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[0:00] Bobby Steggert: I'm Bobby Steggert, and this is The Quiet Part Out Loud.

[0:15] Bobby Steggert: The first show I ever did was The Pirates of Penzance. I was the best little boy soprano in Frederick, Maryland, and I got cast as the pirate Frederick. And my favorite song to sing was A Paradox. I had no idea what it meant, I just liked the harmonies and the rhythms. But as I've gotten older, I've come to think that perhaps my life's purpose may be to resolve paradox, the yin-yang swimmers in the pond of Pisces. It may seem grandiose, but I've always been keenly and persistently aware of the contradiction in every moment. It's why I was an actor, seeking the most honest expression of the dichotomy of the human experience. And it's certainly why I love learning about the dichotomous minds of others.

We often want something as much as we fear it, or reverse that, we actually fear what we most want. Either way, this is a truth that we are stubbornly resistant to seeing fully. In my job, I'm often surprised by how quickly people come to regret something that they've worked so hard to achieve, or how quickly people benefit from a consequence they long dreaded. And what is true of the brain between your two ears, is also true of a country between two great oceans. Today, we find ourselves in a polarization of increasingly extreme worldviews. What we're soon to discover is, like the stretching of a rubber band, whether there's a snap, or if we're able to soften into the miracle of a middle ground.

It feels more likely that a break is coming. In moments of great social upheaval, history teaches us that it is often a populist movement that lulls its people back into a false sense of comfort or righteousness through narratives that are simple and straightforward. These are stories that have an obvious light and dark, a clear hero and a clear enemy, and us and a them. This is because truth is often an obstacle to expedience. It's inherently messy and contradictory, and so denial and avoidance of these complexities is the seductive off-ramp from confusion and fear. This is true to varying degrees on both sides of the political divide, whether it's about vaccines or elections or climate change.

It takes a lot of work and, frankly, a lot of brainpower and strength to hold opposite and contradictory truths together in the same reality. In fact, this is how F. Scott Fitzgerald defined what he called first-rate intelligence. Yet most of us choose a lesser intelligence, simply to save ourselves from being entirely overwhelmed by the refractions of contradiction. While I do believe that our polarization is made worse by one side dealing in untruths more flagrantly than the other, an even stickier element of our problem is that no matter what the other side proclaims, the automatic response is often to completely reject the message, even if there are some valuable ideas within the extreme.

What makes polarization especially difficult to grapple with is that much of this process is about projection. We disavow or ignore the parts of ourselves that we can't bear to acknowledge, and subconsciously we assign them to others. They become dehumanized, and we become good. A perfect example of this is outright condemning Republicans as evil for not even pretending to care about healthcare. While most of us who identify as progressive hold little serious concern that our next-day delivery on Amazon Prime is part of a system that exploits people in other countries to an extreme that would horrify anyone who looked close enough. It's a much more difficult reality to care about the rights and humanity of all the Earth's people while actively participating in modern conveniences that systematically harm billions of those very people.

There's little an individual can do to change this, yes, so what do we do to live with the reality? To varying degrees, we hide from it. It is much more convenient to believe that you are good and that your opponents are the ones who are fucking it all up. In trying to come up with a story of polarization in my own life, I kept thinking about some of the people I know who grew up in extreme religions. Fundamentalists and conservative faiths inherently come with a litany of rules and restrictions, expectations of adherence to many behaviors that would seem bananas to most of us. In those people, growing up in such a monoculture, they may not be aware of the polarization that may begin to stir in them.

So busy they are getting everything right and, frankly, needing to compartmentalize the doubts and fear that would be unacceptable to express, let alone feel. But I've witnessed some of these very same rule followers erupt with equally powerful forces of risk and rage once they discovered that compliance wasn't the only way to live. Simply powerful repression can lead to equally powerful rebellion. Now, I didn't grow up Amish or Mormon or Hasidic, but the Catholic Church has its own powerful machinery of repression and shame in order to keep the herd faithful. You add to this a healthy dose of early 80s gay shame, and you better believe that I was driven by a part that was my very own 24-hour stage manager.

He kept me in line, on time, and the most agreeable of good boys. This is precisely why I was awarded the coveted position of safety captain in the fifth grade, when for an entire year I wore a neon orange sash and dutifully recorded the names of rebel classmates who stepped out of line or ran with reckless abandon down the hallway that was my beat. I'm not sure that in my earlier years I understood that there was any option but to do exactly as I was told. And as I racked up the scholarly successes and was able to avoid the worst of bullying, it all seemed to be working as well as could be hoped for. Around that same time, my family started an annual tradition of driving 10 hours up to Red Pine Camp, a rustic family camp north of Ottawa, Canada.

Think Dirty Dancing, but a lot more Spartan and without the dancing. We would spend a week in July swimming and canoeing, performing in talent shows, competing in horseshoe tournaments, and eating three times a day in the mess hall with all of the other families. It was a week of total liberation, kids given free range of the joint only to see our parents at meals and bedtime. My brother and I grew up in awe of the teenagers who spent the entire summer there as counselors. From our first year we dreamed of one day getting to follow in their esteemed footsteps. After six glorious summers, our family now deeply ensconced in the community of families who would religiously attend week seven of the summer each year.

I was finally hired at 16 to be a JP counselor, short for Junior Program, where I would spend my morning creating activities for the little ones so that the parents could go off on their own adventures. We made friendship bracelets and candles, did scavenger hunts in the woods, and organized epic games of Capture the Flag that relied heavily on face paint. I was away from home for the first time in my life, and my new sense of freedom started to stir something in me that I didn't recognize. All I did know is that I decided I would be the first boy of that summer to sneak out of the cabin after lights out to race across the open field separating the girls from the boys so that I could make out with Courtney McFadden.

I now suspect Courtney was also gay. She had a husky voice and peppermint patty hair. She was funny and bold and about a foot taller than I was, and we found safe harbor in each other by becoming one of the first items of the summer. It was a terrifying thrill breaking out of the cabin as all the boys silently cheered me on sprinting across the moonlit field. When I slipped into the girls' cabin, there were waves of scandalized tittering as I climbed the ladder to Courtney's bunk. We sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag and whispered and giggled, only our knees knocked together. We certainly didn't kiss. After a few minutes of stalling for time, I made my return sprint across the field and stumbled into a cabin pulsing with the expectant glee of 11 horny boys who wanted to know every single detail of what had just happened.

And so, I announced that Courtney and I had sex. The next day, the only disturbance our senior counselors were aware of were the wild cheers coming from the boys' cabin upon my pronouncements. We were scolded for being up so late and making noise.

[9:14] Bobby Steggert: I'm a big fan of the word sex, but it seemed a small price to pay for what felt like a collective victory, where I was the hero. From that fateful day, I was given a nickname that would stick for the rest of the summer. I was the Sex Monster.

[9:28] Bobby Steggert: Hack up your skirt a little more, and show the world to me. Hack up your skirt a little more, and show the world to me. In a boy's dream. In a boy's dream.

[9:55] Bobby Steggert: Just to put you in a time and place, that was the song of the summer. And high on my new social capital, and believe me, having a bunch of rowdy straight boys looking up to you as their icon of sexual liberation was like crack.

[10:07] Bobby Steggert: My rebel part started to assert itself as the Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll. I slept so little in the nights that followed, reveling with the boys until dawn, that I skipped work two mornings in a row. I feigned sickness on top of my legitimate exhaustion, and the second morning I didn't show up for work, Linda, the camp leader, checked on me as I laid buried in my sleeping bag.

[10:32] Bobby Steggert: There was a look of cautious suspicion in her eyes. Perhaps she had heard the rumors of my sexcapades that were spreading throughout the staff. It all came to a head on week six, just days before my parents and brother were to arrive, the culmination of a summer in which I'd get to show my family the pride and accomplishment of finally being a Red Pine counselor.

[10:54] Bobby Steggert: One of my afternoon responsibilities after junior program was to work at the Tuck Shop, a small general store that sold penny candy and ice cream to throngs of sugar-crazed children. A few of the counselors were planning on going to a movie the next day in the little town nearby. It was Men in Black, for historical context. And as I was ringing up an ice cream cone on the register, I had the thought that it would be nice to have a little more pocket money to buy popcorn at the movies.

[11:21] Bobby Steggert: Mind you, the gig was fairly close to unpaid labor, and we weren't to be paid until the end of the summer. And so I quietly pulled a $20 bill out of the drawer, slipped it into my pocket, and didn't think about it for the rest of the day.

[11:33] Bobby Steggert: In fact, I was totally unfazed when the next morning, my supervisor at the Tuck Shop, a senior counselor who was my friend, told me that Linda wanted to see me in her office. I walked in cheerily, told her I was feeling much better after recovering from my cold, and only registered that something was wrong when sitting next to her was the owner of the camp, a somber, gray-haired man who asked me to take a seat.

[11:57] Bobby Steggert: I'm going to give you a chance to be honest with us, he said. Did you take any money from the cash register yesterday? No, I said with a hollow sincerity, my theft not yet integrated into my own reality. I'll give you one more chance to do the right thing.

[12:13] Bobby Steggert: I froze. A wave of nausea turned me cold as the meaning of his words penetrated. I lowered my head, and my lips started to tremble. I was told to pack my bags, and that I wouldn't get the chance to say goodbye to anyone.

[12:30] Bobby Steggert: That very same man drove me the two interminable hours to the airport in complete silence. He shook my hand, wished me well, and said he hoped that I learned something. My mom met me at the airport gate with a silent disappointment that was far worse than anger.

[12:47] Bobby Steggert: My family would never be welcome to return to Red Pine Camp, ever. And in one thoughtless action, I took away my brother's dream of being a counselor, and deprived my parents of years-long friendships that vanished in one instant.

[13:02] Bobby Steggert: Over the years, the story became a joke. Hey, remember that time I stole $20 and ruined summer camp forever? But as I recount this full story, I feel it's one of the most painful memories, and a source of fundamental regret in my life.

[13:17] Bobby Steggert: This is how a stage manager and a sex monster can live in the same body. And even more importantly, this is how two parts of the same human can be blind to each other, especially to the opposite part's value, while focusing so stubbornly on the destructiveness.

[13:33] Bobby Steggert: It makes sense that my inner hall monitor would be aghast at the rebellion of the rule-breaking, the invention of sexual escapades, and stealing money from an ice cream shop. And that part is right, these are behaviors worthy of punishment and all the shame that befell me.

[13:49] Bobby Steggert: But then what has the rule-follower disavowed in itself? Perhaps it's its own capacity for destruction, through rigidity, expectations, and limits that squeeze us into confinement and make us less human. These are the forces against which we find ourselves acting out.

[14:06] Bobby Steggert: There was obviously something in me that needed expressing a rage and resentment at making myself small and being afraid to reveal who I truly was. The rebel needed to take some power, and yes, he did so in some foolish ways, but he allowed me to risk something. There is something wonderful in that flagrance, if you're willing to acknowledge it.

[14:25] Bobby Steggert: And then again, what might the rebel have not understood in its sole desire to be free? It's that true freedom is experienced in the middle, where balance allows for calm and perspective. Without any structure, freedom is chaos, and that never ends well, does it?

[14:42] Bobby Steggert: On the other hand, the rebel was projecting its own fear of any structure at all onto the overthinking stage manager and making it an enemy of autonomy. But autonomy can't exist in a vacuum, it is in relationship to actual structures in the world, ones that we must navigate in order to use our autonomy in actual context and without harming others.

[15:02] Bobby Steggert: So where does the answer lie? Aristotle described the most common polarization in our psyche as the battle between reason and emotion. While modern studies show that emotion usually wins out, they have a name for the marriage of these two forces, and that definition is wisdom.

[15:19] Bobby Steggert: It's taken me a long time to integrate my polarized parts into an arena where they both have a legitimate say at the same time. And there are certainly still periods where I will be all in as the good boy, only to crash out spectacularly with some act of defiance that blows up the structures that I have so meticulously built.

[15:37] Bobby Steggert: But when I am in a place of wisdom, I manage to find a compromise between these forces that seems to make all parties somewhat content, at least. I'll work too hard, dutifully respond to all of my emails, go to the gym and eat healthy every day of the week, but I remain aware of the need for my rebel to have a say.

[15:57] Bobby Steggert: And so I'll go on a walking tour with my best friend Jacob where we sample baked goods from six of the best bakeries in New York in a three-hour window. Or I'll give myself the glorious permission to binge three cult documentaries in a row, ignoring all misses from the outside world and ordering Ethiopian food that is meant for two but eaten by one.

[16:16] Bobby Steggert: Sometimes going just a little too hard is exactly what I need. It is unabashedly giving myself the opposite of structure so that I can live another day to tolerate the rules I do deem important when they come back into play, all in the name of being a responsible friend and therapist and member of society.

[16:33] Bobby Steggert: When I was 16, I was too trapped in the fear of who I truly was to be able to bring any of the darkness into the light. So the darkness found a way to exert itself in its own spectacular way. If I've learned anything, it's that darkness is valuable. It's an important messenger. And ultimately, it's just plain honest.

[16:50] Bobby Steggert: I wish for you, for our country, for our world, an embrace of wisdom, where ego and id, dark and light, rationale and emotion can meet in a place where no perspective is disqualified from the conversation. Our literal survival depends on it. Otherwise, we're bound for a downfall, whether personal or collective, in a civil war that no one wins.

[17:15] Bobby Steggert: The ways of paradox and common sense she gaily mocks, though counting in the usual way. Years 21, I've been alive, yet reckoning by my natal day, yet reckoning by my natal day, I am a little boy of five. He is a little boy of five. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

[17:36] Bobby Steggert: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

[18:06] Bobby Steggert: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.