tribal subscriptions: new architecture of political belief

I’m 17, and only recently have I begun learning about different political ideas—tentatively, hesitantly, like someone picking up a language. I’ve started building my own stance on issues, moving away from passive neutrality. But I noticed the jarring divide in political beliefs—and the quiet pressure to subscribe to a full set of beliefs that matched one side of the political spectrum.

Politics today feels like tribalism. It’s as if subscribing to a certain political “side” means inheriting a fixed package of beliefs—whether or not they logically connect. For instance, someone who supports abortion rights is likely also to advocate for taxing the rich, urgent climate action, and police reform. On the other hand, someone who champions traditional family values often ends up opposing welfare programs or public healthcare.

These belief systems don’t necessarily emerge from individual reflection. They’re not connected by reason—but by tribe.

This isn't just a random pattern. It aligns with what psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner described in their Social Identity Theory. They argued that people derive a major part of their self-worth from the groups they belong to. Loyalty to these groups becomes psychologically necessary—not because it’s rational, but because it’s identity-affirming.

We like to think of ourselves as super independent rational people, but as David Hume pointed out, "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Our emotions and our instincts guide our choices far more than cold rational facts do. In politics this means, we often choose what feels right—and what feels right is often what our social circle or echo chamber endorses.

Once we emotionally commit to a cause, let's say being a pro choice, it's not the reason which leads us to adopting a more left leaning view; it's a deeper desire for consistency, belonging, and emotional alignment with a group which makes us feel that we are morally right. It isn't intellectual laziness, it is the need to belong that is super powerful, sometimes even more than thinking for yourself.

This tribalism is more visible on social media, We can see this conformity play out dramatically on social media—where political identity becomes less about belief and more about signaling.

You don't need to perform politics; you need to question it. Trust me I understand that performance pressure is intensified on social media,  if you deviate from your group’s unofficial doctrine even on one single issue, then that can result in swift backlash - making you get cancelled! And so instead of challenging ourselves to hold complex, sometimes even contradictory views, we simplify ourselves to fit into easily marketable political identities, to avoid this backlash.

We stop building our beliefs one at a time and start buying them as prepackaged sets. You know, It’s cognitively easier, emotionally safer, and socially rewarded.

But…it makes us intellectually dishonest—even to ourselves.

The Asch conformity experiments (1951) are a striking example. Participants were asked to judge line lengths, an objective task. Yet when everyone else in the room (who were in on the experiment) gave clearly wrong answers, most people conformed—even though the evidence in front of them said otherwise. The conclusion? We’re far more likely to yield to group pressure than we care to admit. 

If we conform on something as trivial as line lengths, what happens when the stakes are moral, political, and emotional?

But we need to remember that we didn’t start out this way. Most of us began talking about politics because something genuinely mattered to us. But somewhere along the way, we let identity overtake inquiry.

We stopped asking, “What do I believe?” and started asking, “What does someone like me believe?” But if we want a more honest, less polarised political culture, we need to reverse that. We need to re-center the original motivations—go back to the causes, back to the questions, and back to the freedom of building our beliefs one at a time, instead of buying them in a set. Rather than outsourcing our thinking to the “left” or the “right,” maybe we should take the riskier, lonelier route: building a belief system issue by issue, not identity by identity.

It’s hard. The need to belong is deeply ingrained—almost inherent. But truth-seeking demands discomfort. It asks us to wrestle with contradictions and tolerate the possibility of being politically homeless. Maybe that’s what political maturity really looks like. Am I thinking, or just echoing?