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WHY is there a culture war?
A proximal cause is "fellow travelers" being more able to find each other and create echo chambers where they don't have to spend time becoming exhausted by arguing their viewpoints for their neighbors (by chance or fate) with different views. This doesn't just happen online; since people who trust governments more than private citizens tend to congregate in cities and live in apartments and condos, cities become progressive and the rural and suburban areas become conservative. The busybodies and meddlers in each group who can't stand being told what to do by "those people" try to push laws and regulations and ordinances and speech codes to interfere with "those people" getting their way, even if they themselves would never consent to being ruled in such a manner. Thus, the cold culture war.
I do offer an ultimate cause, however, and I hope it'll blow a few minds.
My sensemaking journey began with a simple pair of concepts: The physical world and the world of logic operate on separate sets of attributes and rules, and emotions are a third and equally separate realm like unto the others.
Upon first making a list like this, I realized that the physical essence is masculine, the emotional essence is feminine, and the logical essence is neither. ("Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" and geeks are from Vulcan.) I've called this worldview Triessentialism.
More recently, I observed that physically intuitive people tend to be red tribe/conservative while emotionally intuitive people tend to be blue-tribe/progressive, and logically intuitive people tend to be grey tribe/libertarian. In animal metaphors, the red tribe acts like a pack, the blue like a herd, and the grey like a hive; asymmetric but equivalent. Since coming to these conclusions, I've rarely been surprised when it comes to politics, which tells me my beliefs pay out in prediction.
I could go on and on about these mindsets, and I could even point to Jon Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory as a root cause as to why these mindsets tend to be the three fundamentals. I'd love to talk with him about looking at his data and suggesting three, not two, moral foundation mindsets, with the third being somewhat rare. But for me, I've sensemade enough to consider my theory substantiated.
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