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Before I started reading about rationality, I used to get frustrated because I felt like people often acted ‘irrationally’ when talking about politics. Then I started reading things like, “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup” and “The Scout Mindset”. Everything started making sense; people have a desire for tribal belonging and they need to signal allegiance to a tribe as well as establishing their place in the tribe. When someone says something, it often isn’t meant to be taken as an objective claim about how the world really it is. It is often just a social ritual.
Often people are consciously unaware that they are participating in these social signaling games. They just believe whatever they are saying is true even if they are presented with an obvious and rational explanation for why the belief is incorrect. I speculate at the subconscious level creating a ‘boo outgroup’ post on social media is releasing dopamine because the brain is wired to reward social approval from your tribe. Then people come up with a rationalization for why they have to keep repeating the tribal behavior.
Once I updated my model of the world with people having these tribal behaviors things become much more predictable. On the other hand observing the tribal model being accurate leads to a kind of depressing realization. Most people are just soldiers for their tribe and if you don’t have a position of power in the tribe it is very hard to get people to change and get people to act in a more ‘rational’ way. The soldiers have positions of power and make rules/laws/social conventions that they force on other people. Sometimes the primary outcome of decisions is just to punish the outgroup regardless of the cost to society.
Furthermore, technology allows people to exploit this tribal thinking to manipulate other people to act in their economic or political interest. A lot of the internet is just designed to make people feel like they are part of ‘a tribe’ and most people end up consuming/creating a ton of ‘boo outgroup’ content. Combined with scope insensitivity, the availability heuristic people, and other cogitative biases many people end up with an incredibly inaccurate understanding of reality.
How do you cope with the reality that these tribal incentives drive a lot of human behavior? We are destined to live an ‘irrational’ world where people are caught up in these tribal games. I feel like many people don’t have much to offer beyond their tribal behavior. If all someone does is repeat political talking points they aren’t useful. It is a waste of my time and energy to interact with these people. How do I avoid become jaded and disconnected from people?
One of the core insights which has struck me in the past years has been that tribalism is downstream from reality.
People too often focus on the group itself and ignore the ecosystem it's part of. Any group gets modified by reputation, competition, practicalities and the need for results. It is only after this kind of modification has happened that you can understand the significance of a "social ritual."
There are risks, but groups are also the basis of pluralism and a way of learning where we all stand relative to each other.
I look at this as dialectic. For instance, by itself as an ideology libertarianism hasn't really appealed. While a lot of the ideas are quite beautiful I find it all a bit simplistic, a bit look over here, not over there and at it's worst just a rote-learned thought system, or catechism.
But as part of a dialectic to work against other prevailing ideas I think it has great merit.
I call it "directional libertarianism", the belief that there is no ideological nirvana to achieve, but that our society could use a more libertarian approach in a bunch of specific areas.
Political sophistication begins with the realization, in the words of Sowell, that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The socratic ideal of political sophistication requires one to be able to articulate the opposing side in terms they can accept, and to state what bits of reality would need to change before one supported different policies.
So, for instance, I oppose the drug war in general, but believe there are drugs out there that are dangerous enough that they should stay illegal. At a certain probability of bad health outcomes, we kind of need to hit the ripcord.
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