I am serious about the tribalism.
Americans who identify as R will not hold an R to the same standards that they hold outsiders.
Similarly the other side.
I currently think one side is usually right and usually wrong. That raises an internal red flag: possible tribal bias in my mind.
I feel the impulse to join, to sink into the feeling of shared enlightenment like a tub of almost-too-hot water, a pleasure on a level with a lungful of heroin. (did. don’t.)
That is awful temptation. And once I give into the acceptance of the emotional reward of “loyalty despite knowing better” I am in deep trouble. I find that dismantling a long-held amd fierce belief thst just failed the reason test … is as hard as kicking one of the bigs (opiates, depressants)* PLUS THEN having to be brutally honest with myself and dig for the ensbling lie.
And then face it and look at it in detail, agsinst every instinct to scream run hide.
That is the stage where I typically fail. It is hard, and I neglected discipline when I was younger.
But recently I am seeing a few of my biases, and the grim truth that working on them is a cornerstone of self-respect, i’ve occasionally snarled, rolled up my sleeves and dealt with the bit of ugly. That works. The process really sucks. But if I find a way to get through, the result is a subtle but durable improvement in both my self-esteem and my capacity for compassion (not my strong suit).
bottom line: spotting a bias is unpleasant to the point of aversive.
Working on a bias is hard long work on the level of breaking an addiction.
*There is one addiction that stands above the others because quitting is not an option: eating disorders. Overcoming these requires supreme commitment paired with the application of relentless will against strong and fairly constant impulses.
I believe that dropping an ideology that is objectively faulty after spotting all or part of the bad bit is as difficult as treating an eating disorder. In both instances you cannot simply quit, but must handle the objects of temptation daily, involving constant denial if strong impulse. Most don’t, so tribal thinking sets in unopposed.
Relevant here is less important than loyal to whom. Jmo.
Stand up & be counted! Sure, I’ll play
re: tribalism…I mostly have good things about tribes and their place in human communities, but I get what you’re talking about and I can disagree with you. If I may extend your analogy a bit, though….
the MAGA mobs and their owners, trainers, & operators are essentially a monoculture. As we’ve seen, the cannon-fodder & muscle of the overthrow party includes several prominent non-white actors in prominent positions, which on some level violates the rules of the monoculture,but the mental/emotional bond of “True Americans!(tm) transcends that, at least for those crucial moments: they’re all meshed together now.
So, yeah, they act a lot like history tells us that ethnically- & religiously-monocultural societies tend to act: they’re intolerant of what’s outside the monoculture, show belligerence & threatening speech & action toward other cultures, oppress differences within their own population, work against different populations in other cultures…not coincidentally, these monocultures are big on kings, rank, obedience, control, profit. They very much play follow-the-leader internally. Don’t rock the boat; find a way to fit into the machine; suck up to the right people.
So, that’s one kind of tribe, for sure. I’d say that describes the “republican/libertarian/conservative“ tribe fairly well.
Multicultural societies can’t operate that way. They don’t have the shared tree of lore & mythology & cultural characteristics, and that causes friction a monoculture like Christendom doesn’t face, due exclusively to the power differential. In a multicultural situation, the road requires building trust between communities and finding ways to take care of more than the nice neighborhoods, the shop owners, the big houses. Each tribe must be willing to work with the others in order for anything to get done beyond their own reach. It seems natural that such communities would not play follow-the-leader a lot.
I think that’s roughly accurate as to how ‘the democrats’ (everyone else) operates, at least politically.
When I was a kid, there wasn’t any tribe anywhere more “out, proud, & out loud” than the ‘white, Christian, segregated, Deep South’ I was born into (every word in ‘ ‘ there is a separate, continuously-sustained, pressure to conform - not just, even, but to REPRESENT for both the conformity and the pressure, as a way of not being ‘looked at too closely’ by ‘the wrong people’…a state of watchfulness maintained, even in private. Learning to act like one, speak like one - necessary to survival).
Bias is a weird thing for me: it hasn’t worked like you’d expect (maybe it’s a middle-child thing). Having felt like an alien presence within the monocultures (white, Christian, actively segregated, deep-south), it gave me a lot of opportunity to reflect about the good & bad of tribes: feeling like you actually belong somewhere is actually a super-important thing to us impressionable humans; having the need to belong, to have a place - maybe the most fundamental need we have - used against us for the profit or other benefit of others is a truly unspeakable act - and IMO the definition of true evil.
the monocultures are more tent-revival, where the multi tribal cultures seem more market-day / festival; may not be possible (or advisable) to eliminate one or the other. I expect there will always be those who prefer a monocultural context, so the question becomes “are we prepared to resist the, fucking with us?”
this is only one of several possible riffs that could have been spawned by you & Roger. Thanks, y’all!
