I’m having a political conversation with someone I know is ethically aligned with me. This person, like me, hates how the system has placed its boot on the throat of the common folk. If I hadn’t used a single name, and had spoken only about principles, the conversation would have been uneventful. But because I mentioned a famous politician—one that was part of “the team”—friction, heavy friction, was introduced.
It’s not like this is unknown. After all, we are tribal creatures. We evolved to defend our tribe. And not only does this make perfect sense if you imagine the dangerous world of the past, it’s also one of those things that is always worth keeping in mind when we analyze human behavior with a more modern lens—especially when we encounter unexpected pushback.
One does well to introspect on this often. It’s incredibly easy to default into tribality. I suspect we all know this all too well. But there seems to be a clear trick to not lose the plot—a way to lay out a compass for ourselves: standing on principles.
If you stand on principles, and from that platform analyze everything, then it hardly matters who said what, or what jersey they wear. Corruption is wrong—demonstrably so—because it has victims. So attempting to carve exceptions, twisting ourselves into justifications, betrays the very principle that should guide us in the dark.
To be specific—because I know abstracts can get boring—if I say that Hunter Biden’s art sales were suspicious, inappropriate at best, and likely signs of disguised corruption, that does not make me a member of the opposing team. A team that, mind you, has rug-pulled its own base with scam tokens a few times already—and we just now completed a year.
If I believe it is a moral obligation to call out corruption in one party, that cannot come from loyalty to the other. Blind, unquestionable loyalty to a party is the slippery slope that led us precisely where we are. The normalization of corruption didn’t happen overnight. It was a frog slowly cooked. The north star—the guiding principles—weren’t stolen in one speech; they were hidden behind systematic indoctrination.
A good friend of mine likes to tell me that I should always reanalyze a situation—rejudge, if that’s even a word—but do so by changing the names of the main characters. If my analysis changes, if I find myself tempted to explain away something that was crystal clear a minute ago, then I have to conclude I’m being dishonest. Not out of evil, of course, but out of unwarranted loyalty to the system that indoctrinated me.
— MenO
