PG's "Keep Your Identity Small" should be required reading in high school / college: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.

PG's "Keep Your Identity Small" should be required reading in high school / college: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html Unfortunately, humans are to some extent intrinsically tribal (when Haidt calls us "90% ape, 10% beehive", I think he's being exceptionally generous). This is so pervasive in our nature, it tends to be unconscious: if I consider an existential crisis for the opposing political party to win, I'll likely filter my thinking to that end, minimizing faults and maximizing virtues in my party, and doing the opposite with my opponents. As they do the same, it creates a race to the bottom, and all norms and decorum and fairness go out the window, in pursuit of victory and raw power. Jason Brennan makes a compelling case [0] that democracy makes this problem worse. A lot can be chalked up to our electoral process being an utter failure of implementing democracy, from campaign finance corruption to First-Past-The-Post (to say nothing of more advanced ideas like holacracy, liquid democracy, public choice econ, etc); nonetheless, there's a case that the tribal dynamics inherent to politics creates perverse incentives for truth-seeking and sense-making. I'm starting to think that democracy is only the second-worst system (except for all the others), and we'd get better results with a completely random lottery [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Democracy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition