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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Not sure, but Laura Southern had a moment like this and documented it for the world to read.
That article tried to "both sides" so hard it made my brain hurt.
"I was a liberal, now I'm a conservative; she's a fascist and she's still a fascist but she's upset that fascists are being fascist towards HER - do we have anything in common?"
Spoiler: yes.
That was a really interesting read with a lot more expansion and nuance than I expected at first, thanks!
For those reading it’s a lot more thorough than simply “right wing men beat women” or something. Worth checking out
It's a challenge.
Southern is still a complex (and, for me, thoroughly unlikable) person with odious views, but it's an interesting journey if for no other reason than you can see just how powerful a force tribalism is in human psychology; how it lets people get right up to the point of dealing with the incongruity of their tribe versus their safety/well-being/reality.
The other place I saw this is in watching the flat-Earther documentary Behind the Curve: there's moments in it when you can see people get within a hair's breath of rationalization, but get held back not by stupidity, or ignorance, but tribalism.
We make a big mistake in thinking that the reason people are the way they are because of ignorance or stupidity. That's not it; they are the way they are because human tribalism has millions of years of success behind it. Up until, oh, the last hundred years or so, ostracism meant real death, so our monkey brains, though millions of years of selection, developed group cohesion and social strategies to help us stay within our in-group. Unfortunately, in the last century or so, that tribal instinct is proving maladaptive.
It's a little like how we're evolved to process sugar, which has hundreds of millions of positive evolutionary enforcement, only to fail at the outside-context problem that is McDonalds & Coca Cola.
I’m actually very much of the same mindset as you. For instance, I often frame QAnon folks, particularly those who are not on YouTube profiting, as victims. Something is wrong in their life and a bad person sold them incorrect solution, but a solution all the same.
A problem for the people in politics and on social media who are profiting off it without believing in it is that, eventually, either Hamlet syndrome kicks in and you start believing it, or the fascist followers you've been yoking get out of control and you need to start doing actual Nazi stuff to save your own skin.
There’s nothing unique about it, and the problem is indeed more general. If I had to sum it up in one word, I’d say empathy. The alt-right lacks empathy. Expecting empathy from an alt-right husband just isn’t realistic.