Better Dead Than B
(Group A Forever ! ! ! )
As a right thinking member of Group A, I know that all of our societies ills are the fault of Group B. Of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of things we disagree on, it is clear to me that Group A holds the correct position on each and every one. It is purely a coincidence that there are an almost exactly equal number of people who support the ideas of Group B – holding the exact opposite position on these issues. The only explanation for this large group getting every single issue exactly wrong is that half of all people are smart and half stupid.
Now, occasionally someone in group B will say something that I am forced to agree with, and occasionally it may seem like one of THEM is actually also a smart person. The explanation for this is that it is a trick. If you are smart enough to see deeper to the subtext, they are saying true stuff, not because they think that important truths need to be said, but because it is a way to make Group A look bad. Or, if one of them is smart, they are also evil and just say what they do for personal gain, not because they believe it. So instead of looking for common ground in what appears to be a shared truth, or stopping to consider why another person sees the world differently than I do, the smart thing to do is defend OUR position by shouting them down.
To give any one of THEM credit for either good intent or valid insight would add support to the positions they hold that I do not agree with, so instead I must claim that they are only saying true things for false reasons. Then I must bring up all the bad stuff I blame on their group and try to shift the argument to the issues that I feel most comfortable arguing that make me more sure that everything my group believes is the truth – even though all the issues are not logically connected and I have just put them in the same mental bucket labeled “things Group A believes” so that I can just think about the ones I am really sure about and conclude from those ideas, that all of the others that I don’t have time to think about, because they are more complicated, must also be true.
Now I know that some people actually claim to have a set of beliefs that holds some things that Group A believes and some things that Group B believes. While these people might be well meaning in some cases (like situations where they agree with me on a particular issue) my below the surface analysis reveals to me that they are really just deluded tools of Group B.
It is important to me that there only are two possible sides, and that all the various positions held on various issues by my side must be right and the other side must always be wrong. If this is not the case, then the whole group identity falls apart. If people can be right about some things and wrong about others, then there would really be millions of possibles “sides” and it is no longer US against THEM with a large, easily understandable enemy and many many good friends, but rather, it might turn out that it is just me alone, and a lot of other people who are all individuals – not easily viewed as 100% friends or 100% enemy – 100% right or 100% wrong.
It might even turn out that on some issues there are no 100% right answers that work for everybody – that sometimes I don’t know best – that sometimes nobody knows best, and that the best thing to do is actually let people act according to their own hearts, rather than trying to set a single rule for everyone to follow. It might even turn out that this is true for almost every issue that divides us into groups…
And that would be very scary and confusing.