Katie, Thank you so much for this timely observation! While I agree with your message of seeking what connects us as human beings, it's difficult to actually do so in my daily life. Your writing is very helpful and healing for me.
Not feeling particularly qualified to advise, I searched and found these "Words of Wisdom" from Pope Francis (whose job is to Pontificate! ;}
“Unity is often confused with uniformity; with actions, feelings and words which are all identical. This is not unity, it is conformity. It kills the life of the Spirit; it kills the charisms which God has bestowed for the good of his people. Unity is threatened whenever we try to turn others into our own image and likeness. Unity is a gift, not something to be imposed by force or by decree … Conflicts and disagreements in the Church are to be expected and, I would even say, needed. They are a sign that the Church is alive and that the Spirit is still acting, still enlivening her. Woe to those communities without a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’!”—Pope Francis (September 20, 2015)
These "Words of Wisdom" are from the Prophet Muhammad, who (ﷺ) said, "Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should not hurt his neighbor and whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should serve his guest generously and whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should speak what is good or keep silent."
My favorite prophet is John Wooden, the famous basketball coach at UCLA, who said, “The great secret of life is to cultivate the ability to appreciate the things you have, not compare them.”
“ Conflicts and disagreements in the Church are to be expected and, I would even say, needed. They are a sign that the Church is alive and that the Spirit is still acting, still enlivening her.”
The whole divides in to parts. 🧬
The parts move around and in and out of each other.
Like water flowing in rivers 💦 and oceans 🌊 and changing into vapor 💨 and snow ⛄️❄️and ice 🧊.
NYC is very diverse, and I live in Jackson Heights, the most diverse neighborhood in the world. I’ve lived in the city over 20 years, and most people here identify as New Yorkers first, before race, gender, or citizenship, and over time, it’s become more difficult for me to get along with US people from anywhere else except for Philadelphia and Detroit. On a business trip to Denver, something immediately seemed off, and after a few seconds I realized it was because there were nothing but white people, who I don’t have a problem with, but I’m just not used to that kind of saturation. My coworker and I were the only non-white people in the airport.
It’s strange because a part of the reason we’re relatively liberal is because of the diversity, and you see firsthand what should be obvious. It isn’t the immigrants who have even less power than most natives who are screwing us, it’s clearly the wealthy bastards in their gleaming towers.
But at the same time, there’s an argument almost every year that NYC should secede from the Union. Most of us are sick of conservative crap, especially when we’re subsidizing a lot of red states, and we’re also sick of being lectured about race by well off white people from homogeneous states, most of whom are too afraid to come here at all, unless they stay in the areas for tourists.
So while a lot of “thems” became “us,” even in regard to people we meet in other countries, the rest of the US has become “them.” The tourists are particularly annoying, and I’ve met decent people and even lived in other states, but I never could for long. The people are just too different.
An upper middle class woman from a good neighborhood in California told me minorities can’t be bad. I told her they’re the same as everyone else, and capable of the full range of human behavior, including crime and being assholes, and that every poor neighborhood or ghetto in the world is basically the same, but generally much more dangerous in cities like NY, Chicago, and Detroit, and she was offended.
I think education, or learning how to agree on basic facts and attack problems with scientific and mathematical rigor would be a good place to start.
We might see more unity once climate change directly devastates a billion people globally and at least 100 million in the US and Western Europe, but based on what’s happening now, more wars over resources seems more likely.
I was going to say the same thing about London and Londoners. To be a Londoner one just needs to understand the rules, stand on the right, never slow down at corners, walk with a slight swagger, never talk on the tube at certain times, dress more precisely, smarter and more fashionable than country folk. London accepts people quickly, once they start talking faster and banter, doing their jobs fast and efficiently. All Londoners have their escape from London plan.
It’s only after I left I noticed how different the Others were.
I lived in London for two years and I loved it. It was cleaner, safer, and at the time (mid 1990s) great pork cracklings. The pub atmosphere worked for me, people were generally friendlier, and the American accent had the same effect as the English one does here, and I generally had a great time.
The rules are abut the same. The right is the slow lane on sidewalks and escalators, the left is the fast lane, or basically, be conscientious of other people. If you don't gamble or do drugs, or more accurately, don't owe money,, you're pretty safe nowadays, but some neighborhoods are still horrifying. Wear a Yankee cap and an orange hoodie and people will assume you're a construction worker, or relatively strong and broke. As long as you don't make eye contact, you'll usually be left alone.
As far as working, there are literally thousands of people waiting to take your job, so you have to be competent.
My escape plan is to find an abandoned house or cave upstate and shore it up..
I miss London, I liked Paris--it reminded me of NY in some ways--I hated Rome--it reminded me of NY in other ways. I got to see Amsterdam before it turned into Disneyland, and that was fun.
Next to Ho Chi Minh, I felt closest to home in London. NY is a mess--worse than London--but it's home. Have a pint for me, and if you can still get them, the pork cracklings in the gold wrapper. I was addicted to those.
Tribalism is not inherent across the world. In Africa a thing called communalism exist, there is even a term for sharing and interconnectedness - Ubuntu. "I am because you are". After the enslaved Africans were emancipated they were left to flounder about with little to rely upon but themselves, and they did form a bound, self reliance and self support glued as one. As they began to thrive, survive and flourish, those from another "tribe" - became envious, jealous and threatened, and of course use violence to destroy what was being built under the terms of Black Codes and Jim Crow. Black Wall Street was such an example. I appreciate you celebrating a civil society, Dr. King had a vision for what he called the " Beloved Community'. "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.'-- Martin Luther King Jr.
Us-ing and Them-ing seems so hardwired into us that it's difficult to avoid, even when we would consciously want to do so. When I started getting angry about the Conservative government here in the UK I had to remember that my beloved father had voted them in! Though he was not the person I was thinking of when I was thinking of Them (Tory-voters) and this caused some kind of glitch in my brain every time I reminded myself, it was a helpful way of breaking the thought.
Yeah I often have to remind myself of the conservative friends and family I love. I keep reminding myself not to make assumptions about someone's personality based on their political label. 😅 Just as not all of us leftists are "militant" (a stereotype of us), not all right wingers are racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.
A conservative Christian friend, strangely enough, has "conservative beliefs about gender and sexuality" (her words). But her actions are actually very supportive. She never once deadnamed me and always used the correct pronouns and gender markers for me. She even asked me how to better support trans folks. For one of my birthdays, she bought me a razor, since I would have to learn how to shave soon, LOL.
Yes, we should know people by all their actions, not just their voting actions! So important to find the good in people (and agreement with them) despite some areas of disagreement.
Yes, as Timoyhy Leary's theory of mind says the creation of kids in different enviroments and travels expands the mind... The emergency of the global individual
Thanks for this wonderful article, Katie! I often complain about why people keep getting into these tribal mindsets. Even among people you'd think would be "on the same side," you still see them drawing lines and making enemies of each other, sigh.
For instance, some of us change sexual orientation labels as we learn more about ourselves, or things just change for us. It is simply our own business and our own sexuality. But people get so hostile about this. I used to identify as straight because I didn't know any better (and got my gender wrong). Later, I identified as bisexual. But after taking testosterone for my gender transition, my feelings changed somewhat (this is a common experience for people transitioning), so I identified as gay.
But now...uhhh... I'm having some rather serious crushes on friends of the opposite / different gender. So calling myself gay doesn't seem right anymore. I could go back to bisexual (or pansexual), but this could lead people to think I'm more attracted to the opposite/ different gender than I really am. Since these opposite gender feelings are still rare. So I'm just calling myself queer for now.
Nobody has said anything mean to me so far, thankfully. I just get nervous about people thinking that I betrayed the gay tribe, or I refused to join the bi tribe, or whatever. In reality, I'm just sorting through the different labels, considering the emotional and cultural connotations, and deciding for myself which label fits best. (Homoflexible is the best one of me but hardly anyone has heard of it.) I'm probably a 4 on Kinsey's scale, haha. But it sure would be nice if we can do this self-exploration without the fear of people thinking we're "betraying" them or "too good to be with them", etc.
Thank you for sharing your journey and for the kind words! I think quite a lot of us are figuring things out as we go, even if we don’t always admit it, since society expects us to have everything sorted before we even get the chance to fully understand ourselves. It's a shame. But it's also a shame there's still so much tribal thinking today, including in spaces that you'd think would be free of it by now.
Great article. Best I’ve come across in a while. My professor in school wrote a book Why They Don’t Hate Us. If I remember there was emphasis on they and us
Being able to draw a boundary between groups of people and then think about their experiences of life separately is actually life-saving sometimes.
Eg in abusive heterosexual relationships, women often feel isolated and think “it’s just me.” When we discover blogs like yours, we go, “omg it’s not just me! It’s so many women! Over centuries! And so many men acting in this way!” Sociological analysis helps us feel less alone but to do it we do have to draw a distinction somehow. (Of course there’s a difference between “difference” and “duality” where the former is possibly objectively neutral and the latter connotes a hierarchy of some kind “we are better than them “ etc).
There’s a lot of paradoxical rhetoric from the right around unity and “they’re trying to divide us and pit us against each other with all this talk of sexism and racism, making women hate men and everyone hate white people …and we end up spending all this energy fighting each other that we have no energy left to fight the real bad guys: the elites. We are all human! Unite!”
It’s of course paradoxical because as you say there are clearly groups that are being othered: immigrants, elites etc.
But it’s kind of impossible to avoid for any analysis of anything. Even this article is “othering” in some way: there are the good guys (people who refuse to other) and there are the bad guys (people who other, like trump and his supporters)
I like the idea of the call to spend more time with people different to us to see their humanity but so often this can be co-opted by the more powerful party to centre themselves. Eg men and women talking together, or in intimate relationships spend TONS of time together but it ends up with the woman seeing the man’s humanity, giving him the benefit of the doubt, asking herself if she’s being kind / generous/ forgiving enough, giving so much emotional labour…and the man often treating women as unreliable, emotional, uncaring, manipulative (hostile sexism) or weak, incompetent, in need of men (benevolent sexism). The less powerful party is socialised into seeing everyone’s humanity, the more powerful party is not.
Everywhere I look it's the so-called liberals doing the censoring, using inflammatory language and canceling anyone who dares disagree with them. Accusing conservatives of disinformation/misinformation even though so much of liberal media was blatantly lying. I was once a die-hard, radical feminist liberal and proud of it. Now the labels don't mean anything. Now, I judge by actions not words.
Since the pandemic, I've experienced a much broader view of people, including Donald Trump, whom i never cared for before and I've found that those on the right are far MORE tolerant than the left. Heck radical feminists calling out the atrocities of transing children were vilified by the left but welcomed to share their stories, evidence and concerns on CONSERVATIVE platforms. This is why people are now flocking to the right. They, for the most part walk the talk and fight for free speech.
There's much that I don't like about conservative politics, but I'm discovering that politics has been completely taken over by corporations, the military industrial complex, pharmaceutical companies. The people have almost no voice and the liberals have abandoned their base. Conservatives, oddly, have taken up their cause and even minimally given them a platform. I'm ashamed of what liberals have done throughout the pandemic.
Before, the right used to be all about authoritarianism, following rules, order, family/the collective, responsibility. And the left was about hippy dippy, free love, individualism with everyone free to express themselves, gay and lesbian rights, free speech, freedom.
Then somewhere along the way, the left became about the collective, responsibility, authoritarianism. And the right became all about freedom, free markets, free trade, free speech, individualism…
There’s this story about how the devil took the truth and “reorganised” it so that the left got a bunch of values and the right got a bunch of values. If you reject what the devil offers, you reject the truth. If you accept what he offers, you go along with the half-truth which is kind of a lie…https://reneejg.net/2023/11/the-silver-tongued-devil-and-the-principle-of-distortion/
I tried reading this article to a right wing family member (I hadn't pre-read it but decided to take the risk anyway), and as soon as I got to mentioning the emotional rhetoric of right wingers and Trump, she flipped out and told me that was a leftist lie and that Trump has never used violent rhetoric, and I had to stop reading because it turned into an argument about immigration. On the one hand, her yelling about "different cultures" and how immigrants are terrorizing the West and raping and murdering all over, and me trying and failing to break down the nuances to undercut the sweeping generalizations (which she wasn't happy about). So, I'll finish reading now that I've escaped, but it sort of just proves the point I guess.
I find this topic fascinating. Categorising information (including people) has its benefits, such as helping us to make sense of the world, but as you highlight any real or perceived differences can lead to snap judgements as well as discrimination.
Tajfel and Turner stressed that we have to balance our personal identity and social identities, which can also come into conflict too, so that makes things even more challenging. Their work was pre-Internet/social media obvs, so I would be curious what their thoughts be now.
Great article once again, Katie. A timely/timeless topic. Tribalism is the basis of competition for power and curiously very practiced in religions. The world has become extremely complex and rather than collaborate on progress, innovation and envisioning a better place as our environment changes - we just us/them - competing for the bigger piece of the pie. Humans have always been very judgemental as part of this tribalism. That's likely to confirm biases?
“ You can just imagine my conservative parents’ shock when, at the age of 8 or 9, I asked why we need to have borders at all. ‘It’s all just lines in the dirt anyway,’ I remember saying. To be honest, my views on this haven’t changed much since. And I still frequently wonder: Why do we continuously divide ourselves? Why can’t we first and foremost acknowledge and cherish that we’re all from here, from this planet?”
Whenever asked what nationality or race I am, I answer HUMAN.
As to boarders, our body is a boarder.
Do we want to allow anyone or everyone access?
Our dwelling is a boarder.
Do we want to allow everyone to simply walk in and take control???
Katie, Thank you so much for this timely observation! While I agree with your message of seeking what connects us as human beings, it's difficult to actually do so in my daily life. Your writing is very helpful and healing for me.
Not feeling particularly qualified to advise, I searched and found these "Words of Wisdom" from Pope Francis (whose job is to Pontificate! ;}
“Unity is often confused with uniformity; with actions, feelings and words which are all identical. This is not unity, it is conformity. It kills the life of the Spirit; it kills the charisms which God has bestowed for the good of his people. Unity is threatened whenever we try to turn others into our own image and likeness. Unity is a gift, not something to be imposed by force or by decree … Conflicts and disagreements in the Church are to be expected and, I would even say, needed. They are a sign that the Church is alive and that the Spirit is still acting, still enlivening her. Woe to those communities without a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’!”—Pope Francis (September 20, 2015)
These "Words of Wisdom" are from the Prophet Muhammad, who (ﷺ) said, "Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should not hurt his neighbor and whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should serve his guest generously and whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should speak what is good or keep silent."
My favorite prophet is John Wooden, the famous basketball coach at UCLA, who said, “The great secret of life is to cultivate the ability to appreciate the things you have, not compare them.”
Best regards,
Joe Hartnett
Joe, the words of Pope Francis are wonderful.
Everything is united and everything divides.
“ Conflicts and disagreements in the Church are to be expected and, I would even say, needed. They are a sign that the Church is alive and that the Spirit is still acting, still enlivening her.”
The whole divides in to parts. 🧬
The parts move around and in and out of each other.
Like water flowing in rivers 💦 and oceans 🌊 and changing into vapor 💨 and snow ⛄️❄️and ice 🧊.
NYC is very diverse, and I live in Jackson Heights, the most diverse neighborhood in the world. I’ve lived in the city over 20 years, and most people here identify as New Yorkers first, before race, gender, or citizenship, and over time, it’s become more difficult for me to get along with US people from anywhere else except for Philadelphia and Detroit. On a business trip to Denver, something immediately seemed off, and after a few seconds I realized it was because there were nothing but white people, who I don’t have a problem with, but I’m just not used to that kind of saturation. My coworker and I were the only non-white people in the airport.
It’s strange because a part of the reason we’re relatively liberal is because of the diversity, and you see firsthand what should be obvious. It isn’t the immigrants who have even less power than most natives who are screwing us, it’s clearly the wealthy bastards in their gleaming towers.
But at the same time, there’s an argument almost every year that NYC should secede from the Union. Most of us are sick of conservative crap, especially when we’re subsidizing a lot of red states, and we’re also sick of being lectured about race by well off white people from homogeneous states, most of whom are too afraid to come here at all, unless they stay in the areas for tourists.
So while a lot of “thems” became “us,” even in regard to people we meet in other countries, the rest of the US has become “them.” The tourists are particularly annoying, and I’ve met decent people and even lived in other states, but I never could for long. The people are just too different.
An upper middle class woman from a good neighborhood in California told me minorities can’t be bad. I told her they’re the same as everyone else, and capable of the full range of human behavior, including crime and being assholes, and that every poor neighborhood or ghetto in the world is basically the same, but generally much more dangerous in cities like NY, Chicago, and Detroit, and she was offended.
I think education, or learning how to agree on basic facts and attack problems with scientific and mathematical rigor would be a good place to start.
We might see more unity once climate change directly devastates a billion people globally and at least 100 million in the US and Western Europe, but based on what’s happening now, more wars over resources seems more likely.
I was going to say the same thing about London and Londoners. To be a Londoner one just needs to understand the rules, stand on the right, never slow down at corners, walk with a slight swagger, never talk on the tube at certain times, dress more precisely, smarter and more fashionable than country folk. London accepts people quickly, once they start talking faster and banter, doing their jobs fast and efficiently. All Londoners have their escape from London plan.
It’s only after I left I noticed how different the Others were.
I lived in London for two years and I loved it. It was cleaner, safer, and at the time (mid 1990s) great pork cracklings. The pub atmosphere worked for me, people were generally friendlier, and the American accent had the same effect as the English one does here, and I generally had a great time.
The rules are abut the same. The right is the slow lane on sidewalks and escalators, the left is the fast lane, or basically, be conscientious of other people. If you don't gamble or do drugs, or more accurately, don't owe money,, you're pretty safe nowadays, but some neighborhoods are still horrifying. Wear a Yankee cap and an orange hoodie and people will assume you're a construction worker, or relatively strong and broke. As long as you don't make eye contact, you'll usually be left alone.
As far as working, there are literally thousands of people waiting to take your job, so you have to be competent.
My escape plan is to find an abandoned house or cave upstate and shore it up..
I miss London, I liked Paris--it reminded me of NY in some ways--I hated Rome--it reminded me of NY in other ways. I got to see Amsterdam before it turned into Disneyland, and that was fun.
Next to Ho Chi Minh, I felt closest to home in London. NY is a mess--worse than London--but it's home. Have a pint for me, and if you can still get them, the pork cracklings in the gold wrapper. I was addicted to those.
Tribalism is not inherent across the world. In Africa a thing called communalism exist, there is even a term for sharing and interconnectedness - Ubuntu. "I am because you are". After the enslaved Africans were emancipated they were left to flounder about with little to rely upon but themselves, and they did form a bound, self reliance and self support glued as one. As they began to thrive, survive and flourish, those from another "tribe" - became envious, jealous and threatened, and of course use violence to destroy what was being built under the terms of Black Codes and Jim Crow. Black Wall Street was such an example. I appreciate you celebrating a civil society, Dr. King had a vision for what he called the " Beloved Community'. "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.'-- Martin Luther King Jr.
'I am because you are' - that's such a beautiful concept.
Us-ing and Them-ing seems so hardwired into us that it's difficult to avoid, even when we would consciously want to do so. When I started getting angry about the Conservative government here in the UK I had to remember that my beloved father had voted them in! Though he was not the person I was thinking of when I was thinking of Them (Tory-voters) and this caused some kind of glitch in my brain every time I reminded myself, it was a helpful way of breaking the thought.
Very true, personal experiences can be quite powerful in disrupting the Us/Them thinking.
Yeah I often have to remind myself of the conservative friends and family I love. I keep reminding myself not to make assumptions about someone's personality based on their political label. 😅 Just as not all of us leftists are "militant" (a stereotype of us), not all right wingers are racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.
A conservative Christian friend, strangely enough, has "conservative beliefs about gender and sexuality" (her words). But her actions are actually very supportive. She never once deadnamed me and always used the correct pronouns and gender markers for me. She even asked me how to better support trans folks. For one of my birthdays, she bought me a razor, since I would have to learn how to shave soon, LOL.
Yes, we should know people by all their actions, not just their voting actions! So important to find the good in people (and agreement with them) despite some areas of disagreement.
Yes, as Timoyhy Leary's theory of mind says the creation of kids in different enviroments and travels expands the mind... The emergency of the global individual
Thanks for this wonderful article, Katie! I often complain about why people keep getting into these tribal mindsets. Even among people you'd think would be "on the same side," you still see them drawing lines and making enemies of each other, sigh.
For instance, some of us change sexual orientation labels as we learn more about ourselves, or things just change for us. It is simply our own business and our own sexuality. But people get so hostile about this. I used to identify as straight because I didn't know any better (and got my gender wrong). Later, I identified as bisexual. But after taking testosterone for my gender transition, my feelings changed somewhat (this is a common experience for people transitioning), so I identified as gay.
But now...uhhh... I'm having some rather serious crushes on friends of the opposite / different gender. So calling myself gay doesn't seem right anymore. I could go back to bisexual (or pansexual), but this could lead people to think I'm more attracted to the opposite/ different gender than I really am. Since these opposite gender feelings are still rare. So I'm just calling myself queer for now.
Nobody has said anything mean to me so far, thankfully. I just get nervous about people thinking that I betrayed the gay tribe, or I refused to join the bi tribe, or whatever. In reality, I'm just sorting through the different labels, considering the emotional and cultural connotations, and deciding for myself which label fits best. (Homoflexible is the best one of me but hardly anyone has heard of it.) I'm probably a 4 on Kinsey's scale, haha. But it sure would be nice if we can do this self-exploration without the fear of people thinking we're "betraying" them or "too good to be with them", etc.
Thank you for sharing your journey and for the kind words! I think quite a lot of us are figuring things out as we go, even if we don’t always admit it, since society expects us to have everything sorted before we even get the chance to fully understand ourselves. It's a shame. But it's also a shame there's still so much tribal thinking today, including in spaces that you'd think would be free of it by now.
I don't think I realised you were a fellow expat! Hearing about your family's experience offers a strong perspective. I have gathered my favourite articles about migrant life and shared them in my latest post, feel free to check them out! https://open.substack.com/pub/barbshoneycutt/p/bonus-the-postcard-club-on-substack?r=2puiwd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thank you for sharing the article!
Great article. Best I’ve come across in a while. My professor in school wrote a book Why They Don’t Hate Us. If I remember there was emphasis on they and us
Thank you, glad you appreciated it!
Interesting discussion of tribalism, and wheels within wheels. Gossip groups. Clubs. Business buddies. Mulitias.
Being able to draw a boundary between groups of people and then think about their experiences of life separately is actually life-saving sometimes.
Eg in abusive heterosexual relationships, women often feel isolated and think “it’s just me.” When we discover blogs like yours, we go, “omg it’s not just me! It’s so many women! Over centuries! And so many men acting in this way!” Sociological analysis helps us feel less alone but to do it we do have to draw a distinction somehow. (Of course there’s a difference between “difference” and “duality” where the former is possibly objectively neutral and the latter connotes a hierarchy of some kind “we are better than them “ etc).
There’s a lot of paradoxical rhetoric from the right around unity and “they’re trying to divide us and pit us against each other with all this talk of sexism and racism, making women hate men and everyone hate white people …and we end up spending all this energy fighting each other that we have no energy left to fight the real bad guys: the elites. We are all human! Unite!”
It’s of course paradoxical because as you say there are clearly groups that are being othered: immigrants, elites etc.
But it’s kind of impossible to avoid for any analysis of anything. Even this article is “othering” in some way: there are the good guys (people who refuse to other) and there are the bad guys (people who other, like trump and his supporters)
I like the idea of the call to spend more time with people different to us to see their humanity but so often this can be co-opted by the more powerful party to centre themselves. Eg men and women talking together, or in intimate relationships spend TONS of time together but it ends up with the woman seeing the man’s humanity, giving him the benefit of the doubt, asking herself if she’s being kind / generous/ forgiving enough, giving so much emotional labour…and the man often treating women as unreliable, emotional, uncaring, manipulative (hostile sexism) or weak, incompetent, in need of men (benevolent sexism). The less powerful party is socialised into seeing everyone’s humanity, the more powerful party is not.
“Race realists” would use this research to say “see? See? DEI and woke is disarming us from natures protections!”
Or something.
Everywhere I look it's the so-called liberals doing the censoring, using inflammatory language and canceling anyone who dares disagree with them. Accusing conservatives of disinformation/misinformation even though so much of liberal media was blatantly lying. I was once a die-hard, radical feminist liberal and proud of it. Now the labels don't mean anything. Now, I judge by actions not words.
Since the pandemic, I've experienced a much broader view of people, including Donald Trump, whom i never cared for before and I've found that those on the right are far MORE tolerant than the left. Heck radical feminists calling out the atrocities of transing children were vilified by the left but welcomed to share their stories, evidence and concerns on CONSERVATIVE platforms. This is why people are now flocking to the right. They, for the most part walk the talk and fight for free speech.
There's much that I don't like about conservative politics, but I'm discovering that politics has been completely taken over by corporations, the military industrial complex, pharmaceutical companies. The people have almost no voice and the liberals have abandoned their base. Conservatives, oddly, have taken up their cause and even minimally given them a platform. I'm ashamed of what liberals have done throughout the pandemic.
Yeah this upside down world gives me a headache!
Before, the right used to be all about authoritarianism, following rules, order, family/the collective, responsibility. And the left was about hippy dippy, free love, individualism with everyone free to express themselves, gay and lesbian rights, free speech, freedom.
Then somewhere along the way, the left became about the collective, responsibility, authoritarianism. And the right became all about freedom, free markets, free trade, free speech, individualism…
There’s this story about how the devil took the truth and “reorganised” it so that the left got a bunch of values and the right got a bunch of values. If you reject what the devil offers, you reject the truth. If you accept what he offers, you go along with the half-truth which is kind of a lie…https://reneejg.net/2023/11/the-silver-tongued-devil-and-the-principle-of-distortion/
I tried reading this article to a right wing family member (I hadn't pre-read it but decided to take the risk anyway), and as soon as I got to mentioning the emotional rhetoric of right wingers and Trump, she flipped out and told me that was a leftist lie and that Trump has never used violent rhetoric, and I had to stop reading because it turned into an argument about immigration. On the one hand, her yelling about "different cultures" and how immigrants are terrorizing the West and raping and murdering all over, and me trying and failing to break down the nuances to undercut the sweeping generalizations (which she wasn't happy about). So, I'll finish reading now that I've escaped, but it sort of just proves the point I guess.
Really enjoyed this post, Katie.
I find this topic fascinating. Categorising information (including people) has its benefits, such as helping us to make sense of the world, but as you highlight any real or perceived differences can lead to snap judgements as well as discrimination.
Tajfel and Turner stressed that we have to balance our personal identity and social identities, which can also come into conflict too, so that makes things even more challenging. Their work was pre-Internet/social media obvs, so I would be curious what their thoughts be now.
Great article once again, Katie. A timely/timeless topic. Tribalism is the basis of competition for power and curiously very practiced in religions. The world has become extremely complex and rather than collaborate on progress, innovation and envisioning a better place as our environment changes - we just us/them - competing for the bigger piece of the pie. Humans have always been very judgemental as part of this tribalism. That's likely to confirm biases?
“ You can just imagine my conservative parents’ shock when, at the age of 8 or 9, I asked why we need to have borders at all. ‘It’s all just lines in the dirt anyway,’ I remember saying. To be honest, my views on this haven’t changed much since. And I still frequently wonder: Why do we continuously divide ourselves? Why can’t we first and foremost acknowledge and cherish that we’re all from here, from this planet?”
Whenever asked what nationality or race I am, I answer HUMAN.
As to boarders, our body is a boarder.
Do we want to allow anyone or everyone access?
Our dwelling is a boarder.
Do we want to allow everyone to simply walk in and take control???