Disagreement Used to Cost You Something

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On August 22, 1961, a woman named Ida Siekmann climbed into her window on Bernauer Straße and tried to get from East to West Berlin. Days earlier, it was just another street. One day you could wave to your neighbor across the sidewalk. The next, it was barbed wire, soldiers, and a new reality you didn’t vote for. Ida jumped. She died from the injuries, often cited as the first casualty associated with the Berlin Wall. 

That’s the part most people remember: the wall.

It was a visual division of two sides. But beyond that, there was something more profound that occurred. The wall didn't just divide, it eliminated the middle.

Not “the middle” as in moderate politics nor Indiana-based sitcom. I mean the shared space where disagreement didn’t automatically incite a riot. The middle space where people could still interpret the same world and remain in the same room–where we could be wrong, revise, apologize, laugh, and keep eating dinner together.

The Berlin Wall was concrete and barbed wire, lined with guards to enforce an agenda. Today, we’re divided by a different type of wall, one that is mostly invisible. It’s made of algorithms, labels, distrust, and a growing assumption that if you see the world differently, you can no longer be my friend. This wall, like the Berlin wall, has eradicated the middle. 

We seem to be obsessed with the most polarized people, not the people that are gathered near the wall, hoping to reclaim the middle, but the people that are on the most extreme sides.

The middle did not disappear overnight. In fact, early analysis of General Social Survey data found little evidence of broad-based mass polarization from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s, aside from a few notable exceptions such as abortion (DiMaggio, Evans, & Bryson, 1996). By 1992, however, Gallup still found that 43% of Americans identified as politically moderate, making moderates the largest ideological cohort at the time (Gallup, 2025). Over the next three decades, that center thinned. By 2024, the share identifying as moderate had fallen to 34%(Gallup, 2025). Pew’s 2014 polarization study helps explain why: between 1994 and 2014, the share of Americans with consistently liberal or consistently conservative views doubled from 10% to 21%, while the share holding a more mixed set of views fell from 49% to 39% (Pew Research Center, 2014). In other words, the middle did not vanish, but it became smaller, less dominant, and increasingly overshadowed by a more ideologically sorted public. 

When the middle disappears, we begin to lose objectivity. We begin to become defensive to protect our beliefs, instead of having healthy discourse.

One of my favorite psychological experiments illustrates exactly what happens when you're preconditioned to see the world through only one side.

In 1999, psychologists Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris published a paper in the journal Perception titled Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events (Simons & Chabris, 1999). 

I often use a version of this that I have modified in my lectures and keynotes, and it always is talking point of audiences. In honor of this particular essay, I'm uploading that video to YouTube, and you can view it here. Or, if you prefer to know the punchline, you can skip ahead keep on reading.

In the experiment, participants watched a short video of people passing basketballs and were instructed to count the passes made by one team. While they were focused on that task, an unexpected person in a gorilla suit walked through the scene. Many viewers missed it entirely. This is not because they were careless or unintelligent, but because attention is selective. As Simons and Chabris concluded, we often perceive and remember only the aspects of a scene that receive focused attention (Simons & Chabris, 1999).

You don’t miss the gorilla because you’re unobservant.

You miss it because you’re focused.

Now zoom out: what happens when millions of people are all “counting passes” From their own unique lens on their side of a particular wall. Each is preconditioned to scan for different threats, different villains, different storylines. Two people can watch the same moment and walk away convinced the other person is delusional. That’s not just distraction anymore. That’s fracture. 

As soon as I finish that video in my keynote, I put up a slide. One half is black, one half is white; one side is labeled "your side," the other is labeled "my side." I leave it there for a moment, and then across the bottom comes a gray bar and it says "what actually happened."

That's where the middle is. And the middle is eroding because we are so fractured.

There was a time when disagreement required something of you.

If you had a bone to pick with someone, you had to look them in the eye to do it. You had to finish the conversation. Maybe you were sitting in the same barber's chair you'd sat in for twenty years, or you bumped into them in the grocery store, or you were sitting on the same soccer field sideline on a Saturday morning. You couldn't fire off two hundred characters and walk away or cower behind the blue light glow. You had to stay in the room. That friction, as uncomfortable as it was, kept people tethered to each other. It forced a kind of accountability that no algorithm can replicate and that an anonymous username was specifically designed to eliminate.

Today, if you disagree, you don't have to look anyone in the eye. You don't have to finish anything. You can just hop on social media, drop a zinger, tag a few people to stoke the fire, and move on. And the machine rewards you for it. Likes. Shares. Reach. The algorithms are not neutral observers in this. They are programming us, reinforcing the outrage, amplifying the division, giving us a dopamine hit every time we attack something that isn't ours. We are being shaped by systems that profit from our fracture.

I had a post go viral last week. Not because I took a divisive position. In fact, I took a position most people would agree with. That's precisely why it spread...at first. People were resharing it…but the trolls showed up anyway, tagging people, poking, instigating. That's the world we're in. And on one hand, the reach was remarkable. On the other, I kept thinking: why can't we just have a conversation?

I don't mind being disagreed with. I actually like it. Every pushback opens up a perspective I hadn't fully considered. It draws me out toward the middle. That's what disagreement is supposed to do. Disagreement can draw us to the middle, and it can actually keep us in the middle when done respectfully.

We didn't arrive at this fracture overnight. There's a generational current running underneath it.

Millennials were the first demographic where information was truly available at scale to nearly anyone. It started innocently enough, with Ask Jeeves and Google. Eventually a world of information landed in their hands on a device they carried everywhere. No more encyclopedias. No more waiting for the evening news. Information became instant, and with it came a new expectation: transparency. Access. Answers now.

Then Gen Z arrived and inherited a version of that promise that had already been corrupted. 

They grew up watching filtered photos, curated feeds, and "fake news" become a household phrase. They saw what happened when information was weaponized and performance replaced authenticity. So they built a radar for it. They became the most skeptical, most verification-oriented generation we've seen because they've watched institutions, leaders, and platforms earn that distrust one tweet, comment, or post at a time. Or they've earned it for being silent.

What they want, what they have always wanted underneath all of it, is the real thing. Not a polished position. A person. Someone willing to sit in the gray and stay there.

And that brings us back to the middle.

Here's what I keep coming back to: we are all, at our core, in pursuit of meaning and significance. That's not a generational trait. That's a human one. We want to belong to something larger than ourselves. We want our lives to matter. And when we draw lines and attack people on the other side of those lines, we are almost always attacking something tied to how they have found that meaning. Their faith. Their politics. Their identity. Their community.

That's why it feels so personal. Because it is.

My grandmother passed away recently. With all of her kids, most of her grandkids and great-grandkids gathered together, someone remarked how she said throughout her life: "You must be able to dine with Prince and Popper." She meant it simply. She wanted her family to be comfortable at any table, with any person, regardless of status or circumstance. Whether you were the most powerful corporate leaders or politicians, or whether you were in rural developing countries on a dirt floor, sitting and eating the only food that they had. What's so amazing, especially for her, a member of the silent generation, is that she and my grandfather often had those opportunities to sit in both palace and shanty. Their wide-reaching impact and what people said about them was not their accomplishments, but the fact that they cared for other people deeply.

That's the middle. Not a spineless, uncommitted middle where you don't believe anything. A middle where your convictions are strong enough that you don't need to destroy someone else's to feel secure in your own.

Dialogue doesn't mean we're going to agree. It doesn't mean we're always trying to convert each other. It means we're willing to stay in the room. To finish the conversation. To look each other in the eye.

One hundred forty people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall (Berlin.de, n.d). They weren't dying for an ideology. They were dying to get back to the people on the other side of a line someone else drew.

We are drawing new lines every day. In our organizations, our families, our churches. And every time we do, we quietly tell the people on the other side that they are not worth the conversation.

The middle is still there. It's waiting for someone to sit down in it first.