What I call team sports. Political parties are like peoples’ Ur-teams, their foundational team that shapes…

What I call team sports. Political parties are like peoples’ Ur-teams, their foundational team that shapes all of their others. You can waste a lifetime arguing topics with people, who really are just arguing for a team. There’s no actual appetite for knowledge. /1 https://t.co/NwyZnQ6p26

And this isn’t just the ‘rusted-ons’ either. I’ve seen this same behaviour in every group I’ve ever had to mix with, of even the best-intentioned people. It’s often subtle. Once debates continue on for long enough, it shifts to defending territory for the team. /2

Spinoza and the Rabbis is still one of my favourite works of art, because it shows this process so beautifully, and this was Spinoza’s life. One of the most fearless thinkers of all time, almost completely oblivious to the social pariah it made him. /3 https://t.co/lSerGMf8JW

I guarantee that just about everybody falls into this trap, of thinking they’re just prosecuting a good cause, just following the facts. But actually playing team sports. It creeps up on even the best people. Lists of team enemies, to be brought down. /4

Nothing drives passions more. This year is an international election orgy, and all of this will be on heightened display. The elections themselves will result in no meaningful change, because they never do. But that’s always forgotten in the heat of the team sports. /5

One marker of how infected you are with team sports is how important it is, to you, to maintain friendships. Because as Spinoza found, a person really committed to seeing reality for what it truly is has an uphill battle with friendships. /6

Often contrarians are seen as on the Spinozan path. Deliberately going against accepted and popular truths. But they’re even more infected than everybody else. The team sports is an absolute obsession for them. Their entire focus is the social team mechanism. /7

Inside which they’re only trying to create some sort of product differentiation for themselves. It’s the most difficult thing in the world to reject all of that. To really only care about what’s true. To be able to say to a friend, ‘yeh, nah’ about their deepest beliefs. /end