausting list of issues facing our world.

And to be honest, at times it’s been more than a little frustrating. It’s been uncomfortable, even.

Yet, as I write this, I realise something unexpected also happened along the way.

Rather than weakening my convictions, these experiences have helped me understand them more deeply. I’ve found myself giving time and attention to questions I thought I’d already explored, discovering new perspectives and developing a deeper appreciation of why I believe what I believe.

And for someone who already spends a considerable amount of time questioning himself, that feels significant.

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The more willing I’ve been to challenge my own position, the more deeply I’ve come to understand the convictions I already held.

Gregg the Artivist

Yet more and more, I’m encountering an expectation that questioning suggests uncertainty. That uncertainty somehow signals a weakness in conviction. Or that challenging one side automatically places you in the opposing camp.

And I find it disconcerting that we’ve become so uncomfortable with people thinking out loud.

The comfort of certainty

The other evening I watched a clip from a podcast featuring a particularly charismatic speaker.

He was super engaging for many reasons. He was articulate, passionate and spoke about issues I care deeply about. And much of what he said resonated with me.mBut his argument also left me feeling uneasy.

According to him, there were only two sides. You were either on one or the other. No third way. No room for ambiguity.

His language was powerful, often sensational, and he had a remarkable ability to make a complicated issue seem straightforward. Honestly, I felt a pinch of envy.

I understood why people found him compelling. I did too. But what made me uneasy also made me curious. I started to wonder, what happens when we communicate complex issues with such absolute certainty? And just as importantly, what does that encourage in the people listening?

So I opened the comments.

People were literally ‘gushing’ over his clarity. They praised his willingness to speak his mind and for saying what needed to be said.

But among the comments I read, there was remarkably little, if any, questioning of the argument itself. Now, of course, I hardly believe a social media comment section represents everyone who watched the clip. But this clip had gone viral, and there was a lot of interaction that was hard to ignore.

And as I continued reading, that uneasy feeling began to grow. It wasn’t the people who disagreed with him. It was this black hole where critical engagement should have been, particularly among those who agreed.

And I thought to myself, this is where the real challenge begins.

It’s relatively easy to question people whose views we oppose. But how often do we question those who appear to speak for us?

I have chosen a side

I think, or feel rather, I should make something clear.

I’m not at all trying to find a comfortable position between opposing political camps. And I am far from positioning myself above polarisation, looking down on everyone else. Trust me. I’m living in the middle of it, with all the frustration, anger, biases and contradictions that come with being human.

And I have chosen a side.

I choose life. All life.

I believe in fundamental rights, human dignity and a world where people and nature are not endlessly exploited for the accumulation of wealth and power.

I believe we have an economic and political system that continues to extract from finite human and natural resources. It concentrates extraordinary wealth while undermining the conditions on which life, all life, depends.

I see a class struggle within that system and the enormous inequalities it produces.

These, of course, aren’t neutral positions. But choosing what I stand for doesn’t mean automatically agreeing with every argument, strategy or action proposed by those who share my values.

I can and do support a movement’s ambitions while questioning its methods. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers to overcoming the injustices I see. Nor does listening to someone whose worldview differs fundamentally from mine mean surrendering my own.

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I believe the grey isn’t necessarily a place of indecision. Sometimes it’s where our convictions are tested.

Gregg the Artivist

When uncertainty becomes uncomfortable

I know I’ve expressed this time and again. Apologies to my regular readers.

We’re living through extraordinary uncertainty. War, ecological breakdown, economic insecurity and political instability are changing how we experience the world.

It’s exhausting.

For me, it’s little wonder there’s such growing discomfort with nuance.

Because when everything feels uncertain, clear answers can offer reassurance. Someone who confidently explains what’s wrong, who’s responsible and what must happen next offers something that complexity rarely provides. Certainty, a sense of belonging, and even relief. I can understand the attraction. I sometimes feel it myself.

But when I see our desire for certainty becoming stronger than our willingness to question, I begin to worry. Particularly when asking an uncomfortable question becomes an act of disloyalty.

And then there’s an important complication here. Questioning everything isn’t necessarily a virtue either.

My experiences in climate activism have taught me that uncertainty can also be used to frustratingly delay and even obstruct change. For decades, we’ve watched the fossil fuel industry promote doubt about climate science, helping delay meaningful responses to an ever-growing body of evidence. They simply didn’t need to prove that climate change wasn’t happening. Creating sufficient uncertainty was enough to sustain a seemingly never-ending cycle of debate.

And climate movements have faced their own communication dilemmas.

How do we communicate urgency without relying entirely on fear? And how do we acknowledge genuine scientific uncertainty without undermining well-established findings?

Not easy questions, and certainly not ones with easy answers. But they remind me that nuance doesn’t mean pretending every argument has equal merit.

Sometimes the evidence is overwhelming, and sometimes taking a clear position is necessary.

I believe the challenge isn’t choosing between certainty and uncertainty, but recognising when each is justified.

The temptation to shout louder

When I started writing this article, I was really fired up to write something far more provocative. Something sharper, angrier and more confrontational. A few sensational words thrown in for good measure.

It would have been easy to state my argument, identify a convenient villain and deliver my conclusion with absolute confidence.

Maybe it would attract more attention. I’m not going to lie. The temptation is certainly there.

Because I’m really angry about injustice. I’m frustrated by the continued destruction of our natural environment, the suffering caused by war and the extraordinary inequalities we’ve come to normalise.

Sometimes I want to shout so loud. I want to respond to criticism with exactly the same force and certainty that I find so troubling in others.

But then I have to ask myself what I’m actually trying to achieve.

And strangely enough, that question can feel quite deflating. I become disappointed. As though I’m giving in or holding back what I really want to say. Worse, I somehow feel less authentic by choosing my words more carefully.

Because the anger and frustration are real. And I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But I also recognise that the way I communicate can reproduce the very conditions I’m trying to challenge.

So where does that leave me?

How do I express genuine anger without allowing it to become the only thing people hear?

How do I challenge an argument forcefully without turning the person making it into an enemy?

And how do I remain open to other perspectives without feeling that I’m compromising my own?

And typically, I don’t have a neat answer.

The one thing I know with certainty is that I’m discovering wanting to communicate differently and actually doing it are two very different things.

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Funny enough, these past few weeks have reminded me why I began writing READ. Not to become an authority on every subject, but to share the experiences, questions and contradictions shaping how I understand the world.

Climate, social and environmental justice, and peace matter to me. They always will.

Sometimes I write with conviction, sometimes with uncertainty, and more often than not with something still to learn. I really hope you’ll challenge me and offer perspectives I haven’t considered. Because I want to keep listening.

Lately, I’ve wondered whether our insistence on choosing sides is making it harder to ask the questions that might actually help us move forward.

I’m still figuring that out myself.

Some days with curiosity. Other days with considerably less patience.

But I’m trying.

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Because I don’t want to stop questioning simply because I’ve chosen a side.

Gregg the Artivist

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Frequently Asked Questions About Political Polarisation