You've probably experienced a moment in your own life with a friend, family member, or stranger where you're trying to lay out simple facts about a thing but the information is going in from one ear and out of the other. The person you're debating is dead-set on not agreeing with you, your stance, or the ideology your points come from because they're of the opposite mind. They cannot be convinced.
The person isn't debating to debate. They're arguing to be right.
You find this happening a lot when it comes to political arguments. Something about politics sets a person's opinion in stone and they're willing to defend their own ideas and opinions to the point of embarrassment. Being wrong about something concerning politics is, in many people's minds, akin to being wrong about themselves as a person.
Politics causes an interesting sort of tribalism that few other subjects cause us to partake in. Tribalism is a natural part of the human psyche. We form communities based on our preferences on anything from movie genres to brands of cookware. However, nothing gets our defensiveness up quite like politics does.
The issue is that in the modern era, the level of tribalism we've gotten to has become incredibly destructive.
As Bonchie reported on Saturday, Bill Maher of all people pointed out how our extreme tribalism has now affected children:
There's a certain kind of activist these days who wants to take heterosexuality, old school, old fashioned, boring, minding its own business heterosexuality, and lump it in with patriarchy and sexism and racism and tell kids, "Wouldn't it be cool if you were anything but that?" It also seems to be the theme of kind of a lot of kids' books these days. I never used the phrase "gay agenda" because I thought it was mostly nonsense, and it is, mostly, but a director for Disney television animation didn't say after she was hired...
DISNEY EXECUTIVE: The showrunners were super welcoming to, like, my, like, not at all secret gay agenda. Like, I was just, wherever I could, just basically adding queerness. No one would stop me, and no one was trying to stop me.
MAHER: Look, I'm all for adding queerness wherever. I put some in my drink before I cam out here today. (Laughter). But maybe we should think about giving kids a break from our culture wars for a minute, or at least until the election is over.
Bonchie follows up by giving Maher props for pointing out how wrong it is for this to happen, but chides Maher for trying to seek some sort of middle-ground by claiming the "gay agenda" isn't real. It demonstrably is, and it's a bit too successful.
And it's only successful because of a ridiculous amount of spite that's been generated in this country for some time between political parties. Where does all that spite come from? Not from just one place. Personal relationships, corporate media, the arts, and school all have a massive influence on how someone views the world and the prejudices they develop over time.
But the sad part is that we've become so accustomed to tribalism that many of us don't stop to think about what that level of disdain for another group causes. We know where it leads. We've seen it throughout history. It's never good.
Case in point, we now have radical leftists in the LGBT community who are attempting to target the youth of America for indoctrination because they believe if they don't, then America will destroy them. Why do they think America will destroy them? Their own tribalism convinced them of such a thing. They pervert the youth, a great evil thing, in good conscience because they believe they're saving lives by doing it; best of all, they get to hurt the people who they claim hate them at the same time.
Their tribalism has gotten them to believe they're mixing duty and pleasure.
But the right isn't wholly innocent of this either. There are people who are so hateful of Donald Trump that they're willing to hand the country over to the Democrats. While one is definitely not required to like Donald Trump at all, the proof that this country can't endure another four years of Democrat rule is pretty obvious. A wet paper bag full of pond scum would be better than Biden, but spite for Trump is so intense in some, for one reason or another, that they're willing to turn their backs on the alternative. They reinforce their beliefs through a developed tribal attitude with others.
This isn't an attempt to sway people to vote for Trump who don't want to. If you have legitimate reasons for wanting to vote for someone other than Trump, then fine. Do so. I simply want to point out that not voting for Trump out of spite is not going to do you any favors.
It's easy to see how a sort of blindness forms whenever you become so entrenched in an idea that you're willing to go to great lengths to stay entrenched. The only way to move in these situations is further downward, and there's very little to find in the dark.
