Wrong! He's not afraid of anything. Also, I would have accepted, Snakes.
False.
The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others.
This is call The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight, which you can read all about on the
You Are Not So Smart blog.
Basically,
You remember high school. You’ve worked in a cubicle farm. You’ve watched Stephen King movies. People in new situations instinctively form groups. Those groups develop their own language quirks, in-jokes, norms, values and so on.
and
What you may not have noticed though is how much of this behavior is gurgling right below the surface of your consciousness day-to-day. You aren’t sharpening spears, but at some level you are contemplating your place in society, contemplating your allegiances and your opponents. You see yourself as part of some groups and not others, and like those boys [in the described experiment] you spend a lot of time defining outsiders.
Furthermore,
When you feel the warm comfort of belonging to a team, a tribe, a group – to a party, an ideology, a religion or a nation – you instinctively turn others into members of outgroups, into outsiders. Just as soldiers come up with derogatory names for enemies, every culture and sub-culture has a collection of terms for outsiders so as to better see them as a single-minded collective. You are prone to forming and joining groups and then believing your groups are more diverse than outside groups.
In a political debate you feel like the other side just doesn’t get your point of view, and if they could only see things with your clarity, they would understand and fall naturally in line with what you believe. They must not understand, because if they did they wouldn’t think the things they think. By contrast, you believe you totally get their point of view and you reject it. You see it in all its detail and understand it for what it is – stupid. You don’t need to hear them elaborate. So, each side believes they understand the other side better than the other side understands both their opponents and themselves.
The reason I wanted to bring this to your attention (and I encourage you to read that whole post and really David McRaney's entire body of work - it's excellent information for those inclined toward self reflection) is because lately, you've probably noticed, we've got people forming in-groups and out-groups and treating other people accordingly.
This is troubling if we don't see ourselves as all on the same team. We want to win elections and we all need each other to do that. (I invite any 12-steppers to reflect on Tradition One and how it might apply to elections and political parties: Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends on group unity) Because there are other, bigger out-groups (namely republicans) that we've identified and defined as being way different than us, or as wanting very different things than we want, and they want to win very badly too, and they will take advantage of any divisions among us. They need us to break apart. That's their best hope. (Just like our best hope is for them to break apart...)
So be a fan of your candidate. Support your candidate. Volunteer for your candidate. But please recognize that your fellow democrats are going to do the same for their candidates and that's their choice - it's nothing to do with you or your candidate. We don't need to tear any of our candidates down. It will just make things more difficult later on.
There can only be one Democratic nominee for president. So some of us will necessarily be disappointed. Knowing that now, knowing that disappointment is difficult and some people have experienced it repeatedly in the political process, knowing that it can feel like having your heart broken, some of us have never backed a primary candidate who won.... think about how tough that is, how much resilience it takes to pick yourself up and carry on a fight for what you believe is a less good result.
Whoever loses, it's going to be painful for the other candidates' supporters, so we should go ahead and start being kind to each other right now. Being kind is basic, learned in kindergarten stuff. Don't poke sticks in peoples' eyes. Don't rub salt in wounds. Remember, you're going to need the other candidates' supporters. Don't make yourselves into out-groups. Set a good example.
I am hereby appealing to any geekiness you might possess to read up about this particular way (Illusion of Asymmetrical Insight) we all tend to delude ourselves.
I expect this diary to be thoroughly ignored, but I will delete it if comments are ugly.
(And I have to leave in a few minutes, and my car is acting up again, so I'll only be back to check on it later, assuming best case scenario. Worst case, I'll be waiting on a tow truck...)