Finding Your Tribe

One of the ways we choose between good and evil is by choosing our tribe—the people who are like us, and we want to be like, and who influence us and our way of thinking.
(Second in a series that starts >here<)
Turning to evil as an Individual is one thing, but most of us aren’t as individual as all that. Most of us join a tribe somewhere along the way. If I’m a technical nerd, I join the other nerds. We talk jargon to each other. We drill deep into odd issues that no one else cares about. We tell obscure jokes to each other and laugh out of proportion to the joke.
The same politically. If I’m on the Left, I have a set of attitudes which attracted me to the Left in the first place. But then it’s a self-reinforcing cycle. I make a community with others on the Left. We tell jokes and communicate opinions to each other. If my opinion reinforces our mutual world view, others praise me. I like that—it shows me that I must have been right, and it feels good to have my community hold me in high regard. So my opinion is reinforced. My people seem even more right, and people with opposing views seem even more wrong. The epistemic circle closes.
This just happens. It’s how people operate. So we can ask how to break out of that circle—and as fully realized human beings it’s our responsibility to work to do so—but the more interesting question for now is, how did we choose our tribe in the first place? What are the values of the tribe and are they helpful? If my tribe wanders down some dark alley (anti-Semitism, slavery, authoritarianism, you name it) I’m very likely to go with them. So choosing a tribe becomes critical because their values are likely to become my values. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. With which dogs shall I lie?
Nerds value information, facts, and connections between facts. Knowing it all and getting it right. Scientists, who are generally nerds, value objectively provable facts. Sufficient commitment to these values can even cause people to change opinions, which is notoriously difficult to do. There’s the case of the statistician who was convinced that climate change was wrong and that the ecologists who were promoting the theory were simply bad at crunching numbers. He went deep into the climate science and came out convinced that not only were the ecologists right, but they were actually understating the problem.
So I could argue that nerds have a built-in immunity to evil (to the extent that evil is unnatural). I could argue they would see that obviously blacks are people, that Jews do not own the global financial system, that Russia is behind the hacks into our systems.
But that does not seem to be true. Many on the Right are total nerds. I know these guys. They’re not stupid. They’ll bury you in supposed facts pulled from Fox News and right-wing blogs. They’ll explain how these “facts” correlate, building up to some giant conspiracy or hidden explanation for why the world is fucked up. And they’ll be totally impervious to actual facts, choosing to disbelieve those because of their source. Because they don’t come from their tribe.
Loyalty to the tribe—or better, identity with the tribe—outweighs other values. And so we march with our brothers and sisters to perdition.
(To be continued.)

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