Interesting post from @brianklaas
“This is likely part of the reason why political leaders stoke fear and a sense of civilizational collapse when they discuss the rival granfalloon that’s coming to destroy your life. The feeling of threat intensifies our evolutionary instincts, entrenching toxic in-group/out-group dynamics. When that happens, we willingly abandon humanity’s secret weapon: our intellectual curiosity.”
As our world enlarged to the point where you didn't spend your life mostly surrounded by your own villagers, we had to develop a sense of who was or was not in your tribe. People fixate on the most fucked up things as a substitute for any reasonable definition of "one of me" vs "one of them". For Europeans, Catholicism used to do it, but that went up the spout in the late Middle Ages...
