Keep Your Identity Small

February 2009

I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such
uniquely useless discussions.

As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates
into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion
and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about
on forums?

What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need
to have any particular expertise to have opinions about
it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have
those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about
religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold
of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's
an expert.

Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics,
like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise
for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.

Do religion and politics have something in common that explains
this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with
questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure
on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every
opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with
theirs.

But this isn't true. There are certainly some political questions
that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy
will cost. But the more precise political questions suffer the
same fate as the vaguer ones.

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they
become part of people's identity, and people can never have a
fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity.
By definition they're partisan.

Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not
the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included
citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably
degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about
a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No
one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's the
source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion
has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that
it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities.
[1