Thomas Hübl: Welcome back to the Collective Healing Conference. My name is Thomas Hübl and I am the convener of the conference, and I’m very happy to be sitting here with Mathieu Lefevre. Matthew, a warm welcome to our conference.
Mathieu Lefevre: Thank you.
Thomas: As we already talked a little bit in our pre-conversation about that, I think we share some mutual interests and maybe let’s start a little bit with your current interest and then we’ll dive deeper into your work. But I find it always exciting to talk about where is our creativity most alive right now? Where do we feel “that’s my leading edge”? Even if I do what I do 25 years, there’s something where I feel really that captures my creativity and or my agency. And maybe you’ll share with us a little bit, what’s that for you right now in your work?
Mathieu: Sure, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, and very happy to be here, Thomas, and thank you for the invitation. I’m looking forward to a good conversation. My leading edge and my passion right now is very close to the core of the work that we do, which we’ll be talking about, which is that I observe the world around me, like you and all of the people who are listening to us, and it looks like a field of ruins, really. Our ability to come together to solve shared challenges has been really damaged by years of polarization and division. We work mainly in Europe and in the United States, so I’ll speak only about those two places, but it just seems that polarization and division is growing stronger. So a bleak picture really, but where my passion is to show that people are actually better than that. They are better than the image we see in the mirror.
It’s like a distorting mirror, like in a hall of mirrors, in an amusement park. The image that we see on social media, on TV is much uglier and more violent and more divided than what we really are. So very much my passion at this moment is to show that there is this gap between reality and the perception and the image we are seeing of ourselves. I think people are kinder, more compassionate, more ready to embrace nuance and complexity than you would think if you were an alien landing on planet Earth and you looked at social media or cable news television, we are better than that image. And so my passion is very much about proving that, about showing that actually, people are much better than the image we’re giving off of ourselves.
Thomas: Well, fantastic. So let’s say two things. I’m interested, you said two things that kind of create a little bit like a split. You said on the one hand we are drifting apart more and more, but actually we are better than that. And I’m curious, what’s the root cause for both? What makes you think that we are better than that? How do you, because that sounds amazing, and then why do you think we are drifting more and more apart? Why does polarization get stronger? I mean, what are the root causes in your understanding that create that phenomenon that we are seeing all over?
Mathieu: Yeah, so let’s take the two parts, one after the other. So the first one is why does it appear at least that we are drifting apart and we’re more polarized? I mean in some way the answer to that question is obvious to anyone who lives, whether in Europe right now, in the United States, but also in India and Brazil. I mean we appear to be divided on every issue. We are speaking just less than 48 hours after an assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, and that’s a symptom of the violence of the division in the United States. But the same is true in many other places. It appears that we are more polarized and more divided than ever before on every possible topic. If you think back to Covid, Covid was a global pandemic that for a brief moment, people like me, probably naively, thought it would unite us. There is a theory that said that all we needed to be united was a common enemy. Well, we were given one brilliant common enemy: a disease. Well, even that became very divisive. Wearing a mask, getting a vaccine became a source of tension and division, whatever your views are on that, it’s just a fact that we have a capacity to be divided on almost anything. The war in Gaza divides us. Climate policy increasingly divides us when we thought for a short bit that it was going to be a great uniter.
Views on religion seemed to divide us. And so on the surface at least there seems to be growing division. Worse than that, there’s what scientists call social scientists call effective polarization. Effective polarization is a kind of tribal phenomenon where winning for your team becomes more important than the subject of whatever you’re discussing. It doesn’t matter what you’re discussing. What matters is to win for your team to beat the other side like a sports team. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing well or if you’re doing something terribly wrong. What matters is to win, and that’s effective polarization. And I think the reason why we seem to be caught in a trap of polarization is this effective nature. You’re either on my side or you’re against me, and there’s nothing in between. So it just seems on the surface that we are increasingly polarized and divided and that any topic falls victim to this phenomenon of polarization and division.
So that’s the bad news. On the one hand, we seem to be more and more polarized, but the good news is that partly that’s not true. Partly that’s staged polarization, it’s given to us to be seen as a show. So the organization that I co-founded eight years ago now is called More In Common, and what we do is we do very large-scale opinion surveys of people, and we’ve surveyed hundreds of thousands of people at this stage in surveys and focus groups and different interview techniques and across a wide number of topics, what we see is that people actually have a lot more in common than what you think. That’s obviously the name of the organization that I founded, but we have data to prove it. So I’ll give you two quick examples. One is the war between Israel and Hamas, which has been a hugely divisive issue all over the world.
If you look at the news or cable TV or social media, you would think that there are two sides to this battle. You would think that there’s one side that is entirely pro-Israel and one side that is entirely pro-Palestine and Palestinians. But in fact, when we do surveys, we see that that’s not true. We did a survey recently in France, and of the 70% of people who say that they are very worried about Israeli civilians in the conflict, the overwhelming majority is also worried about Palestinian civilians, which is both obvious and the human thing to do and also not what you see on the news. And I’ll give you a second example very quickly on police brutality in the United States and in Europe we’re also told that there’s a pro-police camp and there’s a pro-minority youth camp, and those two things are in opposition.
The reality is that most people who are concerned about the treatment of minorities by the police in places like the United States also think the police have an important role to play. It’s not either or. And so, in fact, on so many topics we see that actually people refuse that binary nature of polarization. But the problem is that that nuance and that complexity just doesn’t make for very good TV or doesn’t really work with social media algorithms. So both of those things are true. We appear to be more polarized and we actually are much less polarized than we appear. That truth requires nuance and complexity to understand that both of those things are true. But of course, and we can talk about this if you’d like, the danger is that fiction often becomes reality if you start believing the fiction that we are very divided and polarized, that can become reality and that can be very, very dangerous.
Thomas: Yeah, I would love to talk about this. So what I hear you say is actually—just for me to reflect it a little bit back. So what I hear you say is that yes, we become more and more divisive, but actually a bigger part of the divisiveness is a result of social media, media, and all kinds of news outlets that actually display that much more than what you find in your surveys. That’s basically what you’re saying.
Mathieu: That’s correct. Yeah. I mean there’s something about polarization and division is not new. Since our human adventure started, people have experienced division and polarization. So arguably there’s a case to be made to say that there’s nothing new happening here. What is new is the impact of social media. I think that is the defining factor. Social media is designed in a way to pull you into more and more extreme views. So it sort of pulls poles apart further and further and makes it much harder to listen and to understand the other part of the argument. And it creates something that we’ve studied in the United States, which we’ve called perception gaps. So perception gaps essentially. And we’ve published a series of reports called Perception Gap, and perception gaps essentially measure the difference between our perception of the views of our so-called opponents and the reality of their views.
So for example, in a two party context, you might ask party A, what do you think supporters of Party B think about immigration? And then you measure that perception with the reality. And what we find is that there’s enormous perception gaps. We tend to exaggerate the extremity of the views of our so-called opponents. So it’s good news. That means that our views are by and large more similar to those of our opponents than we think. So then we did another layer of analysis was to try to understand, well, why are there so many perception gaps? And the more you’re active on social media, the bigger your perception gap, the bigger your misunderstanding of the other side is. So I think there is some, I mean I’m not saying anything that’s not obvious to people, to you and to people listening to us, but it is very true that social media exacerbates polarization in a very dangerous way.
Thomas: And did you—I’m curious now that my research mind is—did you make any surveys like, what’s the effect of people consuming more social media on how it changes their views, or how resilient, let’s say, or steady this less polarized view is even under the influence of social media?
Mathieu: So I mean the research is not definitive and not very clear on this point, on the net impact of social media, on social life and general perceptions. However, we have showed that people who post what we call political content, which isn’t about politics, it’s just about marginally political content. It’s not partisan content, it’s political in nature. People who tend to post that kind of content on social media, they feed the algorithm with a point of data, that means that they will get more content like that. And generally, if they have a marginally formed view on one thing, it will feed them something that reinforces that view. And our research shows that people who post that kind of content, they tend to have a bigger perception gap than people who don’t. So if you consume social media particularly to talk about politics, then the distortion mechanism that I was talking about, the distorted mirror in the amusement park becomes more distorted than people who don’t do that. Now, there are also behaviors that reduce perception gaps and polarization. For example, people who consume local news and local newspapers, they tend to have a more accurate description of the views of the other side. So there’s perceptions that extend the gap and perception and behaviors that reduce the gap.
Thomas: So what do you feel is, or what do you think is now the impact of that research? So you said you serve it hundreds of thousands of people, so that’s already and am assume that that it’s through all kinds of demographic layers or societal layers. So it’s a pretty comprehensive understanding of society, at least in the locations you did it in. And now what do you feel or think is the impact that can have or what’s the feedback mechanism into media and social media landscapes? Because you created some meaning here, which is very beautiful. I mean, you came up with something that I think is a great message for us to hear. So how does this feed back into the media, social media landscape? It is kind of a feedback mechanism that could create now some correction functions and say, listen, the polarization is more unhealthy for society and public health and the feedback back into the social media system is actually a corrective function like in the body, if you have a hormone that goes up and you have a—so it keeps it in balance. And how do you see that process?
Mathieu: I think one can start to take your image of the body, one can start to develop antibodies just as the fever is still rising. And I think, I hope that we’re there. I hope that slowly, we are realizing—not so slowly actually—we are realizing that these behaviors, whether it’s social media consumption, the way we think of other people, the way we’ve stopped listening to one another are very unhealthy for our social body, our general body. But the polarization and the division is continuing to rise. Both of those things will happen at once. The question is can we accelerate the development of our antibodies? And here there is good news. In the United States in More In Common’s work, we’ve talked about a group called the exhausted majority, and the exhausted majority is somewhere between a progressive activist segment and a very conservative and closed segments. Both of those segments are opposed politically, but they’re very active. They dominate the conversation, but together they represent really a minority of Americans.
So the vast majority is in the middle between these two poles, and there are many differences between different groups in that middle, but one thing they have in common is that they are exhausted by the polarization. That’s why we call them the exhausted majority, which is a term that has since gone viral and been used by many people in the United States, including politicians who invariably start to say that they are fighting for the exhausted majority, but the thing they have in common is a realization that this polarization and this division is bad for them, bad for their family, is bad for the country. And so realizing that this is bad for us, realizing that we misunderstand the other side, all of those things I think are really important starting point for the production of the antibodies. But I’m also under no illusion that we are faced with sizable economic and political powers who have an interest in polarization.
To name just two, one is social media platforms. They have developed, they are profiteers of polarization, some of them, not all of them. They profit from this polarization. So that’s their business model. Their whole business model is based on this generation of content that you really want to see, et cetera. So they are Goliath and we are a tiny, tiny little David. And then of course there are foreign powers who can seek to use this polarization to destabilize another country. To destabilize another country you don’t need to persuade them that you are right. All you need to do is just destabilize them, confuse them, make them doubt about everything. So I’m hopeful that the realization is growing, but I’m also not naive about the size of the political geopolitical economic interests on the other side.
Thomas: Yeah, I was going to say that on the one hand, all these factors, and there are maybe some more that want that polarization to continue actually need that polarization to continue. I’m wondering if you look in society or into life and you see that if something happens in life, there’s always a reason for it to happen. But in your understanding, when you studied this a lot, what do you feel is the function of polarization in society? Is it something entirely detrimental or do these poles, out of some reason polarization emerged and it’s here and it’s part of humanity’s history for a long time. So any intelligence in polarizing? Does this serve anything in this society or is it just like a symptom we want to get rid of?
Mathieu: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think polarization is a little bit like cholesterol. There’s good polarization and there’s bad polarization, like there’s good and bad cholesterol. I am not here to argue that we absolutely all have to get along and agree about everything. Absolutely not. Division, a strong opposition of views, all of that is very healthy in whatever political system you operate in. But particularly in a democracy, a democracy is based on forms of divisions and disagreement. That is not at all what I’m saying. What I’m also not saying is that it’s urgent to sort of come to some weak compromise or lowest common denominator about everything from immigration to taxation. Not at all. I’m very much in favor of healthy disagreement, but I think to borrow the phrase of a really good initiative in the United States, we need to know how to disagree better. We need to know how to disagree well again.
Because there is also bad polarization. There’s that effective polarization which is just essentially tribal in essence of like, I want to win against you at all costs. It doesn’t matter what you say or what you think, I just want to beat you. There’s something in that effective polarization that is genuinely bad and I think really, really destructive. I’ll give you two examples of why I think that is. The first one is that I started my career before we started More In Common, I worked in the department of peacekeeping operations of the UN. I worked with the blue helmets for five years, and I lived in Afghanistan for three years, I lived, I was the head of the office of the UN in the tribal area on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is really Taliban heartland. I worked in Syria and I saw Syria descend into civil war, and I kind of experienced what it means to see a country descend into civil conflict, and that is the product.
No civil war has ever been sparked or extended without that fuel of effective polarization of just making a large group of people persuade that they are better than the other side. So much so that the other side has to be exterminated. So the bad kind of polarization is quite bad. Now, I’m not here to say that Western Europe is about to become Aleppo or Damascus. That is not what I’m saying. But we are taking a path that can, if you project your thinking out a few years, could lead us down the path of social conflict. So that’s one reason why there is a bad polarization is to avoid war really is what we’re talking about. And it’s interesting that, I don’t know if you saw the movie Civil War, which was a big hit in the global box office. I think last time I checked it was like number 12 on the global box office this year.
Thomas: It’s on my list. I didn’t have time yet.
Mathieu: It’s really good. I highly recommend it, but it’s also terrifying that it’s so close to reality that it’s not for nothing that people are going to see films about a civil war in places like the United States. So that’s one reason why there’s some bad polarization. But then another reason, which is even more existentially important is that humankind, the women and men and children who make up humankind are faced with challenges that are perhaps on a scale that’s not comparable to any other time in human history. The climate emergency is first and foremost, but there are others. The threat, the opportunities, but also the threat posed by artificial intelligence and so on. There are many others. We are simply not going to be able to solve these problems if we are so divided and we can’t agree on anything. And I think that’s where the bad kind of division and disagreement, the bad kind of polarization can really lead us to ruin.
Thomas: No, I completely agree. And so let’s dial it back for a moment and then we go to what you just mentioned, like climate change for example. But, I am curious how you see where is the good polarization turning into bad polarization? So what’s actually, can we define certain qualities that would say this part of polarization is actually a healthy dynamism in a society that keeps the societal evolution going and then there is a fault line, and then when we cross that fault line, then it actually becomes destructive somehow. Do you have some parameters that would indicate, okay, this is polarization that is actually more healthy and it’s a dynamic process between people? What are qualities that you would give that kind of polarization so that we can see, oh, we can learn to distinguish this two and say, okay, this is one and this is the other. How would you say that?
Mathieu: Well, I think that probably depends on each sort of cultural context, but there seems to be one sort of attribute that I think is worrying is what’s called intergroup contact. So intergroup contact basically describes how many people do you know or are you in contact with that are not part of your group, not part of your ingroup. So social scientists refer to ingroup and outgroups, and when there’s very little intergroup contact, then I think that’s quite worrying because it suggests that sort of hardened groups have formed and that leads you down the path of what I was describing earlier, which is this tribal version of polarization. It doesn’t matter what we think or what we do, the most important thing is to beat the other team. So societies that have more intergroup contact, whether it’s through school or housing or the organization of housing or social clubs or sports teams or—Robert Putnam, the Great American scholar, had published this very important book called Bowling Alone.
When people start to not really have that much group interactions with people who are different from them, but also when people start to have fewer and fewer interactions. I think this is also linked to a crisis of loneliness, which is happening all around the world. But I think when there’s less intergroup contact, that’s quite worrying. That tells me you’re drifting from sort of healthy disagreement into that. The other thing is, and this is hard to measure, but I think it’s close to the work that you do, which is it’s really about listening. I very often tell this story, that in our research we conduct focus groups on a variety of topics all over Europe and the US. And as is common practice, we pay participants a little bit of money to join a two hour focus group to talk about climate change or the cost of living crisis or the elections or whatever.
And very often what happens at the end, so a focus group is for people who don’t know, is generally eight people. And you talk about wide range of topics for two hours. These are people who don’t know one another. And what very often happens at the end of these focus groups is that people say, “that felt really good. I haven’t really spent two hours talking to people I don’t know about stuff in decades.” And so what very often, almost all the time they say thank you. They say, really, “thank you for doing this. It feels good to talk about stuff.” And then it happened to us just last week. Participants sometimes say, “Can I please come back tomorrow, but you don’t need to pay me. I’ll come back for free. I just liked the experience.” And so I think there’s also kind of a crisis of loneliness, but also listening like the quality of people’s ability to listen when that quality goes down and when people don’t feel heard or listen to, then that’s an indicator that you’re going to a dangerous, dangerous place.
Thomas: This sounds very lovely, and I mean it resonates very much with the work that we are doing. That’s right. And also what I hear you say is that actively looking for diversity in all kinds of forms and that we as citizens are really interested in diversity and it’s not just being served to us, that we are actively looking for opposing opinions and see how they feel and listen to people and being curious, that that’s actually a healthy social immune system that creates those antibodies that I think you talked about.
Mathieu: But one of the problems is that there are bigger sort of socioeconomic dynamics that are preventing that diverse contact. A great book written called The Big Sort, which explains how in the United States over the last few decades, people have started to move from mixed neighborhoods to very homogeneous neighborhoods, socioeconomically in terms of income levels and education levels. And so that has created a blue America and a red America. And so the problem with that is that even if you want to meet people who are different from you, it just so happens that you wake up one morning and all of your neighbors are kind of like you. And so you think, well, I don’t know where all the other people have gone, but they’re not here. And so that’s where things like school districts and housing policy are really, really important.
Thomas: Yeah, beautiful. Lovely. So it’s kind of a personal and a systemic or structural thing to think about how to enhance this immune system that we’re talking about, these antibodies that keep the democratic process or society more healthy.
Mathieu: Yes, yes. I mean, I think there’s really things that each of us can do to fight these dynamics, look for people who are different from you in your company, in your gym, in your sports club, in your school. That intergroup contact can happen everywhere. I mean, getting off our phones is a good start. Social media is not good for us, but also the phone is just absorbs us and cuts us off from other people. So there’s lots of things people can actually do.
Thomas: Yeah, right. Very much so. What I hear you say on the one hand, actively engaged, there are many things you can do to, I also feel that when I listen to you, when you talk, then I feel like it creates immediately more oxygen. It kind of feels fresh and the air feels fresher and it feels interesting because it sparks our curiosity and also our learning, I think. And we all know that social media, media and our phones create this kind of suits, this suits of homogeneity or sameness. And so getting off that is very helpful. And then I’m curious, it’s a very interesting conversation. I love what you’re bringing and I think it’s very interesting to get this more out, all the things that you found through your service that actually contradict a bit the main information. I’m curious now because to me it seems whenever, and you said it before because we assume that Covid would maybe create more togetherness, but it didn’t.
So on the other hand, we could say every time there’s a bigger collective stress factor that touches the collective, like the society, the societal body, it might reinforce this kind of fragmentation. And I’m wondering now how you look at it, let’s say climate change, you mentioned it before and there are others, but let’s stay with one for a moment to make it more simple. When there is a stress factor coming that is kind of continuously turning up literally and metaphorically the heat in the system. So basically that the resilience that we have is going to be challenged more and more. So isn’t that a natural way into deeper and deeper fragmentation? And isn’t that a natural way segue into what you mentioned before with the movie the Civil War, like you said, okay, we are not in Allepo, and at the same time it’s not so far out and there is a very concrete stress factor that is going to turn up the heat and we are turning up the heat in our own water. So isn’t that naturally going there? And if so, maybe not. I’m curious what you’re saying, and if so, what do we actually have to learn or evolve into or express in new way not to go there, even if that stress factor is there. So I’m curious about your take on that.
Mathieu: Yeah, well, I’m an optimist, but sometimes it’s hard to be an optimist. So there’s no doubt that the stress placed by the growing threat of climate change poses to our societies, to our livelihoods, to our food, to—it’s massive and it’s so multidimensional. Perhaps a problem with that threat is that it still feels very distant for so many people. So making it present is a real challenge. And I think a mistake that has been made for too long is to describe global goals, 1.5 degrees at the 2050 horizon, which is both scientifically enormously important and feels so far removed from the lives of so many people who say, I don’t know what 1.5 degrees means doesn’t sound like a lot. 2050 is like most people have difficulty making ends meet at the end of the month. So 2050 really sounds like, I have no idea.
So I think the climate movement has done a much better job at making things a bit more closer, to talk about food and to talk about people’s livelihoods, et cetera. So that’s helped. But certainly it presents a challenge to us like never before. But I still think that we can have the capacity to come together to solve those challenges, but there will still be tension and disagreements and about how we deal with this, and there still will be sort of winners or losers from these transitions. But I think there’s just a way to lower the temperature on—the sort of social temperature, not the temperature of the earth—but lower the temperature and polarization on so many of the other issues that frankly we shouldn’t be arguing about. I mean, arguing about Covid vaccines or masks sounds to me, at least that’s just my opinion, that that was not necessary. That was entirely avoidable kind of disagreement. We should be focusing on other things that are really existential and really sources of disagreement. But I agree with you that that’s why there’s urgency to this work because as I was saying earlier, I really fundamentally believe that we will not be able to tackle the shared challenge of climate change if we continue to be this divided. We just won’t make it. It’s very urgent.
Thomas: I completely agree with you, and that’s why I find it very interesting to look with you because if migration or forced migration through climate, it’s going to get more and more hot on all levels. I think if we are that divided and we don’t make it into a new level of global collaboration, local and global collaboration, I agree. Then so there is something that asks for some kind of evolution or some kind of developmental maturation that I think is needed.
Mathieu: I really do think that the kind of techniques and framing and thinking that you bring through the understanding of trauma is very helpful and is very relevant here. And my own wish is that it moves into institutions, it’s brought down to people because I think just listening is very much a skill we need to develop. I am in favor of learning how to listen, teaching kids how to listen in school, but I’m also very much in favor of bringing the kinds of tools that you’ve developed into everyday life because they’re very important. They’re not just some sort of fringe thing. They are very important to institutions, to government officials to companies, to all of that. I think there is a part of the answer is there?
Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I do think so too. And that trauma informedness doesn’t mean that everybody needs to become a specialist or an expert. We can create collective competence that can take care of some of the principles that we like a collective can take care of. Right. I agree
Mathieu: Totally. And we’ve seen in our work how crises that are unaddressed, they sort of avalanche into the next problem and the next problem and what everybody feels is that over the last five to 10 years, there’s just been an acceleration of crises. We’ve had Covid and political uprisings and traumatic elections and then wars and the return of the threat of nuclear war in Europe and an acute cost of living crisis, which was very traumatic for so many. And they just keep coming so close. So it’s really interesting because for example, if you think about the financial crisis of 2008, 2007 that left so many people traumatized, they lost their houses, et cetera, and that was never addressed. And that then festered into the wave of populism that we saw in the late 2010s in Europe and in the United States, and that is going to create the next thing. So at least becoming aware of that is really important.
Thomas: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I think we are not good as societies yet in making spaces, creating spaces where we can digest those crisis and integrate their impact. If you had a system, if something happens to you and then you have a space that you yourself or somebody listens to you deeply and you share whatever, you start moving that pain or whatever it is, and it can, it can change and be digested, but the digestion—like society, like eating, eating, eating, eating without digesting, and then we wonder how many Covid integration spaces did we have?
How many did you see? I didn’t see many spaces where people come together and say, “We had a global pandemic, we had a crisis, we were very divided. Let’s stop for a moment and create a space where we just listen.” What you did in the focus groups, just to listen to each other and create the space. And that would help us to digest it. And so it would not linger around so long because it would become an integrated part of our experience. And so I think these spaces are very important, and as you said, you said it beautifully, we are accumulating more and more stuff and then it becomes an avalanche that keeps coming down the mountain and it’s more and more destructive.
Mathieu: I agree. I agree. We also need to kind of change the culture where, it’s not valued to sort of stop and take stock and listen to one another. We’re still in a different kind of culture, which is why I think also a big part of the solution is just to value different things in one another, but also in leaders. I think valuing, creating those spaces is not currently valued in our leadership model, which is still very kind of old school it feels like, which puts a premium on doing stuff and just do more stuff. And I think that needs to change too.
Thomas: Yeah, I completely agree with you. And also the more we learn about the nervous system and it says, okay, if we can live in a more regulated state, our social engagement system, the part where I can listen to you and you can listen to me, I feel you feeling me, and there is a relational resonance and the data flow, that part gets more and more shut down the higher is our stress level, and if we go into more fight and flight states, that will operate less and less, so then I hear you less and less and I need to defend myself more and more fight against you or leave the room.
That’s why I think that education that you said, that collective education of simple things could already change the dialogue and have more mutual spaces being created. And I’m wondering, you said something before that caught my attention, and maybe you can speak a little bit to that. You saw Syria more and more moving into a civil unrest, the civil war. When you saw that, did you see, was there an inevitability to the process or do you feel that something, what can change once that process is in motion? Did you see any loophole where you could say, okay, here is a potential for change, or once that’s beyond a point of no return, it’s going to cascade into what it cascaded into? What’s your take on that since you were there and you experienced it yourself?
Mathieu: There was a lot of talk about red lines being crossed at some point in the Syrian conflict, and I think certainly some of those red lines were crossed. So having some sort of ability either within the country, within traditional systems like tribal systems or religious groups, et cetera, to reign in leaders who have become conflict entrepreneurs. There’s a moment I think at which you can see a leader shift from wanting the best for his or her group to wanting chaos and conflict to benefit from it. And so any system, whether it’s an international system or internal system to reign in leaders who make that switch who are on that journey to sort of authoritarianism. And I think that needs to happen fairly early. But I think coming back to what I was saying earlier, whether it’s in Syria or in Afghanistan or in Congo, in Rwanda or in Bosnia, you see that there’s a demonization of the other side as if the other side became sort of subhuman. And there’s inevitably surfacing a very violent language to describe this other team that must be eradicated.
Sometimes there’s language that compares the other side to animals, to insects, which is very, very frequent. Certainly when you see that that kind of language appears—it’s kind of genocidal language really is what it is—it’s probably too late. You’ve let the formation of these in-group dynamics that are so strong and so riled up that it’s probably too late. So working back from that to the formation of these very strong in-group dynamics and preventing those from being calcified, I think is part of the solution. And then of course there’s an institutional response to it, which is that when institutions, whether it’s religious institutions or school institutions or social care institutions, stop uniting people but become fragmented, then that’s a very bad sign because you’re not united by, I think the role of institutions in keeping us together is really, really, really important. You see that many terrorist organizations where have been all over the world have been very effective in providing social care to take away from very poorly functioning social care institutions at national level and to say, “No, come with us. We have a Hezbollah schooling system or Hezbollah housing system or a Hamas social care provision.” That’s also very worrying because it’s a sort of institutional failure. So those are some of the signs I think, to look out for. But so often you notice these things when it’s too late and those mechanisms are already in play and there’s a sort of inevitability to those conflicts.
Thomas: Yeah, I find it deeply interesting, and most probably many of our listeners too that just listening to your experience, because I think it’s different than when we theorize about something that happened somewhere in the world, or if you have an embodied experience like you were on the ground in Afghanistan, you were on the ground in Syria, and I think being in a zone or in a war zone is a different, there is something to that experience that just as you reflected now, I found it interesting to see what I actually, because to me it feels like there’s a certain moment when what I would call the social coherence starts disintegrating, and the more it disintegrates, it goes into more primal and earlier evolutionary functions that become more and more polarized. And then you said it when the leader turns from wanting the best for the country or anybody, a local leader to, okay, what’s the best for me? That’s already a red alarm, actually a red alarm. And so are there signs when we see that this cascading process starts to happen, what would actually be the immune response? And I think that’s not for now because we’re at the end of our time, but for me that sounds like a very interesting conversation, how to harvest yours and maybe other people’s knowledge to look at what can be done actively to bolster the immune system so that you have immunotherapy for societies.
Mathieu: There are some excellent books that have been written recently that describe the sort stages that you’re in. Are you in stage one or stage five like a disease? They’re really, really excellent books. And what’s really worrying is that if you look at places like France where I live now, or the United States or Brazil, arguably we’re fairly advanced on those stages. If you look at the objective metrics of, it’s quite worrying. Yeah. So there are checklists to say, do we still have a media that kind of unites people or has media become totally fragmented? Is there violent language being used on the radio or on TV to describe the other side? All of those things are kind of part of a checklist that tells you which stage you’re in. They’re very good, very useful books.
Thomas: Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure. So Matthew, this is fantastic. This is a great conversation. I would love to continue, but I know we have this defined time, so thank you so much. This was really very enlivening. It’s very interesting to me, and I learned a lot from you, so thank you so much for being here, and I bless you for your work. You’re doing great work, and so thank you for doing what you’re doing.
Mathieu: Thank you very much. No, thanks for the invitation, and I too really, really appreciated the conversation. And also congratulations to you for all the work you’re doing because it’s a big part of the solution, I think.
Thomas: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. And hopefully we can continue this somewhere else.
Mathieu: Yeah, it was a pleasure.
