2016

Marla had a disagreement over the 2016 election, and it changed her life. 

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Transcript

Michael Lee: [00:00:00] When We Disagree is a show about arguments. How we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. Arguments are a funny thing to study. On the one hand, it can seem like you're studying something very specific, like the properties of a persuasive statement in a courtroom, perhaps, or perhaps psychology in high conflict relationships.

On the other hand, arguments are everywhere. They're so ingrained in our everyday lives that they can be really hard to see. In fact, the title of a popular textbook on argumentation is called Everything's an argument. That title is an argument. My social media feed is full of arguments. So is every advertisement I've seen today.

Even architecture can make arguments. I've taught in a million windowless classrooms, and I always wonder why sunlight or seeing outside while learning wasn't deemed important. [00:01:00] Someone more creative than I am can probably figure out how tidal waves or leaf beetles are arguments as well. But the point should be clear.

We often make the mistake. Of thinking that we're somehow outside of the process of argument and counter argument, of contention. I'm just delivering basic information, or I'm just relating my experience, my feelings. Information and personal reflection are also arguments and they are subject to dispute.

Even if I tell you some simple piece of information, people's speed on my neighborhood street, for example, I'm asking you to see the world as I do. I'm making an argument. I'm Michael Lee. I'm a professor of communication and director of the civility initiative at the College of Charleston. Today's guest is Marla Estes, founder of Building Bridgers, who has been a leader in the depolarization movement since 2017.

Marla, tell us an argument story. 

Marla Estes: Okay, well, I have to give you a little background because prior to the election in [00:02:00] 2016, the presidential election, I was pretty apolitical. I belong to, you know, a party, but I didn't know anything about politics, and when I woke up after the election results, I thought, I had this very strong thought, like, I need to do something about the divide, which came out of the blue.

So, what happened is, um, at the time, there was someone in my life, an acquaintance, uh, we'll call her Kim, and, She had voted for Trump. I had not. And I just want to note right now that after all this, I'm politically homeless. I don't have a side. Um, but then I did, but I was trying to understand what happened.

I really was like Alice in Wonderland. I felt like I've got to understand what's going on. And, um, so Kim was saying how happy she was about Trump. And I was trying to, [00:03:00] you know, Do this thing I'd never done before. And I said, well, um, you know, why? And she gave me certain, you know, things that were really important to her.

And at one point in context, which I don't remember, I had done enough reading finally, by that point that I said, well, I, I have to say, I'm, I am pretty ashamed of my own party. Um, because I really feel that they threw the working class. under the bus. And she was working class. And she said, Oh, don't feel ashamed.

And we both started crying. And what happened is it really deescalated later on. Now it's like part of the coda of bridging or depolarization, you know, to find genuinely, you can't manipulate or fake it, but you find something about your own side that you're critical of. And You may find something about the other side that can say, yeah, that was a good idea.[00:04:00] 

That's the kind of journalists I look for anyway, uh, because I know their thinking, and they're not just running by their own ideology. But I learned really important, because I saw that she was up to that point, and she even said, I don't know why I feel like it's life and death that you understand. Why I voted for Trump.

And then later on, I learned, you know, we are survival mechanisms get Galvanized with these opposing views or they can so it's a lot like I learned a lot that I would learn about why later and it really, um, I've got chills right now because I just feel like it I saw so Not abstractly, I saw in the moment that this humility around an ability to zoom out enough to say, Hmm, my side didn't get that right.

And your side, I didn't find something at that point to say to her. But later on, I have said to people, you know, what I find is right about them. both [00:05:00] sides and where they get it wrong. So that's basically my story. 

Michael Lee: What was, what's the outcome for you in your relationship with Kim? Um, did it deepen the relationship?

Did you find a new mutual understanding for one another? Are you still in touch? 

Marla Estes: Well, she was my housekeeper and she then got very ill. So I actually hadn't, we had nice, in fact, until she got ill, I noticed that our relationship was a lot warmer. We never talked about it again, but I felt like there was an ease there that hadn't been there before.

We really did share a moment, you know, aside from what we were talking about. Um, but it did teach me, How that works, how, how deescalate deescalating things, and, you know, you're in communication, there's something about, If I, if my, if I'm calm and my nervous system is calm and I [00:06:00] can deescalate in a genuine way, it will, it, people usually follow suit, you know, and for me, if I, if I'm, and I've been in the bridging world for a while now, and certain, at certain talks and things, people would get hot and I would get, um, feel frightened, You know, because I'm conflict avoidant, believe it or not.

And, um, I could use that to say, to calm myself down. And it, it just, it creates some other kind of non verbal understanding. That we're, we're safer here than we think we are, maybe. 

Michael Lee: Talk to me a little bit about your reaction to the 2016 election. So many people who, on the left, who were on the losing side in that election, woke up and thought, we need to figure out a way to eliminate the other side.

We need to figure out a way to move away, escape the other side. And then a group of people said a different reaction, a third way, which is we need to heal the [00:07:00] divide. That sounds like where you ended up. Why do you think you chose that option over the other two? 

Marla Estes: Well, I wasn't highly political before I had kind of bought into the tropes of the, the, the left, but thinking back, I, I did do, uh, uh, An elective course at our university, SOU, Southern Oregon University that I was allowed to create myself and it was called exploring right and wrong through film because I have two passions.

One is bridging, depolarizing, and the other one is movies. So I use these movies all to show, um, Uh, like moral gray zones. Like really thoughtful. They were all, all but one were feature films. One was a documentary. And, um, I think I had already started doing that work because once I got into it, I didn't understand politics that well, but I got a fast [00:08:00] education, but I understood people's positionality, you know, and these take, and really one of my pet projects is kind of like how, when.

Especially media presents things as either binary, black or white. Um, and we're not under, we're not able to zoom out to get the bigger picture to really make a more informed. It voting choice or moral choice, um, we often and there's so much misperception about the other side. There's a great study called the misperception gap.

Do you know of it? Yeah, where people are imagining other the others are more extreme in their views than there are. So all to say the idea that we make strong moral stances. Quite often on misperceptions, it's striking to me. 

Michael Lee: Sorry for interruptions. It sounds like you have two, these two passions of [00:09:00] yours, depolarization, bridging, and then also film.

And yet the guiding light for both of them, unless I'm completely off my rocker here. is to live in the gray, which is that the space between us in our political polarization is actually our misperception that there is no gray area. There is no green grass between us, that we're locked in this good and evil Star Wars struggle.

And then you teach a class where movies and narrations illustrate that same point. Talk a little bit about your fascination with the gray area. 

Marla Estes: Oh man, I just think that's where Well, first of all, if we're able to, and that's what a lot of my classes are about as, uh, the micro, the psych, the psychological, neurobiological, if we're able to be more and more comfortable with the gray zone, we can take more and more of a broad view of things and hold many perspectives at the same time.

So one of the things people who take my class over [00:10:00] time, my classes say that they're, um, They don't find that they have to have opinions so much about things, and it's more easy for them to say, I don't know enough about X to have an opinion. So they've developed, and I think it's a nervous system thing, very fundamentally, that we like certainty.

It tricks us into thinking we're safe. And so this way of cultivating, being able to live in the gray and to nudge ourselves towards nuance. I love alliteration, so nudging and nuance really work for me. You know, I, I just think it's a place where not only that you can get more clarity because you can see more aspects of, of a thing, but it's actually more creative.

And I think that's where a lot of problems get solved because working with the right and wrong and my side, your side, a lot of times problems can't get solved. And, oh, I want to get back to another point you made. People who I would run into and [00:11:00] I think it's changing a little bit, but there are some people.

It's probably about 15 or 20 percent of on both sides together that they don't want to bridge. They feel like their side winning. is the solution and too bad for the others, you know, either they'll find out the other side was right or, or that. So I don't, I think in that gray area, people can solve problems together and come up with out of the box thinking, you know, kind of the, um, thesis, antithesis, synthesis idea.

Um, I wasn't expecting to hear 

Michael Lee: Hegel, but well done. 

Marla Estes: There you go. You never know. 

Michael Lee: You never know. As I'm listening to you talk, I'm, I was going to close by asking you what are your kind of core lessons. But as you were talking, I think I've heard three lessons for depolarization that you're tacitly recommending.

And I'd like to run them past you and see if they're right. 

Marla Estes: Great. And then 

Michael Lee: see what else you would add to this list. 

Marla Estes: Okay. 

Michael Lee: So the [00:12:00] first one I'm hearing is, we just talked about, embrace the gray area, live in the gray. Okay. Be curious about the gray. And the second one is you're not that special. Don't pretend you're so righteous.

And then the third one is be conscious of the ways in which you can calm down and the ways that arguments can. activate our nervous systems. 

Marla Estes: Very good. You're a fabulous listener. 

Michael Lee: Is there anything else? Thank you. Oh, there's 

Marla Estes: so many things. I don't even know if we should, but I mean, what my, the, the first class I teach when I'm doing a long term class is cultivating humility, because I really think that's important.

There's lots of ways to start, but I think that's really foundational, you know, to just realize the other guy might know something you don't. You don't know everything. I remember I had a really aha moment when, uh, [00:13:00] diving into this stuff, and I had an opinion about something, but I realized I had formed that opinion 20 years ago and never gotten the upgrade.

So I think just making people aware of These cognitive biases and these, these ways we're wired, um, they can help themselves. They can, it helps them catch themselves in the act. 

Michael Lee: Marla, thank you so much for being on When We Disagree. 

Marla Estes: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. Really fun. 

Michael Lee: When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee.

Recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at whenwedisagree at gmail. com.