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Notes -
Perhaps the same could be said of all ideologies.
The thing that gets me, though, is that progressivism specifically is supposed to be not about that, because it's specifically supposed to be about progress (as the name might imply). Which means progressing away from the old, bad way of figuring things out based on tribalism and moralizing and such, and instead using our modern, enlightened tools to figure out what the best things are. Unfortunately, it seems like there are like 30 progressives who try to think like me and about a billion
witchesbitchestribalists who simply use the stated principles of progressivism to launder in their own tribal opinions as the Officially Good Beliefs, almost always without conscious intent or even awareness.Tribalism is too baked into human psychology. You can taboo all the old tribal markers, but then people will just find more indirect, abstract, and novel markers to be tribal about even while earnestly believing themselves to be non-tribal. Tribalism is not optional. Its excesses can only be mitigated. It cannot be effectively mitigated by denying or hiding it, but only acknowledging and restraining.
That very well may be true. It seems to me that progressives ought to try to do actual credible scientific research to to figure that out, and, to whatever extent that's true, to use actual scientific tools to figure out how to structure society, systems, organizations, etc. to channel people's tribalism in productive or, at least least deleterious ways. Instead, most have been just embracing their own tribalism as well as ignorance while also destroying our very ability to do credible social science research.
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