The Real Reason We Can't Talk to Each Other

Mattering is a Prerequisite to Civil Discourse

“How could someone think something like that?” is a question often asked by people trying to understand those with whom they disagree on political and/or social issues. Why do people vote against their interests? Why support immoral candidates? Why deny facts that seem obvious? I have asked these questions of others, and others have asked these questions of me. How did we get to a place where we misunderstand each other so profoundly?

The answer is as simple as it is elusive. People do not believe what they believe because they are irrational, evil, or uninformed. Often, the issue is more fundamental: people are seeking validation that they matter.

Much of today’s polarization reflects a crisis of mattering. People feel unseen, unheard, culturally invisible, or even disposable (e.g., replacement theory). In response, they seek significance through ideological absolutism, virtue signaling, perpetual grievance, tribalism, and other behaviors that are all too familiar in today’s sociopolitical landscape. For this reason, civil discourse becomes a tool used primarily to secure existential validation in a zero-sum game of mattering. (For example, many people seemed to interpret “Black Lives Matter” as “White Lives Don’t Matter,” because it was seen as a threat to their own significance.)

A crisis of mattering develops when people feel voiceless and powerless. Generally, they lack a sense of agency. This crisis produces desperate selves, and desperate selves do things out of desperation, like embracing egregious ideologies and policies. Much of what is wrong in sociopolitical life can be understood as an attempt to compensate for feelings of insignificance. This helps explain why civil discourse breaks down. A free and pluralistic society requires citizens whose sense of worth is stable enough to endure disagreement without psychological collapse. Such stability cannot depend entirely on external validation; that foundation is too fragile.

If people are preoccupied with proving their own significance, they cannot fully listen to others, especially those whose views seem to imply that they matter less than they believe. Philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes in The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, “We long to demonstrate that the reason we subjectively feel we matter is that we objectively do,” which is to say that most of us seek external validation for our sense of mattering.

But what if mattering were primarily an internal endeavor?

This is where rhetoric comes in, specifically what is called internal or intrapersonal rhetoric. If rhetoric is the art of persuading others, intrapersonal rhetoric is the art of persuading ourselves. Goldstein argues that the mattering instinct arises from a need to persuade ourselves that our lives are worth preserving and cultivating. This raises an important question: How do we persuade ourselves that we matter? The answer may determine the quality of our civil discourse. Healthy public discourse depends on healthy private discourse. If individuals cannot establish a durable sense of self-worth internally, they will continually seek confirmation from external sources such as politics, ideology, or group identity. Mattering may be a rhetorical endeavor at a fundamental level.

The foundation for grounded mattering includes more than rhetoric per se. It connects rhetoric, psychology, ideology, and identity into a single framework. Human beings are not merely truth-seeking creatures; they are mattering-seeking creatures as well. As a result, narratives that provide existential significance, moral importance, symbolic heroism, or protection against insignificance can become emotionally compelling even when they do not align with reality. People are not necessarily choosing falsehoods on purpose. Rather, they are often drawn to narratives that preserve their sense of legitimacy and worth.

Thus, challenges to those narratives can feel less like intellectual disagreements and more like attacks on their very being. This is why disagreement can feel so threatening and why civil discourse can feel anything but civil. When a person’s sense of worth depends upon a particular narrative, questioning that narrative may feel like questioning their right to matter. Perhaps this is why critical inquiry has been called a form of violence by many social justice activists.

Seen this way, mattering becomes a hidden motivational substrate beneath many human endeavors. A sense of insignificance is difficult to tolerate. Ideological extremism, chronic outrage, status obsession, tribalism, moral grandstanding, and other all-too-familiar culture war phenomena can all emerge from an unstable sense of mattering. The narratives people embrace are often shaped not by what they believe is true but also by what helps them feel significant.

A free, pluralistic, and civil society cannot flourish without citizens who genuinely believe they matter. People who feel they belong tend to participate constructively in civil society and pursue life, liberty, and happiness with confidence. By contrast, those who feel invisible or abandoned often describe themselves as having been “left behind” or ignored by institutions meant to serve them.

Sometimes, these feelings emerge from concrete circumstances, such as economic decline or social disruption. Yet, they can also arise when people perceive that cultural, political, or social elites view them as unimportant. Whether accurate or not, the perception that one does not matter can profoundly shape political behavior and public discourse.

If we wish to repair civil society, we must address the deeper human need to matter.