Our Consensus Reality Has Shattered

We will remember 2020 as many things. The year we spent alone. The year we spent online. The year so many died. The year of protests. The year of QAnon. The year of domestic terrorism. The year of the election.

Most of all, perhaps, it is the year of not knowing. Is it safe to send my kids to school? Can I go to the store? Should I vote by mail? Do I still have a job? Is it safe to go to work? Can I afford to stay home? Is it safe to exercise? To fly? Do I still have to wipe down the mail? The groceries? What does the CDC say about that? Can I trust the CDC anymore?

A whirlwind of uncertainty landed on us this year, and it threatens to rip the country apart. We have been struck by an unexpected and little-understood disease, explained in wildly contradictory terms by doctors, politicians, pundits, friends, families, and internet weirdos. The pandemic is an enigma unfolding in real time, where yesterday’s certitudes become tomorrow’s grave mistakes.

[Read: America is trapped in a pandemic spiral]

All of this is taking place within a profoundly broken information ecosystem. We grope, blindly, forced to independently assess a bewildering barrage of seemingly factual claims that arrive on our doorstep daily, with the lives of our children, parents, lovers, and neighbors hanging in the balance.

All of this is bad enough on its face, but its secondary effects could be disastrous. When people don’t know what’s real, they turn to others for reassurance. But in a world overrun by social media, that process results in a smorgasbord of confusing and conflicting inputs, a problem deepened by the Trump administration’s relentless three-and-a-half-year assault on the very notion of truth.

When no clear, authoritative source of truth exists, when uncertainty rages, human nature will lead many people to seek a more stable reality by wrapping themselves in an ever-tighter cloak of political, religious, or racial identities. The more uncertainty rises, the more alluring that siren call becomes. And some Americans are responding by seeking out exclusive, all-encompassing identities that are toxic and fragile—and hold the seed of violent extremism.

We don’t like uncertainty. We’re wired that way. It’s a survival trait. We need to know. But our knowledge is incomplete, our senses fallible. We can’t always answer the important questions. When that happens, we seek a gut check from the people around us.

The gut check goes by various formal names—constructivism, the social construction of reality, or simply consensus reality.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote that our perception of, although the idea goes back further still.