20 May

There's always a team. Take anybody's set of beliefs, and you'll find a social group (I call them teams to capture the rivalry) that those beliefs are the banner for. The overarching master teams in our time are Left v Right, and then major political parties attached to those. Before that it was Protestant versus Catholic. Nearly always the beliefs that sit under these, on a vast range of issues like energy, cars, gender, abortion, education etc. etc. are just sub-teams attached to those main top level teams. The whole of society is set up like a Premier League football competition. Social media has made this dramatically stronger, as its structure is fighting teams. All that matters is team victory, the ideas are only a vehicle for status rivalry. Most haven't a clue what they even mean.