It can be easy to lump our beliefs into a nice package.
For example, if you’re a Christian than it’s more likely (though certainly not 100%) that you’re a Trump supporter, pro-life, against gun reform, and not too worried about climate change.
If you’re on the other side politically, you’re more likely to support LGBTQ rights, be pro-choice, support gun reform, and you see climate change as a real problem.
The issue is that the items on that list have very little to do with one another, and are more about simply belonging to a group. What does your support of LGBTQ rights have to do with gun reform? Why does being pro-life make you less concerned about climate change?
In “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant”, Naval lays this out quite simply:
“Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.”
It’s possible that you’ve looked at every issue and just happened to line up in one of those groups, but if you honestly look at every issue you’ll likely have a few from each list. Naval encourages us to look at each of our individual beliefs “from base principles”, or to break each one down by itself. It’s much easier said than done.
If you find yourself saying “I’m a Republican, so I oppose x” or “I’m a Democrat, so I support y”, that’s not good. You may indeed find that those items go together, but coming to that decision independent of your “package” will lead to more clarity and stronger reasons for why you think that way.
This packaging has always been curious to me. As with some previous conversations, there are smart people on both sides of these issues. And a lot of these people see everyone on the other side as an idiot. And somehow we divide and separate based as much on who we disagree with (or don’t like!) as on the issue itself. Seems crazy to me. But your two broad groupings keep showing up. Just weird.
But you can always through some Libertarians into the mix and they seem to be all over the place, forming their own cluster.
So do you think Libertarians are a good example of what I was saying in this post, or are they largely a group that all think alike (just in a different way)?