Developing an Open Mindset Toward Our Political Adversaries Can Decrease Polarization
By Nate Klemp, Ph.D., Author of OPEN: Living With an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World
What inspired you to write OPEN?
Nate Klemp: The short answer is that I started to notice a subtle shift in the experience of my own mind. It felt like the size of my mental experience kept getting smaller. I think we all feel stressed, irritated, or anxious and, instead of staying with the raw experience of discomfort, we reach for our phones. This is the experience I call “closed”—that feeling that there’s less space, less perspective, fewer possibilities, and an increasingly strong urge to seek out digital distraction. This book is my attempt to understand the state of being closed as well as the insights, tools, and practices we can use to cultivate a more open mind.
What are the primary forces leading so many of us to close down, both to each other and to our own minds?
Nate Klemp: The first is screen addiction. The problem isn’t just that we’re distracted. The real problem is that we crave distraction. And it’s this urge to distract ourselves that is causing us to close down to the full richness of our inner world. The second force is political polarization. When I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation in the early 2000s, I studied political polarization using the Christian Right as a case study. At the time, most scholars noted that polarization was primarily an elite phenomenon, confined to pundits and professional politicians. But over the last decade, political polarization has gone mainstream, showing up at family reunions, school board meetings, and other formerly apolitical areas of life.
Screen addiction closes us off to our inner world. Political polarization closes us off to our outer world. There’s a feedback loop between these two that creates a vicious cycle of distraction and outrage, a cycle that many political entrepreneurs are more than happy to use to their advantage.
Tell us what you learned spending time with the National Rifle Association? What surprised you the most?
Nate Klemp: I wanted to explore opening to the other side experientially. So, I decided to drive from the liberal enclave of Boulder, Colorado, which I call home, to rural Colorado, where I signed up for concealed carry training with the National Rifle Association (NRA). This turned out to be one of the most mind-blowing experiences I’ve ever had and I learned a few powerful lessons.
First, I learned that these “extreme” right-wing gun enthusiasts were much less radical than I had originally thought. Throughout the entire training, our instructor kept emphasizing the need to run away, drive away, and avoid using your firearm at all costs. More importantly, this experience helped me see our shared humanity in a new way. I got to know some of my classmates, and I was struck by the difference between the people sitting with me at the local diner and my previous mental model of NRA members as radical, dangerous, and mean-spirited. True, these folks had radically different beliefs about guns. But they were good people; people who helped their neighbors and who had plans, projects, and hopes just like me. In short, I realized they were not my enemy.
Can you describe the “Three Shifts of Opening”?
Nate Klemp: Yes, the idea here is that when we shift from a closed mind to an open mind, three things happen. The first is that we experience a shift in focus. Our mental experience goes from the state that psychologists call “mind wandering,” where we’re lost in random thoughts about the past and future, to a state called “meta-awareness,” where we can witness our own mental and emotional experience with a bit more space.
The second is a shift from withdrawing to engaging. When we close down, we turn away from challenging mind states or difficult conversations. When we open, by contrast, we turn toward these difficulties. Finally, third, the shift from a closed to an open mind radically changes the experience of space in the mind itself. When the mind closes, it’s like we’re looking at life through a long, dark tunnel. All we can see on the other end of the tunnel is that one problem or difficult person. When the mind opens, by contrast, we may still encounter that same challenge, but the space surrounding it expands—more creativity, possibility, and even compassion become available to us.
How might psychedelic-assisted therapy help with reducing political polarization?
Nate Klemp: This is a complicated question. Psychedelics, after all, are extremely powerful compounds that come with a high level of risk. However, there has been a renaissance of research in neuroscience around using psychedelics to treat intractable mental health conditions. What is clear from this research and my own experiences of psychedelic-assisted therapy, which I write about in the book, is that combining these compounds with a skilled guide and an intentional setting can allow us to experience previously traumatic memories and emotions in a healing way.
There’s an argument to be made that much of the outrage fueling political polarization is triggered, at least in part, by underlying and unresolved traumas. Assuming that’s true, this emerging form of therapy could have a kind of bottom-up effect of mitigating polarization simply by unwinding the wounds in our psyche that cause us to lash out at others.
What lesson do you hope that readers take away from this book?
Nate Klemp: The key lesson is that in each moment, we have a choice. We can choose to experience our minds, political adversaries, and the world around us with a closed mindset, where we retreat to our default habits of screen addiction and polarization. Or we can choose to open, to turn toward both difficult mind states and the people or groups we see as the enemy.
While this shift may sound subtle, I truly believe that it is one of the most powerful ways we can change the world. Why? Because our mindset is contagious. Psychologists call this “complementary behavior” or “social contagion.” That our mind states have this quality of contagion means that a shift toward greater openness not only changes our minds but also ripples through the minds of those around us. And that might just be one of the most powerful ways we can begin to overcome conditions of polarization.
If you enjoyed this article, you can purchase a copy of OPEN here. You can also read more of our Political Pen Pals debates here.
Nate Klemp, Ph.D.
Nate Klemp, Ph.D. is a bestselling author and formally-trained political philosopher. He is the author of the new book OPEN: Living With an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World. Nate is coauthor of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Marriage, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and he is author of The New York Times Bestseller Start Here: Master the Lifelong Habit of Wellbeing. He has been featured in the LA Times, The New York Times, and The Times of London and has appeared on Good Morning America and Talks at Google. Nate cofounded the mindfulness training company Life Cross Training and holds a B.A. and M.A. in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
1 comment
Great article!