as we continue to polarize politically by region, demographics, etc., it's often said that people on the left and people on the right 'live in different worlds.' a few bald assertions: no they don't. all of us live in precisely, exactly, entirely, the same world. for example, all and only the same facts obtain in the world in which i live and the world in which you live.
if people want to argue about that, i'm into it. let's try this: a leftist and rightist, or a man and a woman, or a black person and a white person, a realist and an idealist, or ted cruz and elizabeth warren, or paul krugman and a redneck motherfucker, stroll arm in arm onto interstate 95 as a truck approaches at 70. in each case, they both go pop just the same, no matter what world they think they live in. this applies, for example, no matter what your subjective experiences may be, no matter what language you speak, etc. the 'myworld/yourworld' notion registers the basic insight of philosophical modernism: the world is in your head, or is created by our words: a truly bizarre, unaccountable, obviously wackily false position that no one actually believes, but that is asserted by, say, descartes, hume, kant, rorty, whatever.
no the problem isn't that left and right live in different realities; it's that the consciousness of neither is connected to reality at all. ideology in this sense is a form of psychosis. but people believe because they want to agree with their friends, because they want to sneer at people not like themselves, because they want people like themselves to control people like them, etc. they really want just to say the same sentences as paul krugman or whatever, and hence the same sentences as each other.
or really, the basic principle of human belief-generation seems to be 'believe whatever enhances my (our) self-esteem.' next time you read the billionth timothy egan or michael tomasky column about how insane and stupid republicans are, hear what they're really saying. every sentence means this: i am so smart, so sane, so normal, so good. someone who wants to spend a whole career or life saying that to themselves is pitiable. it would be merely pitiable, except that it leads to myriad practical fuck-ups all the time. for example, it would be just darkly amusing if it didn't do things divide the united states into two ideological/demographic segments that conceive themselves to live in different countries.
none of these procedures for generating beliefs - agree with people in your race, income segment, profession, region; believe what enhances your self-esteem, etc. - is connected to the truth of the beliefs, which is how both left and right generate hallucinatory 'worlds.'
