The Biggest Dangers of Tribes

What should you make of the fact that you are passionate about your position on an issue?

Is that passion justified by real world facts and a careful and conscious cost/benefit analysis? Or did unconsciously adopt your position as a result of becoming a member of a tribe? Did social pressures and desires nullify your intellectual defenses to bullshit, allowing rickety beliefs to find a welcoming space in your head? Did you aggressively attack your new position, making sure that it is solid? Or did it slip in like the trojan horse after your sentries became completely distracted by their cravings to be liked (and not disliked) by others? After all, because called "inappropriate" "misguided," "a tool for the [bad people]" or "racist" hurts, especially when done in public arenas. Those slings and arrows take a toll and they have put Americas institutions at great risk. It takes a special person to be able to shake off those accusations and stay true your need to hyper-scrutinize all issues, especially your own position on those issues.

It takes courage and strength to constantly attack your own ideas and it needs to be constant because truth-seeking is never-ending work. And it's not enough to try as hard as you can to be skeptical of your own ideas, because we are blind to the problems with our own thought process.

We know this for sure, based on the work of many scientists who have studied the confirmation bias, including Jonathan Haidt:

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

From The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

You can't cure this problem alone. You need to expose yourself to viewpoints you find distasteful or even odious. That is the only solution because the confirmation bias is that strong. You cannot see the problem as long as you are clinging only to your favorite sources of information. You need quit being a coward and engage with people and ideas that challenge you. You need to visit websites and read books that you would rather not. That is your only chance to test your ideas, identify those that work and don't work. This need to constantly expose your thoughts to the marketplace of ideas was described with precision by John Stuart Mill (and see here). Recently, Jonathan Rauch has taken a deep dive on this challenge in his excellent book, The Constitution of Knowledge.

There will be many who read this who say "I'm not concerned because I am immune to both dumb things and the pressures of tribes." They are wrong to be complacent for two reasons.

Reason One: People think they are immune because they feel certain that they have things right. They feel this way even though ALL OF US change our opinions over time. We are guaranteed to change our views in the future just as we have in the past, but we don't remember how much we change over time.  We simply sit there smug and certain that we've got things figured out at each present moment. What is that feeling of certainty worth? Nothing, as explained by Robert Burton, in his book, On Being Certain.

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About Tyrannies

This is a passage from Will Storr's new book, The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It  (2022):

Tyrannies are virtue-dominance games. Much of their daily play and conversation will focus on matters of obedience, belief and enemies. Is the game you’re playing coercing people, both inside and outside it, into conforming to its rules and symbols? Does it attempt to silence its ideological foes? Does it tell a simplistic story that explains the hierarchy, deifying their group whilst demonising a common enemy? Are those around you obsessed with their sacred beliefs? Do they talk about them continually and with greedy pleasure, drawing significant status from belief and active belief? Does it seek to damage and destroy lives, often with glee? Is this aggression made to feel virtuous? That’s probably a tyranny. This might sound melodramatic, but we all contain the capacity for this dreadful mode of play: those cousins are built into our coding. If we’re serious about ‘never again’ we must accept that tyranny isn’t a ‘left’ thing or a ‘right’ thing, it’s a human thing. It doesn’t arrive goose-stepping down streets in terrifying ranks. It seduces us with stories.

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Self-Imploding Woke-Permeated Organizations

Can Woke people even get along with each other? Apparently not. Aaron Sibarium reports on "Women Against Abuse." 

"One of the largest domestic violence groups in the United States offered to pay "BIPOC" employees more than white ones; asked white staffers to sign a statement affirming their innate racism; and discouraged black abuse victims from calling the cops."

There are many more examples. Woke workplaces tend to destroy the ability to do meaningful work. A recent example is the meltdown at The Washington Post, featuring Felicia Sonmez. Here's what tends to happen when social justice warriors invade the workplace, as reported by Ricki Schlott.  And if you'd like a lot more example of woeness destroying morale, check out this article by Ryan Grimm at The Intercept:

ELEPHANT IN THE ZOOM: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Here is an excerpt:

A Prism reporter reached a widely respected Guttmacher board member, Pamela Merritt, a Black woman and a leading reproductive justice activist, while the Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were going on last December, a year and a half after the Floyd meeting. She offered the most delicate rebuttal of the staff complaints possible.

“I have been in this movement space long enough to respect how people choose to describe their personal experience and validate that experience, even if I don’t necessarily agree that that’s what they experienced,” Merritt said. “It seems like there’s a conflation between not reaching the conclusion that people want and not doing due diligence on the allegations, which simply is not true.” Boonstra did not respond to a request to talk from either Prism or The Intercept.

The six months since then have only seen a ratcheting up of the tension, with more internal disputes spilling into public and amplified by a well-funded, anonymous operation called ReproJobs, whose Twitter and Instagram feeds have pounded away at the organization’s management. “If your reproductive justice organization isn’t Black and brown it’s white supremacy in heels co-opting a WOC movement,” blared a typical missive submitted to and republished on one of its Instagram stories. The news, in May 2022, that Roe v. Wade would almost certainly be overturned did nothing to temper the raging battle. (ReproJobs told The Intercept its current budget is around $275,000.)

That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.

In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society . . .

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Gender Ideology: Colin Wright Offers a Case Study

How does one explain "the sudden and dramatic rise in the number of children being referred to gender clinics for gender dysphoria—the experience of distress caused by a perceived mismatch between one’s biological sex and “gender identity.”

Biologist Colin Wright followed one recent case on the Facebook Group, “Trans People and the Allies Who Support Them” Facebook Group.? Here's a great recipe if you would like to confuse and abuse a young child.

[This sudden and dramatic rise of such cases] is likely due to the equally sudden rise of a radical new ideology—gender ideology—which is a set of beliefs asserting that whether someone is a man/boy or woman/girl is entirely rooted in one’s subjective “gender identity” as opposed to one’s objective biological sex. In practice, “gender identity” reflects an individual’s affinity to, or rejection of, masculine and/or feminine stereotypes.

This truly radical reconceptualization of what it means to be a man, woman, boy, or girl, does not come without equally radical and harmful consequences. The harm results from the fact that the completely natural and common tendency of some individuals of each sex to exhibit gender nonconforming personalities and behavior is now being incorrectly interpreted as being transgender—a psychological condition that requires treatment.

The current standard of care is called “gender-affirming therapy,” which is the practice of immediately accepting and accommodating a child’s new identity without question or exploration of causal factors. Initially this often means participating in the child’s social transition, which can involve calling the child by a new name, using new pronouns, and allowing them access to spaces (e.g. bathrooms) that “match” their claimed identity. Following social transition, the next step often involves taking puberty blockers to halt further body development, and then cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions such as double mastectomies (removal of breasts) in girls, or orchiectomies (removal of testicles) in boys.

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