Thanks, Travis, for a thorough essay on polarization. There’s another global movement—information literacy—that’s tackling polarization as part of the solution to the challenges of information overload, misinformation, and disinformation. Like a bridge, information literacy is an infrastructure that must be invested in and maintained. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Anita, I'm a big fan of information literacy, although I do think a much larger share of the information literacy curriculum should be focused on teaching about the importance of negativity bias. Excited to follow your work!
I knew where you were going before I read to the end. You are spot on...when we understand that the world is getting better (by most metrics) and that progress is a positive sum game, suddenly polarization and political differences are less salient.
The problem is the media and politicians have every reason to highlight negativity. Not only does it tap into our primal attraction to negative information, but it justifies the need to go out and vote to "change course."
Polarization is also occurring because, in their ongoing quest to maintain power, political parties essentially have a monopoly on providing solutions to a few big issues. And they've largely given up on trying to solve issues the other party claims.
For instance Republicans are perceived as the party of economic growth, while Democrats are the party of equal rights.
And thus Republicans are reluctant to work on equal rights issues while Democrats are reluctant to focus on economic growth.
The only solution I see for this problem is to have. more non partisan elections. This would give politicians greater leeway to negotiate around big problems than what they have now with having to answer to party leaders.
Agree there's a reluctance to work on the "other side's" issues, but political parties and politicians are downstream of voter preferences, so to the extent political parties are producing subpar outcomes, my view is that the problem lies with voters, not the politicians.
We are demanding highly partisan politicians who don't compromise, so that is what the system produces. We demand highly partisan politicians because our view of the other side is warped such that we don't believe the other side can be compromised with in good faith. I think of polarization and political outcomes in market terms like you do. You'd probably like this piece: https://travismonteleone.substack.com/p/what-we-all-get-wrong-about-polarization?r=1l2z5n
In short, people have a tendency to blame the supply instead of the demand. Focusing on the demand is the key to addressing the root cause of polarization (negativity bias).
You write "If the cartoon were reversed to show the excesses of the left and the reasonableness of the right"
It would have been more effective if you showed such a cartoon, or made one yourself if you could not find one on the internet. I think you might find this difficult, which would provide more insight into the problem.
Also, graphs showing things getting better for the world are not germane for ordinary Americans. I have seen posts arguing things have been getting better for the median income earner by showing rising plots of real incomes. But real incomes aren't the issue. The issue is keeping up with the cost of living. That is income relative to living standards. Per capital GDP is typically used as a measure of a nation's living standards relative to others. Thus the appropriate adjustment would not be to inflation, but to per capita GDP. With this measure, improving well=being is a flat line indicating one is keeping up with rising living standards, all are benefiting from progress. Below is a figure showing this measure for several income types.
The general trend was flat until around 1980 as most people were benefiting from progress. After this they started to lose ground. I suspect this is the core element of loss of faith in progress and a possibly a source of polarization, if Turchin's elite overproduction model is valid.
Certainly not difficult to caricature the left, I'm just not a cartoonist and figured it'd be easy for others too. If you can't easily conceive of a caricature of the left, I think that sheds more insight into your own biases than it does polarization writ large. If I could draw, I'd show a satanist, an authoritarian in a grey Mao suit, and a media exec shouting "Obey" on the left, but any number of other caricatures are easy to come up with too. On the right maybe a plumber, a Mexican immigrant, and a nuclear Mormon family. Of course these aren't representative, but they're easy enough to come up with if you take a balanced view of the faults and worst fears of both sides.
I'm not denying there are wage growth issues that should be addressed through moderate reform, I'm saying the impulse to hate your fellow American or to descend into conspiracism or a desire for violent change is a response that is unjustified based on the extent of the problem. The increases in domestic labor, automation, and outsourcing are all headwinds against wage growth. Despite these headwinds, real wages have continued to increase in the US and US workers enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. Could they be better off? Of course, but we should get there through reasonable policy interventions without descending into contempt and affective polarization.
The one with the left wing biases rings true. The Left really does characterize the Right as Klansmen, Nazis, and Confederate flag wavers. That is why it works.
I haven’t seen right wingers characterize the Left as satanists. Not have I see Rightist objections to Leftists as old school economic Marxists (i.e Mao). A lot of the populist Right did not have a bad opinion of Bernie Sanders (the closest thing we have today of an economic Leftist). Hell, old school Marxists (Tankies) tend to agree with right-wingers on today's cultural issues (e.g. Tankies and Trumpists are both pro-Russia)
The communist trope nowadays is about cultural Marxism, a very different thing than Mao. Also a trope about executives saying Obey (this is too similar to leftist critiques of authoritarians) and is not a concern of the Right concerning the Left. Your examples don't really work like the ones in the cartoon you posted do.
Your right tropes would fit in better fifty years ago, the Mao figure would be there with a Black Panther and a hippie. And on the other side you could have a businessman, a construction worker and a cop.
They do not capture any elements of Woke, which is probably the key objection the Right has of the Left. The critique the Right makes of the Left is not so easy to characterize in a cartoon figure, but one trope I can think of is a bearded man in a dress to represent transgenders.
Sure, you can replace with whatever caricatures of the left you can think of. Agreed something about woke would be good. Mao I meant less in economic terms and more as a representation of authoritarianism with a huge and coercive state apparatus, something (the "deep state") that the current right absolutely fears. Fears of media overrepresenting the left and pushing propaganda are definitely fears of the right as well (biden's laptop, covid mandates, covid origin, etc.), but this is all nitpicking. the point is you could definitely make a cartoon for the other side, so the centrist's role is to push back on both extremes.
Good essay with a good conclusion. However, although things are better materially, people are less happy and for good reasons. For a start, people who work for small businesses tend to be insanely happy by comparison to those who work for large businesses or organisation. A 2018 survey showed that 75% to 80% of workers working for small businesses were either very happy or extremely happy with their work and workplace. In the mid-noughties employment by large employers became more common than employment by small employers for the first time in American history.
The neoliberal era might have brought cheaper goods and services in many areas of the economy, but they did nothing for labour security, a key criteria for planning and achieving any sort of life. People who live in cities are less happy and live shorter lives, and this isn't just due to air quality. Religious people are more happy, and religion is on the decline. Faith is not only a comfort, but it also pushes people towards community engagement.
Plus, it's not all good news. If you plot either global population income levels or living standards on a graph, then most people are doing better, especially if you were in most of the bottom 50% of the spectrum or the very top couple of percent. With income, this is called the Elephant graph. Put simply the people who exist between the body of the elephant and the trunk are most blue collar workers in the West.
In term of the distribution of the 'global rich' this equates to 12% of Americans, 3-6% of people in Germany, France, the UK and Japan, and the top 1% in Brazil, South Africa and Russia. This, above all, was the reason for the rise of populism. It wasn't the rise of polarisation per se, although increased polarisation exists- populism was a symptom of mass desperation at the major flaws in neoliberalism. Yes, neoliberalism brought major benefits globally, but there is an extent to which it was also a Faustian bargain in which Western blue collar workers were the clear sacrifices.
Agree with most of this and think you have a lot of good points. I agree there are issues, the question is just should they be addressed through reasonable reform or through contemptuous revolution. Overly negative narratives can lead to the latter and cause governments to enact drastic or dangerous reforms when incremental reforms would have been more appropriate.
The small business happiness is also fascinating. The tradeoff of course is lower job stability, so many are willing to be less happy at larger safer companies, although that seems to be changing with younger generations. Agree with the comments on faith, plus faith pushes people towards optimism as well.
Ha- touche! I did realise this a bit when I was making the argument. I am mostly happy, for example- it's just that my happiness level drops when I worry about social and cultural events.
Let me give you example. I recently wrote a data-driven essay on the Asian/Muslim grooming gangs in the UK. It's my contention that it was one of the key drivers of the recent UK riots. I checked a number of the locations where the riots happened and all of them coincided with recent historical grooming scandals, in which mostly white working glass underage girls were groomed for sex with groups of adult men.
But recently I've been developing tricks and exploits to get Chat GPT 4.0 to give me access to information which Google routinely supresses or deranks. A good example, would be the time when I had to ask it for negative energy exports from Germany, because it has renewable energy as a goal.
Anyway, when I wrote my initial essay, I found comprehensive information sources very difficult to access or find. There were some hugely inflated sources on social media- the product of bad Maths. Eventually I was forced to rely on a particular victim group which seemed to have produced a reasonable range for all group CSE in the UK of 75,000 to 380,000 over a period of around 20 years (I only found out later they probably included a significant number of single offender CSEs). In terms of proportions by group a report for the Office of the Child Commissioner showed that the overall figure was higher for whites (36%), but overrepresented for Asians (27%)- over the historical period in question a generous figure for the Asian percentage of population is 4%).
Anyway, I went back and checked my data again with Chat GPT 4.0, using a more cunnings variant of the question. What I found alternatively shocked me, infuriated me and made me feel sick. I had chosen two data points- a report for the Office of the Child Commissioner from 2011. Most of the data relating to the source had been wiped because of the incendiary nature of the source. I had only found reference to the report through an excellent Independent date-driven article refuting a previous wild claim by another source within media. My other data point was a historical figure of 19,000 child grooming cases in a single year (upon which most of the Bad Maths social media estimates are based).
Here's the thing. A few days ago Chat GPPT 4.0 just gave me the numbers for the 2011 report (from another non-government) source), because of the way I phrased the question. It turns out that there were only 2,400 group child grooming cases in the whole of the UK for the fourteen month period the report looked at. I instantly knew what had happened. The British government hadn't liked the fact that the report (a survey of victims about their rapists) showed that Asian/Muslim offenders were so overrepresented. They suppressed it- but by doing so they created the circumstances in which a significant swathe of the British public (the white working classes) was all but guaranteed to drastically overestimate the size of the problem.
To put it into context, the worst claims estimates of the levels of Asian/Muslim gang grooming floating around on social media put the figure at 1 million. This is clearly ridiculous. Even right or heterodox writers and academics who I consider responsible in terms of evidence-based research, put the figure as possibly as high as 500,000. But these figures from the supressed 2011 report show that group CSE is around 2,000 cases a year, and the source (composed of victim report summaries) shows that only 500 or so of the offenders are Asian/Muslim.
That's still a problem. Something which needs to be tackled. But it's nothing like the scale of the problem many people have been imagining and which has been at driver of genuine concerns over Islam in the UK. The British government didn't want people knowing that Asian/Muslim gang grooming were or are about roughly 18 - 20 times as common per population as it is for White British people, but in so doing it made people think that a problem which according to known cases produced a top range estimate of 15,000 girls over 30 years, into a problem where a significant percentage of the British public imagine the problem over the same period affected 500,000 girls!
The Left keeps going on about misinformation. They won't own up to their own role in creating the blacked out and censored ecosystems, the information voids, into which bad information flows, often arrived at in perfectly good faith by reasonable actors who only want to highlight problems that governments and institutions want to pretend do not exist.
People don't like to be kept in the dark. And it really don't help the governmental and institutional types that they don't realise that people further down the educational and cognitive spectrum people are actually better at spotting dissembling- because although they might trust the expertise of experts they are far less likely than the educated class to trust their motives. Ordinary people don't have the 'people like us' fallacy of educational class-based positive prejudice. After all, morality or ethical values don't really correlate at all with general intelligence (IQ), but where smart or educated people differ is that they often possess the hubris to believe they won't get caught or that people won't spot clever lies and disingenuous assurances. They drastically overestimate their ability to lie convincingly, and clever lies are often more blatantly false to most people outside of the educated 'chattering' classes.
I stand by my original essay. The data I have to date doesn't include victims who've never come forward, and so what if the victims groups added single offender victims? Those girls were still raped. But it means that I was caught by the government blackout the same as many other people. I imagined the real figures behind the victim group estimate were towards the higher end of the estimate. I now correct that assessment.
Here's the thing- government and the institutions need to understand that by attempting to cover up and hide uncomfortable truths, they only make the problem far, far worse. When left in the dark, people will always exaggerate and overestimate the scale of a problem- just think about times in the past where you've notices medical symptoms, only in most cases, to encounter a sense of relief when your doctors tells you it's nowhere near as serious as you imagined.
I imagine if one to were to ask how many attacks inspired by Islamic Extremism have occurred in the UK in the past five years which resulted in serious injury but weren't classified as terrorism, a significant percentage of the population would predict 50 to 200, some would predict over 200. The figure is likely to be no more than 30. Most people aren't natural forecasters, they would stop to think how often they actually here about a particular type of attack in the media, and then estimate on that basis. Hiding the truth doesn't help anyone, much as government might bemoan the rise of 'misinformation' they are the ones creating the media landscape of shadows and darkness which forces people, initially at least, to rely on the plural of anecdotes.
Anyway, my point is this- where I think I'm justified in worrying is that it's become clear that the establishment elites are rank amateurs when it comes to the behavioural psychology of populations. They're creating systems which are almost guaranteed to cause inter-group friction because they are aiming for equality (equity) when all human evolutionary psychology is actually based upon fairness (proportionality). Even the Left-liberal equality drive is a theoretical overlay- when students in Denmark were given Maths tests with financial rewards they defaulted to fairness (and punishment) behaviour at the granular interpersonal level.
Most groups have ingroup. It's a feature and not a bug of human evolution. Only in the relatively safe, secure, educated and affluent backgrounds of mainly white Left-leaning liberal households has this human gravitational pull receded somewhat. It's an evolutionary psychological system meant to aid group social cohesion. But ingroup preference doesn't necessarily lead to outgroup hostility. Only in situations where particular demographics feel as though they are subject to a rigged game, perceive that the interests of others are unfairly being put before their own, or feel that their accrued economic and social resources are being squandered without their consent, does outgroup hostility and resentment grow. Western governments seem to have been doing everything possible to bring these social group instincts to the fore, and aggravate inter-group tensions.
Pretending particular problems between groups don't exist, especially when they offend deeply held sociocultural value codes, is one sure recipe for making the problem a hundred times worse. The British government has inadvertently been turning admittedly large hills with steep inclines and worryingly sharp cliffs and pitfalls into the Mount Everest of inter-group tension- a pressure cooker waiting to blow.
Thanks, Travis, for a thorough essay on polarization. There’s another global movement—information literacy—that’s tackling polarization as part of the solution to the challenges of information overload, misinformation, and disinformation. Like a bridge, information literacy is an infrastructure that must be invested in and maintained. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Anita, I'm a big fan of information literacy, although I do think a much larger share of the information literacy curriculum should be focused on teaching about the importance of negativity bias. Excited to follow your work!
Great peice here Travis.
I knew where you were going before I read to the end. You are spot on...when we understand that the world is getting better (by most metrics) and that progress is a positive sum game, suddenly polarization and political differences are less salient.
The problem is the media and politicians have every reason to highlight negativity. Not only does it tap into our primal attraction to negative information, but it justifies the need to go out and vote to "change course."
It's probably the greatest challenge of our time.
Polarization is also occurring because, in their ongoing quest to maintain power, political parties essentially have a monopoly on providing solutions to a few big issues. And they've largely given up on trying to solve issues the other party claims.
For instance Republicans are perceived as the party of economic growth, while Democrats are the party of equal rights.
And thus Republicans are reluctant to work on equal rights issues while Democrats are reluctant to focus on economic growth.
The only solution I see for this problem is to have. more non partisan elections. This would give politicians greater leeway to negotiate around big problems than what they have now with having to answer to party leaders.
At least that's what I theorize.
Agree there's a reluctance to work on the "other side's" issues, but political parties and politicians are downstream of voter preferences, so to the extent political parties are producing subpar outcomes, my view is that the problem lies with voters, not the politicians.
We are demanding highly partisan politicians who don't compromise, so that is what the system produces. We demand highly partisan politicians because our view of the other side is warped such that we don't believe the other side can be compromised with in good faith. I think of polarization and political outcomes in market terms like you do. You'd probably like this piece: https://travismonteleone.substack.com/p/what-we-all-get-wrong-about-polarization?r=1l2z5n
In short, people have a tendency to blame the supply instead of the demand. Focusing on the demand is the key to addressing the root cause of polarization (negativity bias).
You write "If the cartoon were reversed to show the excesses of the left and the reasonableness of the right"
It would have been more effective if you showed such a cartoon, or made one yourself if you could not find one on the internet. I think you might find this difficult, which would provide more insight into the problem.
Also, graphs showing things getting better for the world are not germane for ordinary Americans. I have seen posts arguing things have been getting better for the median income earner by showing rising plots of real incomes. But real incomes aren't the issue. The issue is keeping up with the cost of living. That is income relative to living standards. Per capital GDP is typically used as a measure of a nation's living standards relative to others. Thus the appropriate adjustment would not be to inflation, but to per capita GDP. With this measure, improving well=being is a flat line indicating one is keeping up with rising living standards, all are benefiting from progress. Below is a figure showing this measure for several income types.
The general trend was flat until around 1980 as most people were benefiting from progress. After this they started to lose ground. I suspect this is the core element of loss of faith in progress and a possibly a source of polarization, if Turchin's elite overproduction model is valid.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F843f372a-943d-4b3c-a3e1-9e1417123ffb_575x287.gif
Certainly not difficult to caricature the left, I'm just not a cartoonist and figured it'd be easy for others too. If you can't easily conceive of a caricature of the left, I think that sheds more insight into your own biases than it does polarization writ large. If I could draw, I'd show a satanist, an authoritarian in a grey Mao suit, and a media exec shouting "Obey" on the left, but any number of other caricatures are easy to come up with too. On the right maybe a plumber, a Mexican immigrant, and a nuclear Mormon family. Of course these aren't representative, but they're easy enough to come up with if you take a balanced view of the faults and worst fears of both sides.
I'm not denying there are wage growth issues that should be addressed through moderate reform, I'm saying the impulse to hate your fellow American or to descend into conspiracism or a desire for violent change is a response that is unjustified based on the extent of the problem. The increases in domestic labor, automation, and outsourcing are all headwinds against wage growth. Despite these headwinds, real wages have continued to increase in the US and US workers enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. Could they be better off? Of course, but we should get there through reasonable policy interventions without descending into contempt and affective polarization.
Thanks for the shout out!
The one with the left wing biases rings true. The Left really does characterize the Right as Klansmen, Nazis, and Confederate flag wavers. That is why it works.
I haven’t seen right wingers characterize the Left as satanists. Not have I see Rightist objections to Leftists as old school economic Marxists (i.e Mao). A lot of the populist Right did not have a bad opinion of Bernie Sanders (the closest thing we have today of an economic Leftist). Hell, old school Marxists (Tankies) tend to agree with right-wingers on today's cultural issues (e.g. Tankies and Trumpists are both pro-Russia)
The communist trope nowadays is about cultural Marxism, a very different thing than Mao. Also a trope about executives saying Obey (this is too similar to leftist critiques of authoritarians) and is not a concern of the Right concerning the Left. Your examples don't really work like the ones in the cartoon you posted do.
Your right tropes would fit in better fifty years ago, the Mao figure would be there with a Black Panther and a hippie. And on the other side you could have a businessman, a construction worker and a cop.
They do not capture any elements of Woke, which is probably the key objection the Right has of the Left. The critique the Right makes of the Left is not so easy to characterize in a cartoon figure, but one trope I can think of is a bearded man in a dress to represent transgenders.
Sure, you can replace with whatever caricatures of the left you can think of. Agreed something about woke would be good. Mao I meant less in economic terms and more as a representation of authoritarianism with a huge and coercive state apparatus, something (the "deep state") that the current right absolutely fears. Fears of media overrepresenting the left and pushing propaganda are definitely fears of the right as well (biden's laptop, covid mandates, covid origin, etc.), but this is all nitpicking. the point is you could definitely make a cartoon for the other side, so the centrist's role is to push back on both extremes.
Good essay with a good conclusion. However, although things are better materially, people are less happy and for good reasons. For a start, people who work for small businesses tend to be insanely happy by comparison to those who work for large businesses or organisation. A 2018 survey showed that 75% to 80% of workers working for small businesses were either very happy or extremely happy with their work and workplace. In the mid-noughties employment by large employers became more common than employment by small employers for the first time in American history.
The neoliberal era might have brought cheaper goods and services in many areas of the economy, but they did nothing for labour security, a key criteria for planning and achieving any sort of life. People who live in cities are less happy and live shorter lives, and this isn't just due to air quality. Religious people are more happy, and religion is on the decline. Faith is not only a comfort, but it also pushes people towards community engagement.
Plus, it's not all good news. If you plot either global population income levels or living standards on a graph, then most people are doing better, especially if you were in most of the bottom 50% of the spectrum or the very top couple of percent. With income, this is called the Elephant graph. Put simply the people who exist between the body of the elephant and the trunk are most blue collar workers in the West.
In term of the distribution of the 'global rich' this equates to 12% of Americans, 3-6% of people in Germany, France, the UK and Japan, and the top 1% in Brazil, South Africa and Russia. This, above all, was the reason for the rise of populism. It wasn't the rise of polarisation per se, although increased polarisation exists- populism was a symptom of mass desperation at the major flaws in neoliberalism. Yes, neoliberalism brought major benefits globally, but there is an extent to which it was also a Faustian bargain in which Western blue collar workers were the clear sacrifices.
Agree with most of this and think you have a lot of good points. I agree there are issues, the question is just should they be addressed through reasonable reform or through contemptuous revolution. Overly negative narratives can lead to the latter and cause governments to enact drastic or dangerous reforms when incremental reforms would have been more appropriate.
I bet you'd enjoy this article on how people are much happier than most people think: https://travismonteleone.substack.com/p/the-most-important-graph-in-the-world?r=1l2z5n
The small business happiness is also fascinating. The tradeoff of course is lower job stability, so many are willing to be less happy at larger safer companies, although that seems to be changing with younger generations. Agree with the comments on faith, plus faith pushes people towards optimism as well.
Ha- touche! I did realise this a bit when I was making the argument. I am mostly happy, for example- it's just that my happiness level drops when I worry about social and cultural events.
Let me give you example. I recently wrote a data-driven essay on the Asian/Muslim grooming gangs in the UK. It's my contention that it was one of the key drivers of the recent UK riots. I checked a number of the locations where the riots happened and all of them coincided with recent historical grooming scandals, in which mostly white working glass underage girls were groomed for sex with groups of adult men.
But recently I've been developing tricks and exploits to get Chat GPT 4.0 to give me access to information which Google routinely supresses or deranks. A good example, would be the time when I had to ask it for negative energy exports from Germany, because it has renewable energy as a goal.
Anyway, when I wrote my initial essay, I found comprehensive information sources very difficult to access or find. There were some hugely inflated sources on social media- the product of bad Maths. Eventually I was forced to rely on a particular victim group which seemed to have produced a reasonable range for all group CSE in the UK of 75,000 to 380,000 over a period of around 20 years (I only found out later they probably included a significant number of single offender CSEs). In terms of proportions by group a report for the Office of the Child Commissioner showed that the overall figure was higher for whites (36%), but overrepresented for Asians (27%)- over the historical period in question a generous figure for the Asian percentage of population is 4%).
Anyway, I went back and checked my data again with Chat GPT 4.0, using a more cunnings variant of the question. What I found alternatively shocked me, infuriated me and made me feel sick. I had chosen two data points- a report for the Office of the Child Commissioner from 2011. Most of the data relating to the source had been wiped because of the incendiary nature of the source. I had only found reference to the report through an excellent Independent date-driven article refuting a previous wild claim by another source within media. My other data point was a historical figure of 19,000 child grooming cases in a single year (upon which most of the Bad Maths social media estimates are based).
Here's the thing. A few days ago Chat GPPT 4.0 just gave me the numbers for the 2011 report (from another non-government) source), because of the way I phrased the question. It turns out that there were only 2,400 group child grooming cases in the whole of the UK for the fourteen month period the report looked at. I instantly knew what had happened. The British government hadn't liked the fact that the report (a survey of victims about their rapists) showed that Asian/Muslim offenders were so overrepresented. They suppressed it- but by doing so they created the circumstances in which a significant swathe of the British public (the white working classes) was all but guaranteed to drastically overestimate the size of the problem.
To put it into context, the worst claims estimates of the levels of Asian/Muslim gang grooming floating around on social media put the figure at 1 million. This is clearly ridiculous. Even right or heterodox writers and academics who I consider responsible in terms of evidence-based research, put the figure as possibly as high as 500,000. But these figures from the supressed 2011 report show that group CSE is around 2,000 cases a year, and the source (composed of victim report summaries) shows that only 500 or so of the offenders are Asian/Muslim.
That's still a problem. Something which needs to be tackled. But it's nothing like the scale of the problem many people have been imagining and which has been at driver of genuine concerns over Islam in the UK. The British government didn't want people knowing that Asian/Muslim gang grooming were or are about roughly 18 - 20 times as common per population as it is for White British people, but in so doing it made people think that a problem which according to known cases produced a top range estimate of 15,000 girls over 30 years, into a problem where a significant percentage of the British public imagine the problem over the same period affected 500,000 girls!
The Left keeps going on about misinformation. They won't own up to their own role in creating the blacked out and censored ecosystems, the information voids, into which bad information flows, often arrived at in perfectly good faith by reasonable actors who only want to highlight problems that governments and institutions want to pretend do not exist.
People don't like to be kept in the dark. And it really don't help the governmental and institutional types that they don't realise that people further down the educational and cognitive spectrum people are actually better at spotting dissembling- because although they might trust the expertise of experts they are far less likely than the educated class to trust their motives. Ordinary people don't have the 'people like us' fallacy of educational class-based positive prejudice. After all, morality or ethical values don't really correlate at all with general intelligence (IQ), but where smart or educated people differ is that they often possess the hubris to believe they won't get caught or that people won't spot clever lies and disingenuous assurances. They drastically overestimate their ability to lie convincingly, and clever lies are often more blatantly false to most people outside of the educated 'chattering' classes.
I stand by my original essay. The data I have to date doesn't include victims who've never come forward, and so what if the victims groups added single offender victims? Those girls were still raped. But it means that I was caught by the government blackout the same as many other people. I imagined the real figures behind the victim group estimate were towards the higher end of the estimate. I now correct that assessment.
Here's the thing- government and the institutions need to understand that by attempting to cover up and hide uncomfortable truths, they only make the problem far, far worse. When left in the dark, people will always exaggerate and overestimate the scale of a problem- just think about times in the past where you've notices medical symptoms, only in most cases, to encounter a sense of relief when your doctors tells you it's nowhere near as serious as you imagined.
I imagine if one to were to ask how many attacks inspired by Islamic Extremism have occurred in the UK in the past five years which resulted in serious injury but weren't classified as terrorism, a significant percentage of the population would predict 50 to 200, some would predict over 200. The figure is likely to be no more than 30. Most people aren't natural forecasters, they would stop to think how often they actually here about a particular type of attack in the media, and then estimate on that basis. Hiding the truth doesn't help anyone, much as government might bemoan the rise of 'misinformation' they are the ones creating the media landscape of shadows and darkness which forces people, initially at least, to rely on the plural of anecdotes.
Anyway, my point is this- where I think I'm justified in worrying is that it's become clear that the establishment elites are rank amateurs when it comes to the behavioural psychology of populations. They're creating systems which are almost guaranteed to cause inter-group friction because they are aiming for equality (equity) when all human evolutionary psychology is actually based upon fairness (proportionality). Even the Left-liberal equality drive is a theoretical overlay- when students in Denmark were given Maths tests with financial rewards they defaulted to fairness (and punishment) behaviour at the granular interpersonal level.
Most groups have ingroup. It's a feature and not a bug of human evolution. Only in the relatively safe, secure, educated and affluent backgrounds of mainly white Left-leaning liberal households has this human gravitational pull receded somewhat. It's an evolutionary psychological system meant to aid group social cohesion. But ingroup preference doesn't necessarily lead to outgroup hostility. Only in situations where particular demographics feel as though they are subject to a rigged game, perceive that the interests of others are unfairly being put before their own, or feel that their accrued economic and social resources are being squandered without their consent, does outgroup hostility and resentment grow. Western governments seem to have been doing everything possible to bring these social group instincts to the fore, and aggravate inter-group tensions.
Pretending particular problems between groups don't exist, especially when they offend deeply held sociocultural value codes, is one sure recipe for making the problem a hundred times worse. The British government has inadvertently been turning admittedly large hills with steep inclines and worryingly sharp cliffs and pitfalls into the Mount Everest of inter-group tension- a pressure cooker waiting to blow.