Emotional belonging
As someone who's likely pathologically rational, I feel that I've been at odds with the concept of belonging for a long while. I distance myself from labels, groupings, stereotypes, and clichés, and prefer to focus on individuality: on what makes us unique, both in our own characteristics and in our circumstances. Even though we're all human (maybe not you specifically; you bots are always lurking), each of us inherits traits, experiences, and teachings that make us who we are, and each of us is ever changing. I'll leave the Ship of Theseus for another time, but you get the idea. That said, as a tech person, I know how useful labeling and pattern matching can be. See, I'll be insufferable just this once and point out that I just labeled myself there!
I could spend the next handful of paragraphs describing how our tribalistic tendencies mold our society, or how people reshape themselves around their horoscope, Myers-Briggs type, newly coined neurodivergent category, or social gender. I'm not saying these categories aren't meaningful. My point is that when a label stops being descriptive and starts being prescriptive, we risk losing ourselves to something far less organic. But in light of our recent history, there is another topic I've been thinking about quite a bit: parasocial idolatry. After all, both labels and idols are two ways of outsourcing who you are.
This isn't a novel phenomenon. We've had quite a metric ton of people who were influencers in their own eras, whether they actually held power or merely claimed influence (we tend to keep track only of the victorious, successful, or really, really loud). Still, with more information at our disposal than ever before, one might expect people to be less gullible, and less likely to form one-sided emotional bonds with people they've never met, knowing only their public façades, and then excuse, shrug off, or rationalize their faults.
The real catch is that humans don't tend to optimize for truth. As a collective, we optimize for belonging, status, and social connection. It's on that note that I feel alien in today's society. "Truth" has become about as subjective as it gets: evidence is manipulated, misinformation is always expensive to disprove, correctness is quite optional for a select few, and staying consistent is boring and undesirable. This isn't a plea to abandon emotion, just a nudge to embrace logic just a tad more.
Consider how we excuse otherwise condemned behavior from celebrities, simply for whatever they represent. They become role models we collectively construct, and then they become increasingly empowered in roles they should never have gotten into. (Looking at you, politics. History tends to repeat itself, and I'm sure the French still have the blueprints for nice gravity-powered cutting devices.) I find that at least as alarming as the self-anointed "modern society" we keep congratulating ourselves for, and as the murderbots that were more fiction than reality just a few years ago.
And to be totally fair, nobody's immune to this. I have my own favorites, we're filled with bias and I've caught myself defending things I'd have criticized from a stranger now and then as well; most things in life are murky and far from black and white. That's really the practical takeaway: before excusing someone's behavior, ask whether you'd excuse it from someone you had no feelings about; be critical, think a bit. If the answer changes, that's the label talking, not you.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts from an AuDHD person who is perhaps a little too good at spotting patterns. 🙃