People sometimes dread holiday gatherings, where they might be facing conversations with relatives who don’t agree with them politically.
Oftentimes, people try to avoid those discussions, but one comedian and author says we should lean into those talks to start bridging ideological divides.
Kat Timpf is on tour with her comedy show and book I Used to Like You Until… (How Binary Thinking Divides Us). She'll perform at the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane on Dec. 8 at 5:00 p.m.
Timpf spoke with SPR Morning Edition host Owen Henderson about how she's approaching such conversations in a politically divided time.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: I'm guessing for a lot of people, the sort of binary thinking in politics is at this point just kind of a habit. How did you start to break yourself out of that habit, or is that something that you still catch yourself doing sometimes?
KAT TIMPF: Everybody I think catches themself doing it sometimes, and I definitely call myself out in my book repeatedly. I really put my personal experiences out there, not only in my book, but also on stage, because I think that vulnerability is just a huge tool in this.
I think that being vulnerable makes it more likely for someone to have compassion for you and listen to you, because if you want to be seen as a human, you have to be willing to show that you are one, because that is really a lot of the problem right now where, and I say this repeatedly throughout the book, just binary thinking is the enemy of critical thinking, where once you pick a side, the thing has been done for you. You don't really need to think anymore.
Sadly, that has us missing out on a lot. And we have issues that are complex and nuanced, but people are always complex and nuanced.
OH: That actually dovetails really nicely. I wanted to talk about — you have a lot of lighthearted sections in your book, but there are some really personal stories, and I'm curious if you could put a little bit of a finer point on the intersection of vulnerability and the conversation on lack of nuance and oversimplification.
KT: I put very personal things out there in my book and also during my shows, and I think that if you're really open about your flaws or even embarrassing stuff or personal stuff, people are more likely to see you as a human being and have compassion for you, and I've been really lucky, I think, to have so many varied experiences.
I have so many different kinds of friends. I'm politically independent myself. I'm not a Republican or a Democrat. I voted third party in this election, just to be transparent, and in the other elections as well, but I work at Fox News.
I know people here who are really, who voted for Trump, who are also many different kinds of people who voted for Trump. I also know people who are very anti-Trump and who are very left-wing, who are very close friends of mine, and I can't imagine my life without any of these relationships.
I mean, these are people who helped me through my mom's death. These are people who helped me get out of a very dangerous, abusive relationship that I write about in my book, and if we let a single viewpoint or association define a whole person, then we're missing out on what could be really fulfilling relationships and also opportunities to work together.
But sometimes kind of focusing on the human vulnerable stuff — which is what my book does and also my show does, that's a great place to start because that's the stuff we really all have in common.
A lot of times the disagreements that people have are about a solution to a problem and not that something's not a problem. I write about in my book that I was sitting in the green room, and there was two talking heads talking to each other about their kids.
And one was a Democrat, and one was a very right-wing Republican. And they were talking about gun violence in schools, and they both had young children and how horrified they were about all the gun violence in schools.
You know, the liberal one said that she was so happy she lived in such a liberal area where nobody really had guns and guns weren't really a thing, and the conservative one said she was so concerned about it she had taken her daughter out of school and put her daughter in a school where there was armed guards and security. And neither one of them tried to say that what made them feel better or their solution was wrong, but they bonded over their shared fear.
I love that example because it's like — you get a lot of emotion, obviously it's a very emotional thing, but you'll hear people say, ‘Oh, people just don't care if kids die.’
But that's very rarely the case unless you're talking to a true blue sociopath, which most people aren't, but it just — the rhetoric gets so heated that you can kind of forget, ‘Do I really think that this person wouldn't care if a kid was shot and killed?’
OH: Yeah, you talked about the division especially caused by the most recent election, which is as we record this is just a couple of weeks ago. I've seen a lot of rhetoric about people cutting out people from their life who voted differently than them or hold political views that differ from theirs.
That to me seems like just in many cases a furthering of this binary political thinking that you're talking about. How do you approach conversations with people like that?
KT: Yeah, I mean, I do, and I have had them, and I'll just say, ‘Okay, well, why do you think that? Why are you concerned about this?’
If you don't get out there and just have the conversation, I think it's better to just try to have it and find things where you can agree on and focus on what you have in common.
Like, ‘Hey, I also want this. I agree with you that I want this. I agree with you that I don't want this,’ and you can really find that you'd have more in common than you think, because what you have with the two sides ceases to be a conversation.
I think I wrote about this in the book as well, where it's like someone will just say something about the other side that's bad, and then the person in response will point out something that their side did was worse and back and forth and back and forth.And then nobody's really actually talking about the issues.
Moral outrage, I also have research in my book that shows that moral outrage is more rooted in self-interest than it is altruism. If there's a problem that you feel really powerless over, you're more motivated to then direct that outrage at a third-party target, and then you feel better when you do.
So it can be really hard to give that up, but also approaching conversations with that in mind, I think, can be really helpful.
OH: Kat Timpf, I really appreciate your thoughts.
KT: Thanks. The show is funny. It's really kind of like a lot of wild stories, and it's about the human stuff that we do have in common, which I think we really need right now.
