Verse 4: The Great Divide to Ordinary -- 22 August 2026

Everyone seems to hate everyone if you browse YouTube or social media. I was thinking about this after seeing the reaction to the death of Jason Arday, the Cambridge academic whose academic credentials and publications had recently become the subject of controversy. I came across a YouTube video discussing the story and started reading the comments. They were brutal. One person joked that Cambridge should award a PhD in Mathematics to whoever could calculate the damage done to its reputation. Another joked about some of the extraordinary claims attributed to him. I understand that people may have legitimate criticisms of someone whose achievements have come into question, but there is something uncomfortable about seeing thousands of people turn someone's death into an opportunity for mockery.

There is definitely a divide in the world, whether it is woke versus anti-woke, rich versus poor, conservative versus liberal, or simply one group of people against another. The divide seems more prominent than it was a few decades ago. With Donald Trump becoming President, political personalities and the way they behave inevitably influence the atmosphere around them. When political leaders communicate through insults, aggression and confrontation, it should not surprise us when some of that behaviour filters down into ordinary society. There seems to be less tolerance for differences, and if you deviate slightly from whatever the current social norm happens to be, you can quickly find yourself being attacked on social media. I think Jason Arday may have been right about one thing: there is certainly a great deal of racism and hatred in the world. But I would go further and say that the world has lost some of its class.

If society moves towards one extreme, it often seems to counter itself by moving towards the opposite extreme rather than finding a balance. A decade ago, parts of society were extremely woke and liberal, while now there seems to be a movement towards being increasingly conservative and, in some cases, intolerant. The world we live in can sometimes feel like one enormous prison where you need an affiliation with one ideology or another simply to survive socially. You are expected to choose a side.

I also wonder how much the wars and conflicts taking place around the world contribute to this atmosphere. We are living in a heightened state of anxiety, and when people are stressed, frightened or angry, they do not always think rationally. We become more primal. Perhaps social media isn't necessarily showing us what humanity is like. Perhaps it is showing us what gets rewarded by an algorithm. Anger gets attention. Mockery gets likes. Outrage gets shared. Nuance gets ignored.

We have built a machine that rewards us for being cruel to people we have never met, and then we look at the resulting comments and wonder why society seems so cruel. Since Donald Trump became President, there has also been a noticeable change in the way social media platforms and algorithms approach political speech and controversial content. I am not saying that people should be arrested simply for making an unpleasant comment, because freedom of expression is important. But I keep coming back to the same question: where is the class?

There also seems to be a shift towards a more bilateral and highly nationalised world, where countries and people increasingly define themselves by which side they belong to. If you do not fit into the culture or ideology of a particular group, you can quickly be seen as an enemy. Minorities, political outsiders and people who simply do not fit neatly into a particular category can find themselves with nowhere to go. The majority gets louder, and the loudest voices often appear to become the voices of everyone.

Donald Trump is the leader of the United States, the world's most powerful country, and inevitably the character and values of its leadership influence the wider world. Whether we like it or not, America has enormous cultural and political influence. But perhaps we should be careful about allowing any political leader, from any side, to determine what kind of people we become.

Maybe the problem isn't that we disagree with each other. Disagreement is normal. Perhaps the problem is that we have forgotten how to disagree without hating each other.

We seem to have forgotten that a person can be wrong without being evil, that someone can have an opinion we dislike without being our enemy, and that changing your mind does not make you weak.

Perhaps we don't need another ideology. Perhaps we don't need another extreme. Perhaps we simply need to become ordinary again.

To disagree without hatred. To criticise without cruelty. To laugh without humiliating someone. To admit that we might be wrong.

Maybe being ordinary isn't such a bad thing after all.