The family group/tribe is built on mutual support, but the modern conservative version is transactional, based on membership and loyalty. Actions that look like kindness are in reality actions to reinforce tribal loyalty. I think this is why so many people in conservative communties, who are trapped in entirely conservative information spaces, have a hard time breaking free. They see examples of community support as affirmations of their community goodness, and this narrative is drummed into them constantly. Conservative leaders have the advantage of labeling any disruptive people or ideas as 'foreign' and a threat, even if from within the community, so that they never even have to engage with new ideas on merit.
Kindness isnt a relevant trait to their tribal functioning, because the ability to be unkind and cruel to people who arent toeing the tribal line is necessary to upholding 'family law'. Kindness in others undermines their attempts to police peoples behavior (this is why its so important that men are in charge). Therefore, not only is kindness devalued, it is actively persecuted as a threat to conservative values. And that is only treatment of your in-group. If you reject kindness internally, imagine how easy it is to subject an out-group to cruel inhumanity. You can literally justify anything. What is horrifying is the degree to which everyday members of conservative communities have become willfully blind to the terrible treatment of others in order to hang on to an image of community goodness. I have witnessed far too much of this in my life.
Its worth stating that the left has its own, different kind of tribalism. They embrace kindness but there is a lot of pressure to prove the right kind of worth. It has a distinctly multicultural, anti-authoritarian tribalism, where the rules of the tribe are under constant negotiation. This makes communicating a platform challenging. Its a lot simpler for conservative platforms whose rules come from demagogues and an old book.
The flaw of designing a system without compassion is that the cruelty eventually becomes impossible to hide from the tribe, and the cruelty comes for everyone. #uspol #politics #disability #sociology #anthropology #kindness #geopol
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