Before the Argument, There Is an Instinct

Why listening to my first UNASB podcast instantly triggered me and what Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations taught me about it.

A Visceral Beginning

Listening to The Benny Show, the first episode in my Unfortunately Not A Sound Bath journey, felt like I had jumped into the deep end. It left me deeply unsettled by what I heard. I wasn’t prepared for my own visceral reaction. My body reacted before my mind could organize an argument. I felt a tightening. A sense of contraction.

I had hoped that listening would humanize and broaden my perspective. Instead, I found myself wondering whether this was a fool’s errand. This rhetoric is not meant to build understanding but rather to invoke fear and exclusion.

For a moment, I considered stepping back. I could handle well-reasoned arguments from either side, but I didn’t know if I wanted to listen to such an inflammatory narrative.

And yet, I stayed.

What’s shifted for me over the past couple of months hasn’t been softening toward the content (which remains painful to hear). What’s shifted is how I’ve begun to listen and what I’ve been able to acknowledge about myself.

The Moral Understory

Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind that our political divisions are rooted less in facts than in moral intuitions. He describes six core moral foundations:

1. Care and harm

2. Fairness and cheating

3. Loyalty and betrayal

4. Authority and subversion

5. Sanctity and degradation

6. Liberty and oppression

He doesn’t argue that the foundations are good or bad, but simply describes them as a product of how humans have evolved in systems that promote survival, reproduction, and cooperation.

Haidt’s research suggests that people on the political Left tend to emphasize care, fairness, and liberty. People on the Right tend to draw from all six foundations, especially loyalty, authority, and sanctity. The difference is not simply about policy preferences. It is about which moral instincts are activated. To be sure, a moral instinct may later be overridden by logic, but the instinct appears first.

Conflict Entrepreneurs Exploit Moral Instincts

Moral instincts are easily exploited in today’s media landscape, where anyone can host a podcast and say just about anything they want. Stories circulate quickly. They do not need to persuade everyone. They do not need to be true. They need only resonate with the moral instincts of a particular audience. And often they are peddled by “conflict entrepreneurs” like Benny Johnson who exploit division and conflict for their own benefit.

When listening to UNASB’s podcast assignments through the lens of Haidt’s research, we get a glimpse of something more layered that conflict entrepreneurs are using to stir up outrage, hate, and fear among their audiences.

Hearing the Instinct Beneath the Rhetoric

When I heard Benny Johnson describe immigrants as eroding the “fabric” of the country, and Muslim prayer framed as allegiance to a foreign land, I heard loyalty and sanctity being activated together. A moral boundary around who truly belongs, and an implicit concern about cultural purity.

When I heard Benny Johnson’s insistence that America must be rooted purely in Christendom, that “orderly, clean, safe societies” flow from adherence to a singular Christian doctrine, I heard authority and sanctity intertwined. A vision of hierarchy presented as sacred order.

When I heard him dismiss global suffering with “I don’t care” because it was not “my country,” I heard in-group protection elevated above universal care.

Politics, in the Haidt’s moral foundations framework, is not primarily persuasion through evidence. It is moral storytelling that taps into a listener’s instinct about what is sacred or who belongs. To listen in this way, we also must name our own instincts.

Naming My Own Instincts

Only after mapping it this way did I fully acknowledge something about myself. My moral compass leans strongly towards care and fairness. Rhetoric that is dismissive of suffering or that draws unfair lines around who is welcome in our country activates something in me almost immediately and makes it difficult to stay with what I’m hearing. My fight-or-flight instinct is activated. My reaction is not just intellectual disagreement. It is a moral instinct.

Moving from Reaction to Real Conversation

Hearing the moral instincts shifted something in me. Instead of asking only, “How could someone listening believe this?” I began asking, “What instinct is being activated here?”

That question does not erase disagreement. It does not excuse harmful rhetoric. It does not change the fact that podcasters like Benny Johnson are demonizing other human beings and intentionally sowing the seeds of divisiveness for their own gain. But it complicates the narrative. It invites curiosity about what meaning people are interpreting from this content rather than assuming that all people of a certain political party are simply misinformed or ill-willed.

This is an important distinction as we move from media and online spaces to real, human interactions with people (who are not conflict entrepreneurs), where “it’s hard to hate up close” rings more true.

Much of my professional work centers on helping people navigate conflict and talk across differences. I have sought out cross-partisan spaces and joined conversations designed to bring people with opposing views into the same room. I have come to believe that understanding across differences is possible, though not easy, a believer in Mary Lou Kownacki’s words that “there isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you heard their story.” I have yet to have a one-on-one conversation with someone whom I have been unable to find any common ground.

Which Instincts Do We Elevate?

Using the lens of moral instincts also raises a harder question. Which moral foundations are emphasized or neglected in my own community? If moral instincts shape perception and belief, then how we frame the issues matters.

On the political left, the moral language often centers on care and fairness. We tell stories about protecting the vulnerable, correcting injustice, and expanding who is included within the circle of belonging. Those instincts can be powerful, but they can also make it harder to recognize the moral concerns that resonate more strongly for others, such as loyalty, tradition, or social order. Understanding which instincts resonate for different audiences is just as important as the facts we present.

Staying in the Room

Staying allowed me to move from reacting solely at the level of outrage to listening for the deeper instinct underneath the argument.

We can be shocked.

We can be angered.

We can be offended.

And we can still ask what fear is being tapped, what value is being defended, what feels sacred to the listener, and whether the messenger is seeking to divide or to understand.

In a polarized culture, that shift will not change everyone’s mind. But it changes the quality of attention we bring to the conversation. And perhaps that is where true persuasion begins.