Hi, greetings to you as well.

For the most part, you'll find that below that I've expressed disagreement with many of your positions, but I hope you'll take my writing as intended, as an explanation of my own ideas and beliefs, and not as any kind of judgment of you as a person (especially since I know very little about you). Also, I apologize for my late reply, I was just exceptionally busy in the past couple of days.

Could it also be that people who are quick to side with a particular grouping do so out of an assumption that they want to be seen as good people?

For most people who side with a particular grouping, I think it's a mistake to think they are "quick" to do so. Generally these groupings emerge slowly over time and most people who join a group have already been exposed to the ideas behind a political movement long before a particular name is given to the movement. For example, the issues that gave rise to the BLM movement here in the US have plagued the US for many decades. The particularly blatant example of it (in the form of George Floyd's murder by police and captured on video for everyone to see) simply crystallized that underlying discontent.

My deepest concern about group formation is that they can easily lead to "group think". But nonetheless, I think the formation of groups is essential to initiating change. But group members should be on guard against blind agreement to all ideas that emerge from the group. I often see this problem in established groups such as Democrats, Republicans, Christians, etc. It's easy for me to find cases where such groups end up believing ideas that to me are clearly unreasonable, and they often publicly argue for policies that I consider to be contradictory to each other.

From my point of view, it has to do with the fact that people want to please everyone and in doing so fall into the trap of not being able to please anyone.

While I agree that some people do try to please everyone (especially politicians in democratic countries, where their jobs depend on maximizing the votes they receive), I think trying to ascribe this as a reason for most people to support a political movement such as BLM is flawed thinking. Professing support for a movement is taking a political stance, and it is inherently a challenge to those who support the status quo. The person who wants to please everyone will typically do the opposite, avoiding any political statement that might earn them condemnation from one side or the other of a political debate.

Possibly you're talking about people who join the most popular side of such debates without any real conviction about the issue, but simply to fit in with the larger demographic. I do think this happens all the time, although I believe such choices for most people tend to be based on the people who surround them socially more than absolute demographic numbers. There's a phrase for this behavior: "go along to get along". It means that you will profess beliefs that you don't hold strongly (or don't hold at all) in order to integrate better into your immediate society and avoid friction with those people.

The BLM and LGBT movements, as well as Climate Gretel and so on, are all, in my view, mere PR balloons ..

I think you're doing a massive disservice to all efforts at political change when you classify the groups above as mere PR balloons. The word "movement" is the really relevant word behind all such groups. They are attempting to effect a movement (change) in the existing status quo.

Such groups are not just a bunch of people wanting to belong to a group. While a group may be born out of a shared sense of concern or outrage, before long they normally have definite end goals in mind, and they act to achieve those goals. There are active and passive supporters for most political groups, and some supporters merely pay lip-service support while their own lives may contain hypocritical contradictions to the position they publicly support, but even lip-service support can have real value to a political movement, in my opinion (except when there is a clear instance of hypocrisy on full display, in which case it can be counterproductive to the movement).

Isn't it also true that in order to know someone, they have to know themselves well first?

I think here you're talking about some deeper level of "to know" than I can reason about with any certitude. I get the feeling you mean it in some metaphysical or spiritual sense.

My definition of "to know" is something like "to be aware of factual information". When I talk to someone and ask them the types of questions you mention, I do consider myself getting to know them. And whether I know anything about my historical ancestry isn't really relevant to my knowledge of the new facts I've learned about another person, unless there is some shared experience in our mutual pasts that might give me more insight into the person than the bare information we've exchanged. This can happen, of course, since the communication of information is often contextual. But I think it's easy to go too far in such an argument.

I would consider it unnecessary for my husband to use such appeasement towards me and would have to think that he considers me a woman who is only sure of herself when others tell her that she can be sure of herself.

In my experience, most people desire some amount of validation about their worth from other people. This validation often comes in the form of compliments about their beauty, intelligence, moral worthiness, humor, or skills.

How much they require and how quickly they can develop self-doubt when they don't receive it, can vary of course. But humans are a social animal and generally we need to cooperate in order to survive and live our lives to the fullest, so I think it's perfectly logical to want to have assurance of one's social status in their community from time to time. Even when that group is as small as two people in a personal relationship.

Now, I do think that there reason to suspect it IS merely an appeasement when such compliments only come as a quick follow-up to a compliment made about someone else. But that aside, I do think it's only reasonable to expect occasional compliments (whether verbal or non-verbal) from someone you're in an intimate relationship with.

Conversely, would you expect your wife to raise your self-esteem if she said something kind to another man?

I must admit, I don't take it amiss (and for the record, she usually does take pains to do so). Especially after she's complimented some guy much younger and more fit than me :-) But, conversely, I don't mind too much if she doesn't, probably because I'm less invested in my personal appearance than most people. That's a far cry from saying I have no care for it: I have no desire to be considered ugly. But when that happens, I can live with it, and it's an outcome I expect will only become more common as I grow older.