Introduction

5 minute read

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. (George Orwell)1

Human beings are not built to see things as they are. We are inherently tribal. Our automatic, fundamental assumption: Our tribe’s beliefs are right. The beliefs of other tribes are right if they are friends; if they are enemies, their beliefs are probably wrong.

This way of seeing ourselves and others is fundamentally about propagating the genes of tribes of cavemen. There was cohesion among members of our tribe; and if another tribe had resources we needed, we could be sure that the other tribe was wrong in their claims to those resources, and to boot, we could also be sure they had evil intentions. If our tribe conquered the other, our genes would propagate. That was really great for the genes that carry those psychological characteristics.

It doesn’t work so well for people living in a democracy that includes many varieties of people.

In today’s America, the two dominant political parties have taken tribalism to the point that they can’t understand each other at all. The other side is not only wrong; its members are also ignorant, stupid, or acting with malevolent intent. Each side generally feels that those are the only possible ways to understand the other.

Additionally, the algorithms built into such internet companies as Facebook and Twitter are built to recommend content that we will enjoy; and we tend to enjoy content that reinforces our pre-existing assumptions about other people, or that even helps amplify them. Unfortunately, this often results in those services sending false information our way that tells us what we want to hear, seeming to prove, wrongly, that the other side really is ignorant, stupid, or acting with malevolent intent. This exacerbates our natural tendency toward tribalism.

The Reality Party aims to reach for a better way.

While our fundamental nature leads us toward tribalism, it also leads us toward an average lifespan of 35 years, which was how long cavemen lived.2 As humans, we can transcend some of the fundamental aspects of our natures. Some of which, in particular, are particularly important for us to transcend. Our natural pull toward tribalism is one of those.

The most important single mechanism behind tribalism in politics is confirmation bias; as humans, we have the “tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values."3 Recognizing its presence in ourselves and others is essential. There are many other types of cognitive bias.4 But, we don’t have to master such a list in order to see things more realistically. We just need to know that as human beings, we are inherently biased, and that we must therefore open our ears and listen to others who care about facts and reality, even if we may not want to hear what they have to say. (People who disperse their own fantasies as if they are facts are another story. An important key is to learn to distinguish one from the other.)

Because the change we need to make is at an unusually deep level of our being, one we usually don’t question at all, certain types of meditation practices can be helpful. Anyone can use them to see reality more clearly. (And to live less stressful lives as well.) Meditation does not apply more to one side than the other. It can help us see that our automatic, emotionally-powered thoughts are not something we should automatically assume are factually correct. Our minds generate them all the time; but they are often in the service of our cognitive biases. Those of the Christian faith might try the meditations described in the 14th century Christian text, The Cloud Of Unknowing.5 A more general version of the same process is mindfulness meditation, which can be equally well used by people of any faith.6 There are many places mindfulness meditation is taught, as well as many books and articles.

Another challenge, which applies especially when people who have very different assumptions communicate online, is that they frequently serve no purpose because each side simply assumes the other is ignorant, stupid, or acting with malevolent intent, and no listening occurs. Very often, there is no way such a conversation can lead anywhere positive, and the best thing to do is to find a graceful way to exit.7 That way, our time and energy can be conserved for more useful discussions. The Reality Party web site provides tools to help accomplish that.

This web site

The Reality Party is here to do the opposite of what Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of having faceless algorithms send content that makes the tribalism worse, the Reality Party aims to empower individuals to break through false impressions by helping them understand how to be heard (and how to hear).

This site has three sections dedicated to its goals. Over time, the site will expand.

  • Ideas. The page you’re reading is in the Ideas section; over time the number of pieces in this section will grow. The heart of the site, is the piece How To Discuss, which aims to help you, in just a few minutes of reading, have a good path to effectively communicating with people with the opposite political orientation. And to do so without wasting your time when it is clear that attempts to communicate with a particular person are just not going to succeed.

  • Discussion. The heart of the Reality Party site is its discussion forum. Check it out!

  • Reusable Replies. These are pages that can be linked to from any discussion anywhere on the web. For example, there is a Reusable Reply that can be used whenever you’re in a discussion in which the person you’re talking to keeps stating things that are untrue, but simply changes the subject whenever the error in one of them is pointed out.8 That type of discussion can continue forever with absolutely nothing being accomplished. Link to one of our Reusable Replies, and you can immediately exit the discussion, and anyone who has been following the discussion will know why you did. Go to our Reusable Replies section to view all the pre-written replies we have available to help with different situations.

  1. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/in-front-of-your-nose/ ↩︎

  2. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/07/the-paleo-diet-caveman-cure-all-or-unhealthy-fad/242621/ ↩︎

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias ↩︎

  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases ↩︎

  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing ↩︎

  6. https://www.mindful.org/mindfulness-how-to-do-it/ ↩︎

  7. https://xkcd.com/386/ ↩︎

  8. https://xkcd.com/1731/ ↩︎

Last modified July 29, 2022