🎯 Well said.

divide and conquer.

two party system.

team red vs team blue.

same as red vs blue corner in a boxing ring.

I think the 'us & them' has always been there.

It's the old illusion of separation.

I think this is the result of the internet publishing evolving. In the past you had your news and your experts and you took them at face value. Now it’s really easy to debunk any news source or any expert. Information is readily available in all sorts of formats.

The problem is that people like clean cut answers to everything- it makes things simple. This usually leads to extremes. And when your algo or community enables you to join a small group of extremes, you start thinking that’s the truth. We form bubbles and think we are correct and the other guys are idiots.

It seems to me the truth is always much more complex than people make it out to be. It’s somewhere in between extremes. But not always. Basically you have to look at everything without prior conclusions about another thing, and people seem to have a hard time doing that.

I guess the short answer is: information bubbles. 🫧

It might be just a consequence of the fact that we all have billions of sources of information now, and we were always tribal.

And perhaps it isn't a bad thing at all. It is good to have a "control group." If everybody believed the same things, we wouldn't be exploring the edges of human knowledge as well as if we take on hypotheses, even wildly divergent ones, and try them out.

These are just my thoughts. My last sentence in my parent post was just a thought, not a conclusion.

What happened with yourself in 2014.

Because the world is like that for far longer.

State terrorism was always a problem, but 9/11 split reality into conspiracy believers and conspiracy theorists. And from there it started to escalate.

Oh yeah, two camps never existed before 2014

Yin Yang

Good Evil

Black White

Nazis Allies

All came after 2014 👍

"i dont want those people in my country, as my neighbors, going to school with my kids" is well entrenched

if this was on purpose, theyve done a bang up job

I think you are on to something, but it’s been happening since long before our time. Have you ever read any Thomas Sowell? He was on to this in the 80s, and traces its origins back centuries:

“A Conflict of Visions (1987) represents Sowell’s best effort to put his ideas in dialogue with their opposite. He begins the book by observing a strange fact: people predictably line up on opposite sides of political issues that seemingly have nothing in common. For instance, knowing someone’s position on climate change somehow allows you to predict their views on taxing the rich, gun control, and abortion. It’s tempting to dismiss this as mere political tribalism. But Sowell contends that more is at work: that there are two fundamental ways of thinking about the social world, two sets of basic assumptions about human nature, and two conflicting ‘visions,’ from which most political disagreements follow. He names these the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.”

It is the kind of insight that helps to explain the things you are noticing.

Read the rest here:

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-nonconformist

A more scholarly take:

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1987/11/cj7n2-17.pdf

I have this though this for awhile. It makes too much sense to not be true.

Divide and conquer.