Unfriending over politics
Political disagreements have always existed. As the daughter of an Ilocano Marcos loyalist (my dad) and a Cory Aquino advocate (my mom), I witnessed my parents debate the pros and cons of martial law at the dinner table long before social media existed. What feels different today is the growing conviction that disagreement itself is intolerable.
Last week, I saw host and TV personality Bianca Gonzalez-Intal get heavily criticized online. Amid the chaos in the Senate, people questioned why she remained friends with a certain senator’s wife and why she had not publicly spoken against their family. Increasingly, political belief is being treated as the measure of moral character, and differences in opinion have become justification enough to erase years of friendship and shared history. Online, who you support matters as much as who you visibly denounce.
The anger is understandable. Many Filipinos are exhausted by corruption, disinformation, injustice, and incompetence that affect their day-to-day survival. For a middle-class employee who sees 33 percent deducted from a hard-earned monthly paycheck while struggling with rising prices and reading about ill-gotten wealth, politics is deeply personal.
There is a deeper danger, however, in reducing people solely to their political affiliations. When relationships collapse due to political disagreements, societies lose the ability to engage in meaningful discourse that helps us form more nuanced perspectives.
Not all opinions are equally valid, and some beliefs need to be challenged, especially when they spread fake news or espouse ideas that could harm another person’s dignity. But a healthy democracy requires the difficult discipline of remaining in conversation with people we disagree with. Societies fracture and lose social cohesion when citizens stop seeing each other as human beings capable of complexity and change.
Still, remaining in conversation doesn’t mean people need to tolerate abuse and harassment, under the guise of a “healthy debate.” For instance, if we find ourselves emotionally dysregulated by a friend’s opinions, maintaining some distance or muting their posts for a while is a reasonable act of self-care. The key, however, is not to stay inside that bubble so long that we start believing everyone else should think exactly as we do.
Research on polarization consistently shows that isolation often radicalizes people. The more individuals interact only with those who think exactly like them, the more extreme their views can become. Ironically, cutting people off may sometimes deepen the very beliefs one hopes to address and challenge.
Psychologist and neuroscientist Joshua Greene, in his book “Moral Tribes,” argues that groups fight not because they are inherently selfish, but because they operate with different versions of “common sense.” People across political divides genuinely believe they are defending justice, patriotism, or the national good. Each side feels they are “undeniably right,” so some people tend to interpret the difference in perspective as proof that the other is irrational or immoral.
Greene suggests that we need to move from automatic emotional reactions to more reflective reasoning. It helps to ask ourselves whether we have become too quick to vilify those who do not share our beliefs and flatten them into caricatures. People are shaped by their upbringing, socioeconomic conditions, religion, media exposure, and lived experience. Some vote out of shared ideologies, others out of inherited loyalties, misinformation, or the direct material benefits they have received.
It is also important to remember that while truth is not relative, algorithms are now serving people entirely different versions of reality. More and more, we are no longer seeing the same set of facts that shape our judgment.
This is where empathy matters. Empathy for where the other person is coming from can be the starting point for a civil and respectful dialogue. Intellectual humility matters too. After all, who wants to listen to someone who believes moral clarity always belongs entirely to their own side?
In the last elections, I found some of Papa’s choices deeply frustrating. Despite how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to change his mind. Does that mean I should have denounced him as my father?
Politics has a real and measurable impact on our lives. Perhaps the more important question is who wins in an increasingly polarized world? If we stop talking to one another, our emotions become easier to weaponize, and confusion becomes easier to spread. Dissent becomes easier to stifle, too. And while ordinary citizens sever friendships and tear each other apart online, some of the very politicians fueling this outrage continue to enjoy their private jets, designer bags, and lavish lifestyles funded by the taxes of the same people now too divided to hold them accountable.
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eleanor@shetalksasia.com
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