Meanings of political identities shift dramatically based on context, and you can’t manually confirm the beliefs of everyone present at your ‘gathering of people with x political identity’. To the extent that your political identity is based on Real Beliefs with Real Consequences, you should expect not to have much in common with many other people who declare the same identity when you move to a new place (or corner of the internet).
Example: In rural Southeast Texas, Confederate flags are a common sight, and my geometry teacher once told us about a cross burning he witnessed (which a few students murmured we really ought to bring back).
The majority of people genuinely hold at least one belief that, to many of my coastal-elite-descended friends, would seem comical. E.g., women should never have jobs and should rarely speak (especially in public), men with long hair are wanton or gay or trans or both, beating children (not like ‘spanking’ but like ‘anything short of broken bones’) is not only fine but your duty as afather, weed overdose not only can but will definitely kill you, megadoses of zinc can cure cancer, the covid vaccine is the mark of the beast from the book of revelation, high school football ought to be the most important thing in your life and, if it isn’t, you are not just odd but untrustworthy, and abortion doctors force-feed fetuses to geese to make fois gras for gay New Yorkers (of which the force feeding is the only ethical component).
Okay, I made up the last one, but the rest are actual positions I’ve heard espoused hundreds or thousands of times by people I met between the ages of 14 and 18.
Also many people talk like this, and everyone’s a ‘libertarian’.
My mom’s from a conservative California family with environmentalist sympathies, and we had something like 60 percent overlap in our views prior to the Texas move. However, I soon found that everyone around who wasn’t liable to drop one of these devastating truth bombs on me thought of themselves as somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders and read 20th century Marxist writings in their free time. Often these people would think leftist voices at the national scale were somewhat silly or focused on the wrong things (e.g. identity politics), but they nonetheless considered themselves closer to those views than to the other views present in their environs. (There was a democratic party around, but it was very different from the national democratic party for reasons I won’t address here.)
I assume most readers are in an environment more similar to my current environment (Berkeley, CA) than to Lumberton, TX, and so won’t explicate the delta.
I think there’s a lot of mind-killing that happens as a result of relying on a presumed shared vocabulary for political identities that does not exist. When I say something left-coded, my Rationalist Libertarian Interlocutor often reproaches me, and then as we talk more about it, they often conclude that I’m a ‘boring centrist like everybody else’ who uses the language of the left owing to some biographical quirk.
I submit instead that everyone’s sense of the political map is hopelessly warped due to biographical quirks, and that assuming an adversarial posture on the basis of someone’s declared political identity is often, and maybe even ~always, a mistake.
I think there’s a lot of mind-killing that happens as a result of relying on a presumed shared vocabulary for political identities that does not exist. When I say something left-coded, my Rationalist Libertarian Interlocutor often reproaches me, and then as we talk more about it, they often conclude that I’m a ‘boring centrist like everybody else’ who uses the language of the left owing to some biographical quirk.
I submit that the problem you are encountering is operating too much on simulacra level 3.
I honestly don’t give a rats ass what your “political identity” is. I care about your beliefs about the effects of different policies, your current beliefs about the world, and most of all your reasons for believing those things. Insofar as your “reasons” are in fact you self-modeling as “leftist”, “centrist”, “libertarian”, or some other label like that, you are clearly operating on simulacra level 3, and I stop caring.
That is to say that insofar as the majority of people have one or more of the items on that list of absurd beliefs you gave because they genuinely believe such things, they are dumb, and the only reason I’d care what they have to say is some morbid curiosity, or of course to argue against them (or both).
Insofar as the majority of people have one or more of the items on that list of absurd beliefs you gave because we simply lack a shared vocabulary for political identities, I again don’t care what they have to say. If they are actually trying to communicate to me that they think of themselves as a centrist, well, that claim has no impact on reality whatsoever, so who cares?
The same goes for people with stupid claims which read leftist.
The thing is that we do have shared vocabulary for things in the real world (excepting many technical terms, but one can just use Wikipedia or Claude for those), and there are not active social wars over what those real world words should mean (that laypeople ought to care about).
If you stick to simply precisely stating your beliefs and values (and reasons for having them), not only will you avoid the upsetting result of having others believe you are The Dreadded Outgoup!!! but you will also avoid meaningless conversations about which Hogwarts house political identity you are.
You wrote this comment in an adversarial tone but I Just Agree With You.
Indeed, this is an alternate formulation of the thesis of my post, and even uses language I used when characterizing the post itself to someone in the office ~2 hours ago.
Hm, I think the thing I disagree with, and was trying to argue against was that it is a good idea in the first place to even try to have a political map at all, nevermind to try to unwarp it.
The post is meant to be somewhat agnostic on the question—conditional on one has a map, here’s a common failure mode. It’s also meant to point in the direction of ‘reconsider the value of your map’.
Separately, I think I ~endorse your first comment, but I also think there are cases in which you should definitely have a map (eg you are attempting to achieve political ends). So I think your second comment is somewhat overstated.
I submit instead that everyone’s sense of the political map is hopelessly warped due to biographical quirks, and that assuming an adversarial posture on the basis of someone’s declared political identity is often, and maybe even ~always, a mistake.
The rest of the comment made sense but this feels sorta non-sequitor-ial. Maybe this is right, but, most of the things you said seemed like on average it would increase the amount I expected some kind of adversarial posture to make sense. (Except insofar as adversarial postures are basically not a good strategy, in which case it still doesn’t depend much on the rest of the contents of the quick take)
Meanings of political identities shift dramatically based on context, and you can’t manually confirm the beliefs of everyone present at your ‘gathering of people with x political identity’. To the extent that your political identity is based on Real Beliefs with Real Consequences, you should expect not to have much in common with many other people who declare the same identity when you move to a new place (or corner of the internet).
Example: In rural Southeast Texas, Confederate flags are a common sight, and my geometry teacher once told us about a cross burning he witnessed (which a few students murmured we really ought to bring back).
The majority of people genuinely hold at least one belief that, to many of my coastal-elite-descended friends, would seem comical. E.g., women should never have jobs and should rarely speak (especially in public), men with long hair are wanton or gay or trans or both, beating children (not like ‘spanking’ but like ‘anything short of broken bones’) is not only fine but your duty as a father, weed overdose not only can but will definitely kill you, megadoses of zinc can cure cancer, the covid vaccine is the mark of the beast from the book of revelation, high school football ought to be the most important thing in your life and, if it isn’t, you are not just odd but untrustworthy, and abortion doctors force-feed fetuses to geese to make fois gras for gay New Yorkers (of which the force feeding is the only ethical component).
Okay, I made up the last one, but the rest are actual positions I’ve heard espoused hundreds or thousands of times by people I met between the ages of 14 and 18.
Also many people talk like this, and everyone’s a ‘libertarian’.
My mom’s from a conservative California family with environmentalist sympathies, and we had something like 60 percent overlap in our views prior to the Texas move. However, I soon found that everyone around who wasn’t liable to drop one of these devastating truth bombs on me thought of themselves as somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders and read 20th century Marxist writings in their free time. Often these people would think leftist voices at the national scale were somewhat silly or focused on the wrong things (e.g. identity politics), but they nonetheless considered themselves closer to those views than to the other views present in their environs. (There was a democratic party around, but it was very different from the national democratic party for reasons I won’t address here.)
I assume most readers are in an environment more similar to my current environment (Berkeley, CA) than to Lumberton, TX, and so won’t explicate the delta.
I think there’s a lot of mind-killing that happens as a result of relying on a presumed shared vocabulary for political identities that does not exist. When I say something left-coded, my Rationalist Libertarian Interlocutor often reproaches me, and then as we talk more about it, they often conclude that I’m a ‘boring centrist like everybody else’ who uses the language of the left owing to some biographical quirk.
I submit instead that everyone’s sense of the political map is hopelessly warped due to biographical quirks, and that assuming an adversarial posture on the basis of someone’s declared political identity is often, and maybe even ~always, a mistake.
I submit that the problem you are encountering is operating too much on simulacra level 3.
I honestly don’t give a rats ass what your “political identity” is. I care about your beliefs about the effects of different policies, your current beliefs about the world, and most of all your reasons for believing those things. Insofar as your “reasons” are in fact you self-modeling as “leftist”, “centrist”, “libertarian”, or some other label like that, you are clearly operating on simulacra level 3, and I stop caring.
That is to say that insofar as the majority of people have one or more of the items on that list of absurd beliefs you gave because they genuinely believe such things, they are dumb, and the only reason I’d care what they have to say is some morbid curiosity, or of course to argue against them (or both).
Insofar as the majority of people have one or more of the items on that list of absurd beliefs you gave because we simply lack a shared vocabulary for political identities, I again don’t care what they have to say. If they are actually trying to communicate to me that they think of themselves as a centrist, well, that claim has no impact on reality whatsoever, so who cares?
The same goes for people with stupid claims which read leftist.
The thing is that we do have shared vocabulary for things in the real world (excepting many technical terms, but one can just use Wikipedia or Claude for those), and there are not active social wars over what those real world words should mean (that laypeople ought to care about).
If you stick to simply precisely stating your beliefs and values (and reasons for having them), not only will you avoid the upsetting result of having others believe you are The Dreadded Outgoup!!! but you will also avoid meaningless conversations about which
Hogwarts housepolitical identity you are.You wrote this comment in an adversarial tone but I Just Agree With You.
Indeed, this is an alternate formulation of the thesis of my post, and even uses language I used when characterizing the post itself to someone in the office ~2 hours ago.
Hm, I think the thing I disagree with, and was trying to argue against was that it is a good idea in the first place to even try to have a political map at all, nevermind to try to unwarp it.
The post is meant to be somewhat agnostic on the question—conditional on one has a map, here’s a common failure mode. It’s also meant to point in the direction of ‘reconsider the value of your map’.
Separately, I think I ~endorse your first comment, but I also think there are cases in which you should definitely have a map (eg you are attempting to achieve political ends). So I think your second comment is somewhat overstated.
Thanks so much for this comment, it crystallized something that’s been in my subconscious for like two years.
The rest of the comment made sense but this feels sorta non-sequitor-ial. Maybe this is right, but, most of the things you said seemed like on average it would increase the amount I expected some kind of adversarial posture to make sense. (Except insofar as adversarial postures are basically not a good strategy, in which case it still doesn’t depend much on the rest of the contents of the quick take)
I don’t understand this. Can you say more?