Western societies are fragmenting. The increasingly pronounced ideological fault lines between opposing opinion groups are becoming vulnerabilities for democracies. These gaps are being exploited—from within and without. The health crisis, combined with a growing loss of trust in political, economic, and even scientific elites, is accentuating polarization: each side is hardening its positions and reinforcing its sense of rupture.
In this book, David Manise returns to his anthropological perspective to analyze this phenomenon. He questions the mechanisms that push individuals to lock themselves into closed cognitive circuits, to the point of seeming to reject institutions and the very foundations of living together. Rather than adopting an accusatory discourse or pointing fingers, he seeks to understand how this dynamic has been constructed and nourished: the influence of social media algorithms, the effects of stress, the resurgence of old grudges that have been fanned and manipulated...
“It’s high time to tear down some walls and build some bridges.” — David Manise
