Division.
When truths collide.
Dayton
In the summer of 1925, a small town in Tennessee staged a show. Dayton had been fading — its coal mines closing, its young people leaving — when a new state law offered an unlikely chance at fame. The Butler Act had just made it illegal for teachers in Tennessee to say that human beings had descended from “a lower order of animals.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, newly formed in New York, wanted to challenge the law. They placed an advertisement offering to defend anyone willing to test it in court. Dayton’s civic leaders — a school board member, a shopkeeper, a local attorney — saw an opportunity. If they could host the trial, their struggling town would be put back on the map. They approached a 24-year-old teacher, John Scopes, and asked if he’d be willing to stand.
Scopes wasn’t a crusader. He wasn’t even sure he had ever properly taught the offending material. But he agreed. The town would benefit, and the case would give the law the challenge it was bound to face sooner or later.
The strategy worked. Within weeks, the town was swarming with reporters, preachers, and opportunists. Loudspeakers carried testimony into the streets. Vendors sold Bibles and toy monkeys—a chimpanzee in a bowler hat posed for photographers. And, for the first time in American history, a trial was broadcast live on national radio. Dayton, this small town in Tennessee with a population of just 2,000, became a stage for a national argument: science versus scripture, modernism versus fundamentalism.
Inside the courtroom, two giants squared off. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and the most famous orator of his age, came to prosecute. Bryan had built his career as a defender of the “common man” and saw the trial as a chance to uphold biblical truth against encroaching modernism. Clarence Darrow, the country’s most celebrated defence lawyer, an agnostic with a taste for theatre, came to defend. He wanted to put religion itself on trial.
The judge barred expert scientists from testifying. Evolution would not be weighed, only whether Scopes had broken the law. So Darrow changed tack. He called Bryan himself to the stand as a “biblical expert.” Did he truly believe the world was created in six days? Had Jonah really lived inside a whale? Bryan defended scripture, but under pressure, he conceded that perhaps the “days” of Genesis should not be thought of as literal 24-hour days after all. Reporters pounced. The crowd roared.
When the jury returned, Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. On paper, faith had won. The Butler Act stood, and Bryan’s supporters celebrated that the law — and with it their values — had been upheld.
But modernists also saw victory. They pointed to Darrow’s cross-examination, where Bryan had struggled over whether the Bible should be read literally. To them, that moment had revealed the weakness of fundamentalism. Their champion may have lost the case, but they left believing science had carried the day.
The same verdict, the same testimony — yet two triumphs. Each side left Dayton more convinced of itself than before.
Dayton shows us something enduring: division isn’t new. It also shows us something deeper: evidence doesn’t bring minds together when identity is at stake.
Why Evidence Fails
If verdicts could close arguments, Dayton should have done it. Yet both sides left more certain of themselves. Why?
Leon Festinger asked the same question nearly thirty years later in Chicago. With two colleagues, he joined a small religious group led by a woman named Dorothy Martin, who claimed to receive messages from aliens through automatic writing. Martin — known to her followers as Marian Keech — relayed warnings from a race of beings on the planet Clarion. Their prophecy was stark: on 21 December 1954, a great flood would engulf North America. Flying saucers would rescue the faithful.
The group, soon dubbed The Seekers, acted with total conviction. They sold possessions, left jobs, and cut off ties with sceptical family members. On the appointed night, they gathered in Keech’s house to wait. Festinger and his colleagues went with them, notebooks hidden under coats.
Midnight came. No ships. No flood. One o’clock passed, then two, then dawn. Still nothing.
Festinger expected despair — believers drifting away, muttering they had been duped. Instead, the opposite happened. Keech announced she had received a new message: their devotion had persuaded God to spare the world. They hadn’t been wrong at all. Their faith had saved humanity. And with that, commitment deepened. The group that should have disbanded became more determined to spread its message.
It was this moment that crystallised Festinger’s breakthrough. A year later, he published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. When beliefs and evidence collide, the clash produces deep discomfort. To ease it, people don’t usually abandon the belief; they reshape the story around it. The heavier the personal cost already paid — jobs lost, reputations staked, families estranged — the harder it is to let go.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt later offered a metaphor for this. We like to think our minds are judges, weighing evidence impartially. In practice, they behave more like lawyers, defending the client we already favour. Our intuitions make the decision first, and our reasoning follows behind like a press secretary, explaining it afterwards.
Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler tested this in the early 2000s. By then, it was clear that the invasion of Iraq had not uncovered the stockpile of weapons of mass destruction that had justified it. Yet many Americans still believed those weapons had existed.
The researchers showed participants a mock newspaper story repeating the claim that Iraq had WMDs. Some versions of the article ended there. Others added a correction, stating that official investigations had found no such weapons. If people were updating rationally, the correction should have reduced belief. It didn’t. For many, it had no effect at all. And among those already predisposed to the claim, it sometimes produced the opposite effect: belief hardened.
The same thing happened with another rumour — that Barack Obama had been born outside the United States and so was ineligible to be president. A factual correction didn’t reliably soften the belief. For some, it strengthened it. The correction itself was taken as proof that the establishment must be hiding something.
Nyhan and Reifler called this the backfire effect: corrections can entrench misperceptions rather than dislodge them. Facts, in these cases, didn’t behave like weights on a scale, tipping people toward accuracy. They behaved like sparks, igniting the very defences that made the falsehood more resilient.
Why does this happen? Dan Kahan at Yale found that when new information threatens to put us at odds with our group, we will reach for reasons to reject it. Accuracy comes second to belonging. You can survive being wrong more easily than being cast out.
Dayton looks less surprising in that light. And so do many other conflicts — from politics that refuse to move on after a verdict, to workplaces where arguments spiral long after the meeting has ended. Once beliefs are bound up with identity and belonging, evidence doesn’t bring closure. It is interpreted through the lens we already hold, reinforcing rather than loosening conviction. If evidence can’t close arguments, something else has to. For much of the last century, that role fell to referees — institutions trusted to provide enough closure that people could live with their differences.
When Referees Lose Their Hold
Referees once meant institutions, such as courts, scientists, journalists, and even churches. Their role was narrow but vital — to arbitrate, to deliver verdicts, to close disputes. People might grumble, but they recognised the authority of the stage. The case ended, not because everyone agreed, but because the referee’s word was accepted as enough to close it.
That mattered. It gave people a way to live with disagreement. Evidence rarely settles anything when identity is at stake, as we’ve seen, but the referee’s authority offered closure — a way of easing dissonance without each of us having to resolve it for ourselves.
That canopy has thinned. Not just because of scandal or wrongdoing, though there has been plenty of that, but because confidence in the motivations of whole systems has worn away. People have seen companies cut jobs while rewarding shareholders, watched the promises of work fray, and noticed how value is quietly siphoned away. They’ve seen regulators accused of being too close to the industries they police, research questioned because of who funded it, media doubted because of who owns it or pays the bills. Whether the criticism is always fair isn’t the point. The suspicion is enough to corrode trust. Referees no longer look like neutral arbiters. They look like players.
Technology has amplified the shift. The internet promised more access to information, and in one sense, it delivered. Anyone can now find anything. But access quickly gave way to curation. Platforms didn’t just open the tap; they shaped the flow. Algorithmic feeds optimise for attention, not truth, and attention is most easily won with outrage. In Dayton, there was one radio feed. However you interpreted it, you at least heard the same words. Today, the same moment can be sliced into a hundred clips, each framed differently, each targeted at the audience most likely to respond. Fragmentation became the condition. And as we saw in Rejection, once rhythm and context are lost, each group builds its own version of events. Division is what happens when those fragments collide.
And when referees lose their hold in society, workplaces inherit the consequences. The difference is that at work, people can’t simply fragment into separate camps and walk away. They are bound together in teams, projects, and targets. Division doesn’t just polarise here; it strains the very collaboration the organisation depends on.
Leaders often try to narrow the field, to keep the focus on “work-related matters.” But the boundary doesn’t hold. Employees bring the outside world with them — their beliefs, identities, and causes — and expect to be able to voice what matters to them. When those expectations clash, the organisation becomes the referee, whether leaders like it or not.
Basecamp learned this in 2021, when its founders banned political talk on company forums. They said it was a way to protect focus. Many employees saw it differently: censorship. About a third of the company quit in the weeks that followed.
The irony was hard to miss. Basecamp had built its name on tools for collaboration, and its founders had written a bestselling book, Rework, urging companies to strip away rules and treat people like adults. Yet when disagreement became uncomfortable in their own company, the answer chosen wasn’t dialogue but silence.
We saw the same tension in practice at Harkn. People used the platform to talk about everything from minor irritations to major world events. Sometimes those conversations flared. Occasionally, whole threads had to be removed. But more often than not, it was enough to remind people of the terms of engagement: respectful dialogue, please. What emerged wasn’t noise but perspective — small signals of how people were seeing the world and their place within it.
Many in leadership believed that employee voice should be reserved for “work-related matters.” But that isn’t how people live, and it wasn’t how they used the system. Some posts were about the everyday. Others were about events in the world outside that shaped how they felt inside work. What we observed time and again was that people are perfectly capable of working out what matters most to them. The attempt to police a boundary between work and life never made much sense. When the world is divided, pretending people can leave that at the door is just another way of silencing them — and of blinding the organisation to itself.
And that was the sharper lesson. The risk was never in what people said — however awkward, however heated. The risk was that people would decide it wasn’t worth the effort, or that the organisation wasn’t interested. That was when the organisation lost its ability to see itself.
Scale makes this harder still. Modern companies don’t just span departments; they span countries, religions, political contexts, and supply chains. A decision that calms one place can provoke outrage in another. What looks neutral in London can look complicit in Lagos. Contradiction isn’t occasional; it is built in.
Which leaves leadership with a task more difficult than most are willing to admit. Division can’t be excluded, avoided, or wished away. It will arrive regardless. The real choice is whether to create space for dialogue that can hold it, or to narrow the field so tightly that people retreat into silence.
Division’s Weight
Distance showed us that culture isn’t what leaders declare, but what people live. It is multiple, shifting, and experienced differently depending on role and place. That plural reality was awkward enough. Division shows what happens when those lived truths collide.
And the collisions are constant. Companies no longer operate in one context but across many — nations, faiths, supply chains, identities. What resolves tension in one place can provoke outrage in another. Contradiction isn’t occasional; it is structural.
That is why division feels so heavy. It doesn’t just create noise; it breeds paralysis. We all hesitate, worrying that any step might fracture something else. Leaders often respond with symbolic gestures, hoping to satisfy, but the gap between what companies say and what they do only grows wider. Employees see the gap and withdraw. Work is diminished not by too much passion, but by too little participation.
Dayton was a town of two thousand, briefly transformed into a theatre for one great argument: faith versus science, modernism versus tradition. A stage was built, the lights came on, the verdict was given — and the crowd went home, more certain of themselves than before.
It is tempting to think of division as something exceptional, as if it only erupts when the stage is set. But today there are hundreds of Daytons unfolding at once. Not one clash, but many — over gender, race, climate, speech, nation, history. Not just in courtrooms, but in streets, feeds, communities, and companies. The same act is read as solidarity in one place and as betrayal in another.
And unlike Dayton, there is no referee, no canopy of authority to settle the contest. Companies that once imagined themselves as neutral are pulled into conflicts they cannot escape.
Division doesn’t end with a verdict. It doesn’t fade when the meeting closes. It multiplies and presses people out of the middle. The open clash is not the real danger. The danger is what follows when the contradictions are too many, the fractures too sharp, and people decide it is safer not to speak at all.
If there is a way through division, it begins with dialogue. Not performance, not staged agreement, but the real work of making sense of the world together — hearing perspectives, testing differences, and finding enough common ground to act. But dialogue only happens when people can speak freely, and when organisations are willing and able to hear. That is the question Division leaves us with: can we create the conditions where dialogue stands a chance?