Left vs Right. Us vs Them. How political theatre keeps ordinary people fighting each other.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell
Here’s a question nobody asks.
If the political system genuinely represented the people, why are ordinary people getting poorer while the people who run the system get richer?
The left blames the right. The right blames the left. The media picks a side and fans the flames, which results in nothing ever changing.
Because nothing was ever going to change.
The divide is the point. As long as we’re fighting each other — over culture, over identity, over the things they tell us matter — we’re not looking up. We’re not asking who wrote the rules of the game we’re all losing.
Unity isn’t naive. It’s the most radical thing ordinary people can do.
The Fight That Was Never Really Yours
Think about what happens the moment you turn on the news or open your phone.
Within minutes, you are told who your enemy is.
But look closely at who they’re pointing at. It’s not the drug company boss who made medicine so expensive you can’t afford it. It’s not the politician who gave themselves a pay rise while your wages stayed flat. It’s not the backroom dealmaker who quietly changed the tax rules to benefit the wealthy at 2 in the morning. No — your enemy, they say, is the person next door. The one who voted differently. The one who watches a different channel. The one on the other side.
This is one of the oldest tricks in human history. And we fall for it — every time.
Here’s what that trick is really doing: it keeps your anger pointed at other ordinary people just like you, instead of at the people who actually have power over your life.
Why Does Politics Only Give You Two Choices?
In almost every Western country, politics has been squeezed down into a simple choice: Left or Right. Liberal (left-leaning) or Conservative (right-leaning). Us or Them.
But that isn’t how real human beings actually think. In real life, people hold complicated, sometimes contradictory views. When you take away the team labels and just ask people what they want, most people — left and right — agree on more than you’d ever expect. They want a health system that actually works. They want their kids to have a good future. They want honest leaders and a fair day’s pay. They want clean streets, safe neighbourhoods, and a government that doesn’t repeatedly lie to their face on a daily/weekly basis.
So why does the system only offer two options?
Because two options create a fight, and a fight keeps you watching. A population that agrees on the basics might start asking uncomfortable questions — so the conversation gets split in two, you get handed a team jersey, and you’re told to get angry at the other side.
The two-party system isn’t a reflection of how different we are. It’s a tool to make sure we never find out how similar we are.
Why the News Makes You Angry on Purpose
The media — television news, social media, online news sites — is not primarily in the business of informing you. It is in the business of keeping your attention. And there is one emotion, above all others, that keeps people glued to a screen.
Anger.
Angry people scroll longer. Angry people click more. Angry people come back tomorrow. Angry people share content with other people, spreading the anger further. Anger is, quite literally, the most valuable commodity in the modern media economy.
This isn’t a secret plot. It’s just how the system works. Social media apps are built by engineers who are paid to maximise the time you spend on the platform. Television news channels found long ago that fear and outrage bring in more viewers than calm reporting. The result is that every platform, every channel, every algorithm is quietly filtering and selecting the most extreme, the most upsetting, the most infuriating content it can find — and showing it to you as if it represents true reality.
That person screaming on your screen? They were chosen precisely because they would make your blood boil. They are not a fair picture of the people on the other side. They are the most extreme example that could be found — because extreme examples make you angry, and angry people keep watching.
You are being played. The only question you need to answer is… ‘Are you going to keep letting it happen?’
So Who Is Actually Winning?
When ordinary people spend their energy fighting each other, someone else is quietly getting on with business. Who?
Look at who funds the political parties. In most democracies, both major parties — left and right — are largely funded by the same wealthy donors, corporations, and interest groups. These people do not actually care very much whether the left or right wins. What they care about is that whoever wins leaves their wealth and power untouched.
Think about what a divided public cannot do. A public that is consumed by argument about culture and identity is not asking;
- Why house prices have spiralled out of reach for ordinary people?
- Why wages have grown far more slowly than profits for the last forty years?
- Why the gap between the very rich and everyone else is now wider than at any point since before the 1930s.
- Why the rules of the economy seem to keep changing in favour of people who are already wealthy?
The divide doesn’t come from a single secret meeting. It comes from thousands of smaller decisions — editors who know anger sells, politicians who know fear brings out votes, donors who know that a public at war with itself is a public that won’t come after them. Nobody has to be in charge of it. The system creates division because division is good for business.
The Person on the Other Side Isn’t Who You Think
Here is one of the most important things you can know right now: the average person who votes differently to you is not who you’ve been shown.
Researchers have studied this. They’ve found that people in divided countries massively overestimate how extreme and unreasonable the other side is. People who vote Labour in UK think the average Labour MP is far more hateful and uneducated than they actually are. People who vote Conservatives think the average Tory is far more radical and anti-faith than they actually are. Both sides have a picture of the other side — and that picture has been painted by a media that profits from making you hate each other.
The truth is simpler and more hopeful than that. Most people who vote conservative are not itching to hurt vulnerable people. Most people who vote progressive are not trying to tear down everything good. Most people, whatever they believe politically, are just trying to live a decent life in a world that feels increasingly confusing and unfair. They’ve grown up in different places, read different things, faced different struggles — and so they’ve arrived at different conclusions.
That isn’t a reason for war. That is a reason for conversation. And it is a conversation that those in power would very much prefer you never have.
Four Tricks They Use to Keep You Distracted
Once you know what to look for, political manipulation follows a surprisingly small number of scripts.
Trick 1: Start a Culture War.
Whenever the economy is failing ordinary people, watch for a sudden explosion of outrage about something cultural — a statue, a flag, a school curriculum, a celebrity’s opinion, a word. These issues are not unimportant — but they are extremely useful to powerful people because they divide the public along emotional lines while leaving economic power completely untouched.
You can argue about statues for twenty years. The people who own things don’t mind at all.
Trick 2: Keep the Emergency Going.
You will be told, constantly, that democracy is on the verge of collapse — because of the other side. The stakes are always the highest they’ve ever been. Every election is the most important in history. This matters because when you believe you’re in a permanent emergency, you stop thinking clearly and start acting out of fear. Fear shuts down the part of your brain that might otherwise notice you have more in common with the other side than your leaders want you to know.
Trick 3: The “At Least We’re Not Them” Game.
You might not be thrilled with your own side. Your politicians may have let you down, broken promises, failed to deliver. But look at the other lot — they’re so much worse, right? This move has kept millions of voters loyal to parties that have consistently failed them for decades. It works by making the other option seem completely unthinkable. The trick works best when the people at the top quietly control both options.
Trick 4: Make It About Personalities, Not Power.
Politics gets turned into a soap opera — heroes and villains, good guys and monsters. This is very useful because it keeps your attention on people rather than on systems. A system — the way taxes work, the way banks are regulated, the way wages are set — is something that can be changed if enough people demand it.
But a villain?
A villain just needs to be removed. And there will always, always be a new villain ready to take their place. The system carries on untouched.
What We Actually All Want
Take away the noise. Ignore the theatre for a moment. Look at what ordinary people — left, right, and everything in between — actually say they want when you just ask them plainly.
They want:
>> To be able to afford somewhere to live.
>> Their children to get a good education.
>> To be paid a descent liveable wage for their work.
>> Their streets to be safe.
>> Not to be excessively taxed where most of their money goes to the government.
>> To see a doctor or dentist without going bankrupt.
>> Politicians who don’t lie to them and act in a way that puts the people of the country first which is what they are fundamentally being voted in to do.
Not one of those things is a left-wing or right-wing desire. They are simply human. And the truly remarkable thing — the thing that should make you stop and think — is how consistently these basic, reasonable, widely-shared desires go unmet, year after year, government after government, regardless of which party is in power.
The argument about which side to blame continues forever. The things people actually need somehow never quite get done.
The division is created exactly at the point where, if we were talking honestly to each other, we might all start asking the same questions.
Seeing Through All The BULLSH*T
None of this means all political disagreements are fake. They’re not. There are genuine, important debates about how a society should be run, what the government should pay for, how to balance different people’s rights and needs. Those conversations matter and they deserve to be taken seriously.
But there is a real difference between disagreeing with someone honestly and being made to hate them. There is a real difference between holding a political view and letting a television channel or an app decide what reality looks like for you every single day.
Try asking yourself a few simple questions:
- Who actually benefits when I’m angry at the other side?
- What big issues are not being talked about while everyone is screaming about this latest thing?
- When did I last sit down and genuinely listen to someone who sees things differently — not to win, but just to understand them?
- Who owns the TV channel or the website I get most of my news from — and what do they want from it?
The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
In the world we live in right now, the most quietly dangerous thing a person can do is refuse to be put in a box.
Refuse the team jersey. Be willing to hold views that don’t sit neatly on one side. Be willing to call out your own side when they’re wrong. Be willing to hear out the other side when they have a point. When you see an outrage story, pause and ask who benefits from you sharing it before you share it.
This isn’t about being wishy-washy or pretending everything is equally true. It is about doing something much harder: thinking for yourself. Starting from what you actually observe and believe, rather than from which team you’ve been assigned to. Refusing to let your attention — and your anger — be used as a resource for someone else’s profit.
Here is the thing that the people at the very top of this system understand, even if they never say it out loud. They — the powerful on both sides — actually agree on more than they let on. Above all, they agree on this:
The most dangerous thing for them would be ordinary people setting aside the fight long enough to look up and ask, together, what is actually going on.
What becomes possible when you stop playing the game they designed for you?
The manufactured divide only works if you consent to stand on one side of it.