Steven Pinker: How Tribal Politics Can Make You An Idiot

It's very fascinating to me these sort of mindsets that you see on the left and on the right, that there's certain subjects that if you support that subject, you are automatically thought of as a left-winger. If you support this subject, you're automatically thought of as a right. If you were on the right, you probably think in some way, like there's... If someone says to me that they think that climate change is probably an overblown thing and it's a cycle that the world has been going through forever, I go, oh, you're a right-winger. And you'd be right. Yeah, almost always. Always, always. And if you think, you know, all gay people should be allowed to get married, who cares? Oh, you're probably a left-winger. That was probably true 10 years ago and it's actually less true now. That's one of these amazing changes. So sometimes there can be these changes that just catch us all by surprise. And gay marriage is one of them. I mean, that was like, even people on the left had misgivings about climate change. But gay marriage, I'm sorry, in the 90s. It was still something that a lot of people on the left were kind of had that, let's not go that far, maybe it's just civil unions or, you know, now the whole, the country is flipped. But in general, so these changes can happen. But you're right that a lot of opinions are just loyalty badges to a coalition. And they can sometimes change in very strange ways. So we've seen it in the last year or so with Donald Trump, who is in many ways a pretty radical right-winger in things like, what do you think, what's your opinion of Russia? Now, for decades, if you're on the right, you mistrusted Russia. And if you're on the left, they, you know, they weren't so bad, they misunderstood. Now it's like totally flipped and opinions on whether you trust Russia just because of the influence of Donald Trump have shifted. So the people on the right are more sympathetic to Russia, something that would have been almost unthinkable a couple, even 10 years ago. Free trade is another example. It was kind of a right-wing cause. And then Trump managed to flip it. So what it shows is, I mean, where I'm going with this, and this is something that I've, where I've changed my mind. I used to think they were these ideologies, kind of like religious catechisms, where these are the beliefs that follow from one another. But a lot of it is just raw tribalism. Just like, you know, in sports, the players churn through the rosters with free agency. And, you know, he used to be a good guy. Well, now he's on the other team. Now he's a bad guy. You know, as Jerry Seinfeld once said, you're rooting for clothing. And that kind of happens with political ideologies as well, to everyone's shock. Yeah, the tribalism thing is very, very confusing to me, because you could see it, like it's such an obvious pattern. And that when it plays out, like, you know, with a global warming thing, I was having a conversation with a guy in my jiu-jitsu class, and I'll never forget this. And he was like, ah, it's been, it's a cycle, you know, it's a cycle, global warming. And then the climate change has always been a cycle. And, you know, the people that say that it's not, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. How much have you studied those? Are you scientists? Like, I don't know a lot about global warming. I don't know a lot about climate change. But I know what I've read. And it seems to me to be a very complex issue. And I'm talking to this 25 year old guy, who is in the military, who's telling me it's this, I mean, do you have an education in this? Like, no, I'm like, well, why did you just automatically like, decide that this is it? We're talking about the very temperature of the planet. That's kind of a big deal. Like, this is complex. And what is causing it? Is it a carbon monoxide thing? Is it a, I mean, what, why do you just automatically subscribe to this? And it's because that's how his tribe communicates. This is how his tribe. And that it gives people comfort to be in these weird little groups where everybody has group think. Yeah. And this is a, I talk about this phenomenon in enlightenment now, because it's a book that argues for the importance of reason and how there has been progress thanks to application of reason. And a natural pushback is, well, you look at things like that, we don't seem so reasonable as a species. How can you, what's going on that we're getting, we seem to be getting less reasonable? And I think the answer is there's reason can work in, for different goals. And here I'm using the ideas of a Yale scholar named Daniel Kahane, where he notes a perverse way in which there's actually is a kind of rationality to that kind of belief. Namely, when you vote, what are the chances that your vote is really going to swing the election? Pretty close to zero. On the other hand, when you express an opinion in your peer group, the people you work with, your family, what are the chances that holding the wrong opinion will lead you to be kind of condemned and ostracized and treated as a real weirdo, very high. So if everyone thinks, what opinion is going to help my esteem in the people I care about, they can latch on to all kinds of beliefs if they've become kind of identity badges for their tribe. This is rational in terms of the world they live in. It's not so rational for the planet as a whole if people just subscribe to beliefs based on tribal loyalty instead of truth. And the challenge is, how do we align beliefs more with truth and less with tribal loyalty? Now it's not hopeless because there are a lot of beliefs that people used to have that have been overturned. People don't believe in unicorns anymore, or alchemy, and fewer people believe in astrology. And a lot of scientific issues are, there's no controversy, do antibiotics work? Yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter whether you're on the right or the left. So part of the challenge is, how do we get more and more of our beliefs to be, to have our social norms be such that if you believe something just because you're on the right or on the left, then you're an idiot. What you should be doing is looking at the best possible study with an open mind. That's what a cool person does, and only an idiot just parrots the right wing line. That's the kind of social change we need to aim for. Right, just almost a shaming of that kind of ignorance. This desire that people have to subscribe to a predetermined pattern of thinking and behaving, because it's comforting. It's comforting that, you know, and also like they know that other people on their group will also think like that. It's like, if you're in the right, one of the things about you see about right wingers is kind of hilarious. I was watching this Kyle Kuklinski secular talk podcast where he was talking about this, these Christians who were talking about Trump, and when you are on the right, you must have a belief in God. You just have to. And when they were talking about Trump, they were saying, we're talking about the man that existed before he accepted Jesus. You know, I don't have a, the guy was literally saying, I don't have a past. Okay, how about you? Because I've accepted Jesus Christ into my life. And that once you accept Jesus Christ, like you are now a believer in Christ and you're forgiven for all of your past sins. And this is on the right. There's a giant percentage of the people that are on the right that subscribe to a religious Christian mindset. It is fascinating. And especially when it comes to our current president, who by any standards is like the least Christian leader that we've ever had. Yeah, in the past. He's accepted Jesus now. He doesn't have a past. Well, yeah, but he's still, you know, I mean, the Christian virtues include things like, you know, modesty, compassion for the weak, temperance, chivalry, gentlemanliness. And this guy is lewd and vain, glorious and arrogant and contemptuous for losers. But with shows, again, kind of going back to our discussion, it's just amazing how much of loyalty doesn't have to do with the actual content of the beliefs. It's just whoever's on my side. And of course, he promised a lot of perks for the religious right, like the repeal of the amendment that tax-exempt organizations can't engage in politics and in lobbying, the so-called the Johnson Amendment, which meant that if you're a church, if you don't pay taxes, you can't be politically active. Well, they didn't like that. And he promised to repeal that amendment. And so he got their loyalty. And so it's just raw political muscle kind of overcame Christian virtue. So bizarre. So bizarre. Yeah. But it's fascinating to watch just these patterns, these tribal ideological patterns, when you see these groups that have this sort of one mindset and this very clear... And they can flip. Another example, and people forget this, is take environmentalism, you know, got a quintessential, you know, left green cause. Not so long ago, it was the other way around, is actually considered to be a cause of the right. Why? Well, if you are a left-wing activist in the 60s, you would say, well, the only people concerned with the environment are rich people who like the view from their country estates, and they don't want them to be spoiled by, you know, being cut down for apartments for poor people. Or they're duck hunters who want to be able to go and hunt ducks. And if you're really socially concerned, you should care about Vietnam and racism and poverty. It's just a luxury to worry about, you know, trees and flowers and ducks. Now that flipped. And then environmentalism became a left-wing cause, but these connections between your coalition and your beliefs aren't set in stone. Yeah. Wasn't it in the beginning of the forming of the political parties, it was... Democrats were very different, and Republicans are more like Democrats. Oh, yeah. Well, starting with Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, and they were the, of course, they were the party against slavery. And in fact, even in my lifetime, through the 60s, in the South, the Democrats were the right-wing kind of racist party. I mean, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, who said, segregation now, segregation forever, he was a Democrat. He formed his own party in 68. Then back in 72, he ran for the Democratic nomination, and the Southern Democrats were the kind of the right-wingers. It was often the Northeast Republicans who were the liberals. That's still partly true in Massachusetts. We have a little bit of a remnant of that. We've had some liberal Republican governors. We have one right now, Charlie Baker, who's a Republican, and he's pretty moderate in the middle of the road. William Weld, who was then the Libertarian vice presidential candidate. He was a Republican. Even when Mitt Romney was our governor, he was not particularly conservative. He was a Republican. So there's the remnant of that in Massachusetts. There used to be a little bit of that in New York, where there were liberal Republicans. But yeah, that's a case where it's flipped, and now, Democrat equals left of center, Republican right of center.