Tribal hatreds around me mean detour on road to personal peace

By David McElroy · June 17, 2021

There are some lessons that I have to keep learning over and over again. It seems as though those are the life lessons which constantly break my heart.

I’m an idealist at heart. I can’t help it. I want to believe the best of others. There’s an ideal world that I see in my mind. Everybody gets along. Everybody is reasonable. Nobody uses force to get his way. We’re all free individuals, understanding that others should be allowed to make their own voluntary choices.

But ugly reality keeps intruding on my idealistic visions. People don’t understand those who don’t think or look or act like them. They band together in primitive tribal groups to oppose one another. They’re willing to use force — even to kill others — to ensure that others obey what they believe is right.

That idealistic part of me grew up believing that I could use reason and persuasion to show others the value of what I believed. But I was wrong. The tribes hate each other. The last thing they’re interested in is understanding one another.

And I’m broken-hearted each time I realize this — and again when I understand what it means for my future.

Anybody who still believes that reason changes the course of public discourse today hasn’t been paying attention. Political and social discussion is strongly dominated by hateful people who stir up the emotions of those who refuse to think clearly for themselves. Then those angry people go online and repeat the hate and anger they’ve learned from the demagogues.

More and more, I find trolls and idiots indistinguishable on social media. That’s because these angry people repeat the idiocy they’ve been taught — and it’s hard to believe that anyone could be so stupid as to believe what they’re saying. I would actually feel better to learn they were simply trolls stirring up trouble for fun.

But the nightmarish conclusion I have to accept is that these angry people believe what they’re spouting — and they have no ability anymore to think critically or to rationally question what they’ve been taught.

They become mindless mobs online — and they slowly bring their hatred into their real lives as well, as they band together into tribes which believe they have all the answers and deserve to force others to obey them.

One of the biggest disappointments I’ve had in life is the realization that human nature leads every group to ultimately operate on the basis of group conformity. The more people are in the group, the higher the need for conformity seems to become.

And the people in these groups don’t even understand this is happening to them. They become mindless sheep who follow the marching orders of their tribe. And they will allow no dissent.

I made the mistake last night of responding rationally and calmly to some progressives on Reddit who were hooting and hollering about those “stupid people” who don’t like “critical race theory.” They were generally just as rabidly irrational and nasty as Trump populists online have become.

It was depressing.

I haven’t written much that’s political in the last few years, but I recently wrote two political pieces. The first was an indictment of the barbarian left which is taking our society over a cliff with deadly ideas which are going to lead to death and destruction for all as we descend into more identity politics.

The other piece was an indictment of the populist right. It was about how the conservative movement has slowly lost its way, as conservatives turned away from their commitment to individual freedom, especially in their recent insane embrace of the very non-conservative Donald Trump.

I got hate mail about each one of these pieces, but if you did a Venn diagram of the angry writers, there was absolutely no overlap between them. Left-leaning folks wrote me about the first one to call me a Trump-lover — and Trump crazies wrote about the second one to tell me I’m a communist.

Reading comprehension is a lost art, but even more than that, few people are willing to question their own ideas — and to question whether maybe they’ve followed someone who’s leading them to their own destruction. Apparently, If I’m not with them, I must be part of that evil tribe on the other side.

I already know that I can’t bridge the divide between these tribes — or all the many sub-tribes which revolve around those. I’ve known for a long time that this country is going to fall apart in time, but I could never conceive until recently exactly what it would look like.

In the last year or so, I’ve started seeing what it’s going to look like, whenever it gets here. And I understand that there’s nothing I can do to stop it. All I can do is try to escape the mayhem — because so few people are willing to listen to ideas which could allow us to live in peace among each other.

I’ve struggled for a long time with how to describe myself politically these days, because I’m no longer a part of any of the groups. I know better than to join a tribe. I know better than to allow myself to get sucked into being a part of the hatred which consumes more and more of us.

I’m just a pragmatist who no longer has even the slightest bit of faith in any statist system. I’m someone who’s just looking for a plan to save himself when this dysfunctional society collapses into a mass of violent chaos.

All I can do now is to find a few others who will see the same threat — and join me in trying to escape the mass destruction that lies ahead for a country which I used to love dearly.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

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