Josh Szeps Ruined My Week
Last week I wrote about polarisation. Then I flicked on my favourite Aussie podcaster, Josh Szeps, and heard him say something like, “maybe the real problem is not polarisation, but fragmentation.” He was arguing that polarisation implies a binary, whereas now our politics is a giant mosaic. So, like a true groupie, I pivoted. Well, half-pivoted. Polarisation has not left the building. But fragmentation explains a different exhaustion — one that runs all the way down into the person.
Forty Arguments, All With Trapdoors
Polarisation is being pushed to one side of an argument. Fragmentation is waking up to find there are forty arguments, each with hidden landmines. Migration. Housing. Climate. Israel and Gaza. Terrorism. Gender. AI. Vegetarianism. Wokeism. Free speech. Too many morally charged subjects, not enough shared ground beneath them.
The two do not compete. Fragmentation multiplies polarisation. It does not give us a single pole to be pushed towards. It gives us forty.
Once, you could get the rough shape of a person from the old left-right map. Crude, but useful. Now a friend can be climate radical and vaccine sceptic; pro-Palestinian but anxious about antisemitism; hostile to capitalism but thrilled about iPhones; worried about migration and appalled by racism. None of this is hypocrisy. It is what happens when people confront more issues than two poles can hold.
You could call this a good thing. Nobody votes as a bloc any more; nobody swallows a whole worldview as a set menu from the local Chinese restaurant. Is that not just thinking for yourself? Maybe. But thinking for yourself on forty fronts at once is not liberation. It is a second job.
Opinions Now Require a PhD
Here’s the catch: each issue actually matters. If they were silly, we could politely decline or throw around ill-informed views. Migration contains compassion, borders, labour, housing and cohesion. Climate contains science, sacrifice, money and the future. It can feel embarrassing to have an opinion without a PhD. It can feel inadequate to have none. So we borrow half-views from people we trust — then discover we no longer quite trust them either.
This is the bit we forget: conversation is how people get less stupid. Most of us do not arrive at an opinion fully dressed and ready for dinner. We mumble, stumble and overstate. We ask a bad question, retract, discover missing facts, then try again. But if a clumsy sentence is treated as a final character assessment, no one learns. They perform.
Trust Has Left the Chat
So why so hair-trigger? Partly because there is too little trust. We no longer know what is real or whom to believe. There are experts, fake experts, sponsored experts, lazy journalism, AI slop, bot farms, context-free screenshots, and people explaining immunology from their parked cars. Some scepticism is earned. But once you cannot check anything for yourself, the cheapest shortcut left is the tribe. So we stop asking, "Is this true?" and start asking, "Which side does this help?" That is not critical thinking. It’s more like crowd management.
That is only half of it. There is also sheer abundance. Our grandparents did not wake to war footage, climate graphs, celebrity crimes, geopolitical analysis, and a bloke yelling about almond milk before breakfast. The nervous system was not redesigned to process every crisis that reaches a phone. So we simplify. We pick a lane. We hide whatever does not fit.
Curiosity Is Suspicious Now
You can watch this happen in miniature. Last week I posted a simple Facebook note about a group on AI and tech in mental health — explicitly a place to look at the good, the bad and the ugly. Not "AI will save us." Not "hand your trauma to a chatbot and hope for the best." Just: let us keep up, think carefully, talk about it. Cue the backlash — "poison," "bullshit," angry emojis. AI in mental health needs serious criticism. But before the conversation had begun, the subject had already been tagged with a smell. Even curiosity looked like complicity. That is what thin trust does: it sorts you before you have spoken.
The Quiet Art of Not Saying Things
The hiding is what interests me most. In thirty years of listening to people for a living, the thing I seek most often is not what someone believes — it is the sentence they will not say out loud. I catch myself doing it daily. Not on grand moral questions, but on small, socially inconvenient ones. I can feel the little calculation before I speak: who is here, which topic is radioactive, which sentence will cost more than it is worth.
Some of that is manners — we should not say everything we think, and thank God for that. But constant editing becomes a private fragmentation. The forty arguments do not just split the room. They run a fault line through the single person, who ends up polished in public and split in private.
The Right to Be Unfinished
Maybe the old dream of "finding your tribe" was always a bit unrealistic. We wanted a place where every view was pre-approved and nothing had to be defended out loud. But a real person cannot belong wholly to a slogan, a party, a Facebook feed. The grown-up version is not a tribe. It is a handful of people who will let you be wrong out loud and shout you a beer anyway.
Yes, this can be gamed. "I am just asking questions" is the oldest bad-faith move there is. But the tell is simple: someone thinking aloud eventually changes their mind; someone performing never does.
So I am not abandoning polarisation. I am adding fragmentation to the list of things that make us strange — out in the world, in our politics, and finally within ourselves. What I miss is not agreement. I miss the room to think aloud, make a mistake, and not be immediately sorted into the disappointing category.