We Don’t Need Everyone To Agree. We Need Everyone To Change How They Disagree.

Start judging people differently.

🚨Breaking: human who lived a different life in a different place at a different time has different beliefs than you.

🚨Trending: these two very different people disagree on a complicated moral issue.

🚨Shocking: celebrity known for controversial artwork makes controversial statement, fans somehow still shocked.

If you focus only on the content of our disagreements, you might find their existence upsetting. If you instead focus on human history, you realize that any time spent not fighting over our differences is the real shocker. In America’s hyper-politicized and hyper-technologically-connected society, attacking people over having different beliefs feels normal. It’s the kind of “normal” those sad orcas born into puddle-sized SeaWorld tanks felt: a demoralizing atmosphere so constant they don’t know enough to want anything else.

A seventeen-year-old American girl doesn’t first encounter serious political theory in her public school classrooms, which make the revolutionary birth of America and the miraculously enlightened ideals of its Founders seem as interesting as the scribbles in the back of her textbooks. She first encounters serious political ideas on social media.

In this fake realm, the girl also gets her first real experience formulating arguments to defend things she cares about. In an ideal setting, she would have learned that arguments should be logical, address opposition robustly, and strive for civility. She would have learned that disagreement is inevitable, so at its best it should be a collaborative effort between two truth-seekers trying to improve their understanding of the world.

What she actually learns is that you gain popularity if your argument demeans your opponent, you can sidestep the hard work of logical argumentation by mischaracterizing opposing views, and disagreement is a terrifying high-stakes battle that can result in an online mob ruining your life. That girl was me.

I found out the hard way that constructive disagreement naturally feels like exercise: you want to avoid it, despite the benefits it can bring you. When your brain encounters a disagreement on something you care about more than ice cream flavors, it triggers an ancient self-preservation protocol. Your amygdala—the threat-detecting part of your brain—revs up to take center stage. Your body shifts into fight-or-flight mode, where the stress hormone cortisol rises along with your heart rate. You’re now more ready to fight than you are to think.

We can disagree beautifully about ice cream flavors because our identity isn’t tied up in “chocolate ice cream lover” the way it is in labels like “Christian,” “lesbian,” “Zionist,” or “vegan.” When our self-image is challenged, we might as well be in the Colosseum facing a starving lion. But by depending on our opinions and identity labels to define ourselves, we fail to update our ancient brain’s assumption that disagreement = tribal exclusion = death. The resulting ideological rigidity robs us of the freedom we have today, enslaving us to act out a primitive past where logic, curiosity, and honest disagreement offered more risk than reward. Whether you’re facing an angry mob of tribesmen or an angry mob of Tumblr lefties, your default settings register them both as equally threatening.

The majority of debates happening on complex issues like foreign policy, immigration, cultural change, or technological change are handled by the primitive ooga-booga part of our brain.

Despite thousands of years between us and our “primitive” ancestors, our biology makes us just as likely to handle conflict with attacks and domination instead of understanding and cooperation. As our primitive instincts lurk beneath the surface of our disagreements, our world is increasingly hyper-connected. Every time we turn on a screen, we get a front-row seat to the ugly, offensive, frightening side of other humans: their irrationality, their ignorance, their viciousness. We’re living through the beginning of an unprecedented disrobing of humanity.

Every issue that can be debated will be debated, from whether pedophilia is just another form of sexuality to whether women should be stripped of the right to vote. Your discomfort doesn’t matter. Social media is the great unmasking agent, revealing whatever is there regardless of whether our future depends on cooperating with people we’ve watched cheer on the death of an innocent person deemed an ideological enemy.

We stand at a crossroads between a future that embraces the reality we’ve released from Pandora’s box and one that tries forcing it back in through violence and political tyranny. The future I want to live in is one where we seek objective reality while taking seriously that our experience of that reality is largely subjective. In that future, asking “How do you see it?” and tapping into the infinite number of perspectives on reality replaces the outraged “How can you see it that way!”

Hurt Worse, A Soft Wrongness

The future I desire isn’t as futuristic as many assume. Over 2,000 years before me, the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi argued that our reality is comprised of an number of infinite competing perspectives, with no “grand perspective” that encompasses and contextualizes them all. Isn’t that exactly what humanity looks like? Billions of different eyes and brains experiencing and assessing our world in their own idiosyncratic way. What better proof for this theory do we have than social media itself, which makes visible the infinite variation in our worldviews and the futility of pretending this isn’t the inevitable outcome of more connection with more humans.

We are blocked from seeing this bigger picture by a tired conflict between the individual vs. the collective, a conflict as productive as our limbs and brain fighting each other for dominance. In reality, these are two parts of the same unit—the herd and the individual without which the herd couldn’t exist. With neither subjugating the other, they can work together toward better understanding of our world in the same near-magical synergy that any ecosystem naturally does.

And yet, like the prisoners in Plato’s cave or the seventeen-year-old girl who first navigates politics on social media, many people simply can’t imagine what constructive disagreement with someone very different from them looks like. That failure of imagination belongs at the feet of many people and institutions—parents whose children felt punishing disconnection for asking probing questions, professors who turned classrooms into factory lines producing ideological obedience instead of open minds. But blame alone doesn’t solve problems.

My disagreements were once unpleasant battles to remain unchanged by my opponent. But staying unchanged by the world around you inevitably makes reality itself your enemy.

What I hadn’t learned in that Tumblr echo chamber was that good ideas don’t need dogmatic defenders. I held my beliefs so tightly precisely because I couldn’t defend them easily. And I couldn’t defend them easily because they weren’t meant to be true—they were meant to be social signals indicating what tribe I belonged to.

As a young person forging an identity in an increasingly fractured culture, I filled the void of not knowing who I was, or what I believed, with political labels that gave me ready-made answers. These answers became a prison I worked hard to stay in, lest I should step outside and discover the world was more complicated than my answers accounted for, and thus more uncertain. That comfortable prison cost me years of my life spent performing a static identity instead of growing into the person I am now.

Luckily, I discovered philosophy, where countless people before me had asked questions I never even thought to form dogmas around:

Why do we choose to keep living despite all our suffering?
What if we’re all just brains in vats?
Can we ever truly know what’s true?

Those questions made my fragile answers look painfully boring. Our ancestors rarely had the freedom to risk challenging ideas openly and inviting challenges to their ideas. Their survival depended on a small group, so conformity almost always won over curiosity. We aren’t so different today except for one key way: we have the luxury of listening to opposing views with the calm mind of someone who gets our food from the store, not the tribe. And maybe that’s the first step toward holding our beliefs more loosely: realizing it’s a luxury we’re wasting.

Critics will point out that some views advocate the destruction of others. But there’s a crucial distinction being skipped: opinions are not actions. Bad ideas can become bad actions, but the expression of bad ideas is our chance to confront them earlier and less violently.

We should be less worried about the proliferation of bad ideas and more worried about the proliferation of primitive psychological defenses guarding those ideas.

I don’t mourn the years I spent hiding from other perspectives by telling myself they were all simply evil or idiotic. I’m grateful that I have the most personal reminder that dogmatism can cost me many things that make my life better: intellectual humility, self-awareness, and good faith disagreements. I only hope more people start to feel the same boredom with dogmatism that I have. Beyond the freakouts over our inevitable disagreements is a kind of freedom. When you no longer view the disagreement itself as a source of outrage, there is only one rational response left: curiosity.

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The future will bring us more apps like Integrally, which offers people the place to practice engaging with different viewpoints in good faith instead of rewarding people for demonizing them. The existence of Integrally tells me there’s already a growing number of people who are bored with freaking out at different viewpoints and would rather understand them and how to navigate the gaps between them. If you’re that kind of person, join me on Integrally.

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