Those Two Tribes
In Rationalist Diaspora pretty much everyone is familiar with the concepts of “Red Tribe” and “Blue Tribe”, and probably at least some of the counterarguments as well, such as “there are more than two kinds of people”. Such criticisms are obviously true, but what’s interesting is the way there seems to kind of actually be two kinds of people, or more accurately, a spectrum which replicates surprisingly consistently in various places and on which most people are positioned somewhere in between but a certain polarization with its archetypes nonetheless appears.
For example, I’m a very Blue person, with moderately Blue parents, born into a thoroughly Red shithole in the Bible Belt of Finland. I was immediately able to recognize this meta-level pattern despite the object-level manifestations differing quite a lot. Around here they are called “Red-Green” and “Blue-White”; I’ll just use “U” and “R” from now on.
Tribe R is relatively uniform, so much that it makes sense to call it a tribe. They yearn for the mythical “yhtenäiskulttuuri” (homogeneity culture) of before-tribe-U-ruined-it. They are white; working class, lower middle class, or petty bourgeois; and more likely men. They vote for the Fascist Party, the Redneck Party, or the Christian Theocrats. They love national symbolism.
Tribe U is better described as a vague coalition of everything that isn’t tribe R. They range from communists to civilized conservatives; precariat to bankers. Disproportionately women. The Green Party is the central example but the Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party, the Swedish Party, the Social Bureaucratic Party, and the Crony Capitalist Party are tribe U as well; support for gay marriage is pretty much exactly the dividing line. They tend to be vaguely embarrassed by national symbolism.
R treats the military as a matter of identity, and enthusiastically supports conscription. They are either militaristic neutral or pro-Russia. U treats the military pacifistically or pragmatically; they support disarmament or NATO.
R opposes the EU on principle; sovereign countries’ rights is a big deal, borders should’ve been closed to foreigners and immigrants even before the arrival of a few thousand brown people made it widely popular, and getting back the old national currency is important. U is pro-EU, or “pro-the-ideas-of-EU-but-not-the-implementation”. Borders should be more open, and immigration easier. Refugees shouldn’t be turned away even if they aren’t eligible for protection.
R is mercantilist; U believes in either free trade, or fair trade which is effectively an extension of foreign aid.
R believes in authority, discipline, obedience, conformity, and tradition. R thinks the problem with today’s kids is their relative inexperience of physical abuse. R wants criminals to be punished severely. U is against all that. U errs on the side of giving people a second chance, and their control of the criminal justice system has so far kept it absurdly lenient in Finland (the one thing I can actually be proud of in this country!). R wants to legislate conformity; U wants to legislate tolerance.
R is xenophobic, U is neophilic. R is fundamental attribution error, U is typical mind fallacy. R thinks people are inherently what they are, while U is prone to blank-slatism.
R is nazism, U is stalinism. R is genocide, U is eugenics. R calls you slurs, U is extremely politically correct while buying a house as far away from you as possible because of “property values”. When an islamist terrorist attack happens, R is very eager to deport all Muslims while U apologizes for causing it (if you’ve seen the “bad Monty Python sketch” post about a European liberal frustrating an islamist by being like “no no no it’s all our fault" it’s exactly how U operates and I’m U enough to be like “yes, I can see why it would appear funny when presented this way but I can’t see why one should not do it").
U correlates with wealth, and U wants to share the wealth. R thinks U’s wealth should be used locally within the country because people should take care of their own kind first. U thinks refugees are more of its own kind than R-tribers. R complains of poor people living on the taxpayer’s money while themselves subsisting on massive regional and agricultural subsidies, paid by U cities.
R feels threatened by their enemy U which wants to destroy their way of life. U treats tribe R as a public memetic health problem to be solved, and wants to eradicate it like hookworm infections. U thinks the only reason people are R is a bad environment, lack of education, poverty, etc. and R should be cured by removing the cause.
R is characterized by a frightened hostility, while U is characterized by a smug superiority. U thinks U is obviously the right way of being, and can whip out a lot of ~science~ and ~statistics~ to support ideas like “children should not be physically abused”. R can only say “fuck you” because it knows it can’t beat U in its own game. U is higher-IQ but also often reluctant to concede that IQ means anything.
False consciousness is a very U idea. When U leftists are sympathetic towards poor Rs, they still show a fundamental disrespect towards R values by explaining that R is only racist because they are downtrodden by global capitalism, and without global capitalism they would turn into the proper multiculturalist U-leftists they should be, and that’s the most U thing ever. An informed adult willingly not being U is simply impossible.
Something seems to be going on, and it’s far deeper than soy latte vs. NASCAR. Some of it is obviously class, but there is still quite a lot that isn’t. It’s definitely not left vs. right because both tribes have their own internal left-right distinctions. “Openness to experience”, aka liberalism, is a big factor; but why would liberalism cause a “we know better than you” attitude. I’m slightly actually confused.
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