I spent years in IT building something called a CMDB. It stands for “configuration management database,” which is a mouthful, so let me just tell you what it is. Picture a giant living map of a company’s whole computer world. Every server. Every laptop, switch, and cable. Every connection between them. The dream is that this map is complete, correct, and up to the minute — one place you can look to see the entire environment, exactly as it really is, right now.
The industry even has a holy-grail name for it. They call it *the single source of truth.*
I believed in it. I tried to build a *federated* one — the bigger dream, where you stitch every separate system and feed into one unified picture. One map to rule them all. One place where the truth lives.
Here’s what I learned, and it’s funny in a humbling way. It never works in real time. Not because the engineers are bad — some of the best people I’ve known. It’s that the world won’t hold still long enough to be measured. Somebody adds a server. Somebody pulls a cable. Something fails at 3 a.m. The environment changes faster than any map can keep up. The very moment you finish recording the picture, it’s already a little bit wrong. The single source of truth is always, already, a little bit a lie.
The promised complete picture? *The cake is a lie.*
And here’s the part that stuck with me. I’d sit in big vendor meetings about the market-leading tool — the famous one everybody buys — and I’d ask one plain question. *Is it federated, or not?* Is this one true source, or is it a dozen separate feeds stitched together and cleaned up to look like one? And the people selling me “the single source of truth” often didn’t know how to answer. The question didn’t even land. They lived so far inside the frame that they’d never once lifted a corner of the blanket to check what it was made of.
I’m not telling you this to dunk on IT. I’m telling you because the thing that makes a perfect CMDB impossible is not a computer problem. It’s a *human* problem. The map can never quite catch the territory. The complete, current, single, true picture is always a fiction — a real picture made of many true threads, handed to you as one finished cloth, by people who never lifted a corner.
And that exact failure — the world changing faster than the map, the “whole picture” that’s secretly a stitched-together guess — is what’s breaking our minds and our country right now.
Let me show you how.
The wall is just how hard you’re holding on
Start with something everyone has seen. Two people who genuinely cannot hear each other. Not *won’t* — *can’t.* One lays out what they think is a plain fact. The other doesn’t even argue. The fact just slides off, like it never landed. Heard as noise, or as a lie, or as nothing at all.
Here’s the first place the floor should tilt under you. Picture that scene, and notice you’ve already cast yourself as one of the two people. Which one? The one whose facts are plain and obvious, probably. But so would the other person. Each of you is sure you’re the reasonable one. That isn’t a trick. That’s the whole thing, and you’re already inside it.
Why does it happen? There’s a simple idea from brain science. Your mind is a guessing machine. All day long it predicts what’s coming, then checks the guess against what shows up. And every belief comes with a setting — how tightly you’re holding it. Hold a belief loosely, and new facts can move it. Hold it tightly enough, and new facts get turned down before you even hear them. They arrive, your mind decides they’re not worth listening to, and they change nothing.
The neuroscientist Karl Friston has a picture for how a tightly-held belief feels from the inside. Imagine a valley. A loosely-held belief is a shallow dip — a small push rolls you out and on to somewhere better. A belief you hold to the death is a deep canyon with steep walls. No fact is heavy enough to roll you up and out, so you stay at the bottom, certain, for life. His real point: *how steep the wall is, is just how tightly you’re holding on.* The grip and the wall are the same thing.
Now blow it up to a whole country. A divided nation is a land full of deep canyons. When the walls are low, the canyons overlap, and you can drift toward the middle without climbing. When the walls are high, there’s no path across that isn’t a cliff. So the best fact the other side offers reaches you weighing almost nothing. You hear it as wind.
You’re not stupid. They’re not stupid. You’re both stuck at the bottom of a canyon too steep to climb. And here’s the part to sit with: *you can’t see that you’re in one.* That’s what the bottom of a canyon means. The walls block the view — including the view of the walls.
So “we can’t agree on the basic facts” isn’t really about who’s smart and who’s foolish. It’s about how tight everyone is gripping. Which leads to the only useful question: who’s tightening the grip, and which way?
It’s the world around us, not something in us
It would be easy to decide that people just got rigid. That’s the hopeless version, and it’s wrong, and seeing why is the most important thing here. If we were simply *born* rigid, there’d be nothing to do but grieve. But we weren’t — and the CMDB already told us why.
Remember the lesson. The map went stale not because the engineers failed, but because fast change structurally outruns any fixed picture. It was the conditions, not the people. Same here. The proof is in your own life. The same person who’s a brick wall in an online fight is loose and funny and curious at a backyard cookout, standing next to people he disagrees with. *You* are. You’ve felt your own walls shoot up while scrolling and come down over dinner. That swing is the proof. The flexibility never left. The world around us just changed in ways that pay you to grip harder.
And we can name the changes. They built up slowly. We used to belong to lots of different groups that didn’t line up. Your politics didn’t predict your church, your town, your music, the people you ate lunch with. Those crisscrossing loyalties kept everyone’s walls low — the guy who’s wrong about taxes is right about your team, so you can’t quite write him off. Over about fifty years, those loyalties stacked and lined up, until one thing — your side — predicts almost everything about you. Stacked loyalties build deep, hard walls.
We also sorted ourselves. We moved, online and in real life, until we mostly live near people who already agree with us. The spots where you used to bump into the other side by accident got hollowed out.
Then we built something new: media that makes money from your attention. And the surest way to hold your attention is the hot, certain, angry feeling — the one that comes off a steep wall. So the machine is paid, in real dollars, to make your walls higher. Add fear on top, because scared people grip harder. None of this is a secret plot. They’re just levers. And right now they’re all being pulled the same way — on you, today, maybe while you read this.
There’s one more way the walls go up, and it’s the one the CMDB warned us about.
The thread and the blanket
Good propaganda almost never lies to you. It doesn’t have to. It hands you a thread that’s completely true — a real fact, a real quote, a real clip — and lets you feel like you’re holding the whole blanket.
This is the single source of truth all over again. A headline tells you a true thing. A real number, a real event. You could fact-check every word and every word would hold. But it’s one thread out of a thousand, picked on purpose and handed to you so it feels like the entire story. You walk away certain you see the whole picture. You don’t. You see one true thread, and a feeling of completeness that somebody else sewed on for you. The cake is a lie.
Here’s the trap: you can’t fact-check a blanket made of true threads. The lie isn’t in any thread. The lie is in the feeling that you’re holding all of them.
That’s how you get handed a finished wall. You didn’t close your own fist around the belief. Someone handed you a fist already closed, and told you it was your own hand.
I want to be fair, because weaving a few threads into a whole picture is also just a normal human gift. We do it constantly — we have to. Nobody can hold every thread, so we guess at the blanket from the corner we can see. That’s fine, *as long as you remember it’s a guess.* The whole difference is one little voice: *this is a guess; I’m holding a thread, not the blanket.* Propaganda’s real work is erasing that voice. It doesn’t sell you a lie. It sells you certainty.
Walls come down, too
The good news hides in the same machinery. If the world can crank the grip up, the world can loosen it. And we’ve known how for a long time.
The oldest finding is the simplest. **Real contact** with the other side. Not arguing online — actually being around them. People who genuinely spend time across the divide soften toward each other. Gordon Allport showed this in 1954, and it’s held up better than almost anything.
The second is **surprise.** Something that happens to you that fits neither side’s story. A shared trouble. A moment your own canyon didn’t predict. That’s the only kind of thing that can roll you up a wall.
The third is **safety,** because you cannot ask a frightened person to loosen their grip. First they have to feel safe enough to let go.
Our world does the opposite of all three, a lot of the time on purpose. But the gentle truth is that those levers aren’t gone. They’re sitting there, unpulled — including the small ones close enough for your own hand.
The same wall, inside one head
Now shrink it all the way down. From a whole country to one mind. Yours.
Sam Harris, who thinks hard about the public version of this, also spends years on the private one. He has a sharp line about stubborn beliefs. A dogma, he says, is something *”you didn’t get reasoned into and you can’t get reasoned out of.”* Same canyon, just inside one skull. A belief no fact can move is a belief held as tight as a fist.
But the grip goes deeper than any one belief, and here’s where it touches bottom. The tightest hold any of us keeps isn’t on an opinion. It’s on *being someone at all.* Harris has a startling phrase for the self. He calls it *”this clenched fist of the mind, which is the feeling of I.”* And he talks about what happens *”when the feeling of I relaxes.”*
That’s the floor under everything. The self is the first clenched fist. Every wall you’ll ever build — every certainty, every belief the other side can’t make you hear — is that same fist, closed around a different object.
You feel it close all the time. Think of the moment you notice someone watching you. One second you’re lost in what you’re doing, nobody home. The next — *snap* — you’re a self, an object, being seen, suddenly stiff. That snap is the grip closing. Harris likes to point out that the whole world you see is built inside your head, a kind of waking dream your brain stitches together. Even the “you” looking out is part of the stitching. Go looking for the watcher behind your eyes and there’s a strange, reliable surprise: you can’t find anyone there. The self isn’t a thing you find. It’s the oldest, tightest grip you hold. And like every grip, it can loosen.
That’s really all meditation is, under the candles. Practice at loosening your grip. Harris describes letting go of the self a fear is happening *to,* so fast the fear shows up and finds nobody home to be scared. Here’s the part that should land in your own chest. The grip you take on a hot political fact and the grip you take on being yourself are the same grip. The same fist, on different things. You loosen them the same way. Which means the skill you’d need to finally hear the other side is something you can practice completely alone, with nobody else in the room.
The war runs through your own head
Under all of it is the oldest idea here, and the one that says *why* we grip.
The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist spent decades on it. I’ll hand it to you carefully, because the cheap version — “left-brain people and right-brain people,” tidy boxes — is junk, and he’d say so first. His real idea is about two ways of paying attention. Think of a camera. You can stop the lens down to a narrow pinhole, or open it wide.
One kind of attention is the narrow pinhole. It’s the focus of a hand reaching for one exact thing. It pins things down, makes a map, and wants, above all, to be *sure.* It builds the wall and says *I already know.* The other kind opens the aperture wide. It’s the attention you’d use standing in an open field, taking in the whole scene at once, comfortable not knowing yet. It says *I’m still looking.*
McGilchrist’s worry is that the narrow one was only ever meant to be a *servant* — sent out to grab one exact thing and bring it back to the wider mind. Instead it took over the house. And a whole culture run with the aperture stopped down to a pinhole looks exactly like what we’ve described. Certainty crowding out wonder. The map mistaken for the land. No patience for not knowing.
Here’s the turn that makes this a mirror. Those two ways of attending aren’t two sides out in the world. They’re not your side and the other side. They’re both inside one head — yours — running at once, all the time. The war isn’t between you and the people you can’t stand. It runs through every single one of us.
And you don’t have to take that as poetry. In rare cases it’s been measured. Sometimes, to stop terrible seizures, surgeons cut the bridge between the two halves of the brain. Afterward those halves can act almost like two minds in one skull. In at least one such split-brain case, one half of the person reported it believed in God, and the other half reported it did not. One head. Both sides of the argument. At the same time. Each half sure of the opposite.
Be careful with that — it’s a rare surgical case, not proof of McGilchrist’s bigger idea. They’re two fingers pointing at the same hard truth. The split you imagine between you and your enemy actually runs *through you.*
Two great minds, two walls
So who escapes the grip? Here’s the most useful fact in this whole essay, and I want to be fair and kind about it.
Take Richard Dawkins. One of the great biologists of our time. *The Selfish Gene* changed how millions understand life itself, and he’s one of the finest explainers of science who ever lived. Take Sam Harris, who’s done real, careful work on meditation and on the strange fact that the self you defend so hard may not be there when you look. Two brilliant minds. Genuinely. Each can see clearly where most of us are foggy.
And each of them, on the subjects he’s most certain about — often religion, often his cultural hot buttons — grips as hard as anyone alive. The clearest-eyed thinker still can’t see over his own wall on the thing he’s surest about. That’s not a takedown. Both men make real points, often better than their critics. It’s something humbler and bigger than a takedown.
Because look what it means. If two of the smartest, most rational minds we have *each* have a blind spot they defend like a fortress, then the wall was never about being smart enough to dodge it. Brains don’t save you. The wall is just part of being a person. Harris shows it best: he can open the clenched fist of his own self on a cushion — then close both fists around a political certainty an hour later. One man holding the whole war.
So I’m not writing from up on the rim, looking down. I have my hot buttons too. So do you. The question was never whether you have a steep wall. You do. The only question is whether you ever turn around and look at one of them.
Which wall is also a roof
One warning before I ask you to try something, or this turns into cheap advice.
Groups hold together by gripping something *together.* Not a fact — facts come later. A big, deep belief the whole group agrees not to question. Their shared ground. And this changes how you see the divide. Two groups gripping the *same* deep belief can argue all day and still understand each other, because they stand on the same floor. Two groups gripping *different* deep beliefs aren’t really arguing about facts at all. The facts slide off because they sit on top of grounds that don’t match. That’s why your best evidence never lands. You’re not offering a better answer. You’re shaking the floor they stand on.
So here’s the catch in “loosen your grip.” Most walls are just walls. But that deepest shared belief isn’t only a wall — it’s also a *roof.* It holds up your belonging, your meaning, the floor under everyone you love. You don’t rip a roof off to prove you’re open-minded.
That’s the real difference between the stubborn person and the honest seeker. Not that the seeker holds nothing tightly. It’s that the seeker has learned the rare skill: knowing *which wall is also a roof.* He treats that one with care — and stays honest about all the other walls he’s been calling roofs to dodge the work. The goal was never to be sure of nothing. Some walls *should* be steep. If your plane is going down, you don’t want the passenger next to you “doing his own research” on the engine. Some moments need everyone to agree, fast. The skill isn’t no walls. It’s knowing which is which.
The honest hold, and one thing to try
I’ll refuse two easy endings. The first is *it’s hopeless* — the walls are too high, grieve. Not true. The walls really are high, I’m not softening that. *And* they’re built by the world around us, which means they can come down, and they have before. Both at once. It’s bad, and it’s not decided. The second easy ending is *believe nothing* — and the roof is exactly why I won’t sell you that.
So here’s the not-decided part, made small enough to actually hold. Not something “we” do. Something *you* can do today, in your own head, nobody watching, nobody to win over.
Find one belief you hold as tight as a fist. Not the roof — leave the deep one alone today. The easy one. The one where the other side looks not just wrong but stupid, or evil, or not worth answering. You know the one. It tightened a little just now, reading that.
Don’t argue it. Don’t change your mind — I’m not asking for that, and you wouldn’t trust me if I were. Just *notice the grip.* Feel how steep that one wall is. Notice how fast the certainty showed up, and how completely the other side’s reasons turn to noise before you even hear them. Then, for one breath, open the aperture by a single notch. Don’t let go. Just widen, by the smallest amount you can feel — the clenched fist of your mind asked, gently, to open by a hair — and listen for whatever becomes faintly audible from the far side of that wall that wasn’t a second ago.
That’s the move. That’s the whole job. Not agreement. Not surrender. Not some mushy middle. One wall, in one head, held one breath looser. The pinhole opened, just for a moment, so the wider mind can see the whole field again.
And remember the thread. Whatever built that wall — a headline, a clip, a true fact handed to you just so — there’s a humble move that fits in your pocket: *I’m holding a thread, not the whole blanket.* Say it, and the fist loosens on its own.
I spent years chasing a single source of truth, and the honest version, the one no vendor would put on a slide, would admit what it really is: federated, stitched from many feeds, weighted by how much you trust each one, and always a little out of date. Not a single source of truth. A single source of honest doubt.
That’s a good thing to be. For a database, and for a person.
The stiffness was never in the species. It’s in the grip. And the grip is yours.
So — which wall did you think of? And can you feel it, right now, holding it tight?
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Where to read more
- **Karl Friston,** on active inference and the brain as a prediction machine — start with an interview or a plain-language overview. The “how tight you hold it is how steep the wall is” picture is the key one.
- **Iain McGilchrist, *The Master and His Emissary*** (2009) — two ways of paying attention. Read it that way, as a book about *attention,* not “left brain vs. right brain.” The tidy brain-map version is wrong; the careful version is what matters.
- **Lilliana Mason, *Uncivil Agreement*** (2018) — how our loyalties stacked and lined up. The clearest account of why the walls reinforce each other.
- **Bill Bishop, *The Big Sort*** (2008) — how we sorted ourselves into groups that already agree.
- **Gordon Allport, *The Nature of Prejudice*** (1954) — real contact across the divide, the oldest wall-lowerer we know.
- On the **split brain** — the work of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. Read it for the vertigo of one head divided, and read it carefully: a rare surgical case, not a theory of everything.
- **Richard Dawkins, *The Selfish Gene*** (1976), and **Sam Harris** on meditation and the self — read both for their real brilliance, and notice, kindly, where each can’t see over his own wall. That noticing is the whole point.
- On **propaganda and the “true thread”** — how real facts get arranged into a false sense of the whole picture — start with Harry Frankfurt’s little book *On Bullshit,* and any honest guide to how headlines are framed. The trick isn’t spotting lies. It’s remembering you’re holding a thread, not the blanket.
*A note in the spirit of the essay: the brain science here is a useful way of thinking, not settled fact. The hemisphere ideas are debated. Split-brain results are real but rare. The media story is well argued and still argued over. Hold it firmly enough to think with. Loosely enough to be reached.*