Right and Left Are Seeing Two Different Worlds

Graffiti memorializing Henry Nowak in Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 2026. (Photo by Henry NICHOLLS / AFP.)

In recent years, there has been considerable scholarly and political attention to the worry that citizens of many democracies increasingly inhabit different “worlds.” This fear is acute in the U.S., where sharp polarization between Democrats and Republicans is intense and seemingly ever-increasing, but it surfaces in many other Western countries as well.

Concretely, the worry is that on topics as diverse as election integrity, immigration, crime, vaccines, and the Epstein files, many citizens do not just hold different values and interests but operate with fundamentally different factual understandings of what is going on.

This creates an obvious problem. Democracies can function if citizens have different experiences, interests, values, and ideologies, but if they can’t even agree on what is happening in the world, we are in trouble.

As Barack Obama said, “We want diversity of opinion; we don’t want diversity of facts.”

However, a prior question is whether this assessment of substantial “factual polarization” is accurate to begin with. How widespread is this phenomenon, really? How worried should we be?

The good news is that there seems to be less bare factual disagreement than many have feared. The bad news is that bare factual disagreement was never where the deepest divisions lay.

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Sources of Skepticism

There are three reasons to doubt the conventional factual-polarization story.

The first is a now-familiar body of research contending that post-2016 worries about fake news and misinformation are overblown. According to this work, clear-cut falsehoods and fabrications are less prevalent in the information environment than many have assumed.

The second is a persuasive line of work suggesting that estimates of factual misbelief and polarization have been systematically overstated due to flawed survey designs. When you pay respondents to give accurate answers (to guard against insincere partisan “cheerleading”), include “don’t know” options, and screen for inattention and trolling, the amount of outright factual errors and disagreements in public opinion tends to drop quite substantially.

Finally, five or ten years ago, it was all the rage among social scientists and public intellectuals to argue that people are so irrationally tribal that they are often immune to facts and sometimes even “backfire” when confronted with corrections. But such ideas have shared the fate of countless other sexy social-psychological findings: they generally haven’t replicated. The more robust, boring finding from recent research is that when people are presented with factual evidence and rational arguments, they tend to update their beliefs, even when that means moving away from their tribe’s orthodoxies.

All of this suggests that the “different worlds” panic is unfounded, that most citizens are more closely tethered to a shared reality than was assumed.

This overly optimistic reading, however, would be premature. Citizens can agree on verifiable facts and still inhabit different worlds, because facts do not interpret themselves. To see why, we need to look beyond narrow factual disagreements to the competing systems of interpretation through which people select, categorize, frame, connect, explain, and narrate facts.

The best account of this phenomenon comes from one of my intellectual heroes, Walter Lippmann, in his analysis of what he called the “pseudo-environment”: the highly selective, low-resolution compressions of reality that most citizens confuse for reality itself. This analysis of the pseudo-environment spotlights a form of political division that tends to be overlooked in the scholarship. We can call it “interpretive polarization,” though the insight is not new.

To understand how this works, it will be helpful to start with one of the biggest stories in recent British politics: the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, and the processes through which the facts of his death were refracted through the rival systems of interpretation that organize political attention and conflict in the UK and broader Western world.

“I Can’t Breathe”

Many of the facts concerning what happened to Henry Nowak are not in dispute, in part because the final moments of his life were captured on horrific body-cam footage.

Last December, Nowak, a white eighteen-year-old university student, was stabbed multiple times by a Sikh individual named Vickrum Digwa. As Nowak lay dying, Digwa’s brother phoned the police and claimed that Nowak had racially assaulted his brother. When the police arrived, Digwa and members of his family reinforced this story as Nowak lay on the ground, barely able to speak or move.

He told the police officers he had been stabbed. One responded, “I don’t think you have, mate.”

He was then placed in handcuffs and was initially ignored and dismissed as he said, multiple times, “I can’t breathe.” The officers told him he was being arrested for assault and read him his rights as he lay dying. “Please, brother, I can’t breathe” were some of his final words.

Eight minutes after arriving on the scene, according to a recently-released transcript of the incident, the police officers discovered that Nowak had in fact been stabbed, and Digwa was subsequently charged with murder. In May, Digwa was found guilty of this charge, after which the body-cam footage from the police officers who arrived on the scene was released to the public, fueling a vast amount of media attention and political discussion of the incident.

Observing this charged discussion, it would be reasonable to conclude that many citizens inhabit different worlds. And yet, this manifested much less through disagreement on the verifiable facts of the case than in how they were interpreted.

Among the populist and far-right, the events were imbued with maximal political salience, not as an isolated or unrepresentative occurrence, but as a national emergency, a cause for a political reckoning.

It was categorized as both an instance and proof of how the UK operates with a “two-tier” culture and justice system, in which establishment institutions apply different standards to white (increasingly capitalized “White”) citizens than to racial minorities.

The police’s response was explained not just in terms of incompetence but in terms of the insidious influence of anti-racist/DEI/woke ideology throughout our institutions, which led the police officers arriving on the scene to treat an accusation of racism “more seriously than an act of murder,” as Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, put it.

In this way, the events were also filtered through counterfactual assumptions about how such an event could never have occurred had a white man stabbed a Sikh teenager and then falsely claimed to have been racially assaulted.

Most fundamentally, the events were located in a clear narrative of villains, victims, and heroes. The direct victim, Nowak, was a synecdoche for the broader population of ordinary white Britons victimized by liberal elites and racial minorities. To fight back, these victims must rely on brave, truth-telling individuals, politicians, pundits, activists, ordinary men and women, unafraid of being called racist.

This interpretation clashed with the mainstream liberal and progressive reading. Here, the events of Nowak’s murder and the police response were largely treated as an isolated tragedy, unrepresentative of, and so uninformative about, anything broader. Hence, they should not be “politicized,” as one Labour MP phrased it, a far cry from Farage’s prescription to respond to the event with “pure, cold rage.” The right’s impassioned reaction to Nowak’s death was assimilated to a broader, more familiar template: far-right demagogues and deplorables exploiting unrepresentative tragedies to whip up hatred and division. In this narrative, the true victims became the racial minorities targeted by such racist hatred, as well as the establishment institutions that serve to protect them.

Importantly, one reason the events ignited such a political and media storm is a specific phrase Nowak uttered: “I can’t breathe.”

Back in 2020, these words were uttered by George Floyd as he was killed by Derek Chauvin, events captured in horrendous video footage.

In that case, the systems of interpretation that I have described were neatly inverted. Among liberals and progressives, not just in the U.S. but across the broader Western world, Floyd’s death was imbued with maximal political salience. It was not an isolated or unrepresentative murder and tragedy but the cause for a national reckoning, in fact, an international reckoning.

The core narrative frame here was racism, not just Chauvin’s racism, but also the deeper, even more insidious forms of racism (structural, systemic, implicit) that had long poisoned Western cultures and institutions, which Floyd’s death was an awful symptom of. Of course, this causal interpretation implied a counterfactual assumption: that had Floyd been white, this would never have happened.

Conservatives and right-wing populists tended to view the events through a very different interpretive framework. They emphasized the specific facts of the case, including Floyd’s criminal record and behavior. They expressed agnosticism or outright skepticism about the relevance of racism to the events, and often made efforts to publicize similar cases in which white victims were killed by police without receiving comparable media or political attention.

This is what interpretive polarization looks like: the filtering of agreed-upon facts through rival systems of salience, explanation, and narrative.

Lippmann’s View

In his 1922 masterpiece Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann argued the following. In contrast to the relatively small-scale social worlds our species engaged with for most of its history, the modern world is far too big, complex, changing, and inaccessible for any individual to engage with directly or completely. Most events, trends, regularities, and public affairs are remote. They happen in places we have never been, involve people we have never met, are affected by complex systems and institutions we cannot fully understand, and turn on countless facts we cannot personally verify.

This has two interacting implications.

First, we rely on others (journalists, pundits, politicians, activists, intellectuals, etc) to mediate reality for us, all of whom are in exactly the same situation.

Second, this mediation cannot involve any simple transmission of “the facts.” There are too many facts and too many ways to interpret, connect, and explain them. So, we must reduce reality to extremely selective, low-resolution mental models.

This thesis underlies Lippmann’s distinction between what he calls the “real environment”, the vast, complex, independent reality in which our actions have consequences, and the “pseudo-environment”: our simplified, selective pictures of reality (“the pictures in our head”) that we instinctively confuse for reality itself.

For Lippmann, we cannot understand democratic politics and its defining pathologies without attending to the distinctive characteristics and failure modes of these pseudo-environments. We also cannot understand political divisions and the ways in which different citizens “live… in different worlds.”

These ideas lie behind perhaps the most famous line from Public Opinion: “For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.”

Public opinion is, hence, not a matter of evaluating a pre-existing, self-interpreting set of facts. It involves applying a pre-existing system of interpretation to the task of selecting, omitting, categorizing, and framing facts.

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Pseudo-Environments

All of this cuts much deeper than questions about simple factual polarization. Radically different systems of interpretation can co-exist with a shared recognition of narrow matters of fact. In fact, just as the most effective propaganda rarely involves outright falsehoods, the most resilient systems of “stereotypes” are precisely those that are difficult to falsify.

For example, the increasingly popular conviction that white (“White”) Britons are victims of an oppressive two-tier justice system is not easily subject to traditional “fact-checking.” Of course, one can point to many facts that seem to contradict it (e.g., the dominance of white people among the higher strata of British society), but one can also point to facts that seem to confirm it (e.g., laws and policies that often involve de facto positive discrimination in favor of non-white groups). At bottom, however, it is not a simple, verifiable claim about reality. It is a highly charged interpretation of reality capable of gobbling up confirming information and screening out disconfirming information.

For most of those who live in this pseudo-environment, it doesn’t even exist as a fully articulated set of propositions. It involves inchoate feelings of identity, status, and grievance coupled with a high-level narrative, the precise details of which are then fleshed out, connected to ongoing events, and defended by a professional class of politicians, pundits, and activists who work to construct and update the details of the pseudo-environment in real time.

Lippmann’s point was that although not all pseudo-environments are equally wrong, they are all, in a sense, wrong. Not only are they selective and simplifying pictures of complex realities drawn in profoundly unscientific ways, but they are also never neutral nor disinterested. Our pseudo-environment, writes Lippmann, is “the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own value, our own positions and our own rights.”

We gravitate toward interpretations that flatter our allies, demonize our rivals, vindicate our grievances, and assign the right people to simplistic roles of villain, victim, hero, coward, dupe, hypocrite, and enemy.

What Can Be Done?

When writing in 1922, Lippmann favored a broadly technocratic solution. If the problem is that public opinion is pre-scientific, the solution must rest with “organized intelligence”: institutions that apply rigorous scientific and statistical methodologies to classify, analyze, and explain the social world.

However, the Nowak and Floyd cases help to show why this solution is so fragile.

The ostensibly neutral knowledge-producing institutions can themselves become captured by popular pseudo-environments. And that highlights a second issue: even if such institutions were perfectly objective, they could shape public opinion only if people trust them. If citizens inhabit a pseudo-environment in which such institutions are viewed as captured, corrupt, or biased, they cannot perform the role that Lippmann hoped for.

We are left with gesturing at some things that might help.

We must make our epistemic institutions more reliable and more impartial. Too often, they are politicized and advocacy-driven. Perfect objectivity may be unattainable, but it is not, therefore, a cover story for hidden interests either. The left’s growing institutional dominance in recent decades, together with a strand of progressive thought that seeks to replace ideals of objectivity with social justice activism, has done real damage to the trust these institutions depend on to play a valuable role in society.

Representatives of these institutions also need to be better at adapting to the constraints and incentives of the new media age. The days of relying on establishment gatekeeping and elite control of the public narrative are long gone. We now live in a more fragmented, more competitive attention economy, one which favors more direct, authentic modes of communication.

Ultimately, however, it’s easier to diagnose the disease than to prescribe the cure. Freed from the constraining influence of reliable, expert knowledge that only systematic inquiry can provide, democratic citizens will construct rival realities, each a grossly simplified and distorted map of a complex environment that they will confuse for the environment itself.

Dan Williams is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He works on issues at the intersection of science, politics, and technology. He blogs at www.conspicuouscognition.com and is a contributing writer to Persuasion.

A version of this essay originally appeared in Conspicuous Cognition.

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