Stop letting your tribe rewire your conscience.
Your brain is defending an ideaology that was created for profit; constantly defending political identity as though it is part of a tribe. System that feed off of outrage normalize rule breaking and political violence.
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Two things worth seeing.
Pulled from the same evidence base Rational Truth uses.
Summary of a 2024 book showing how rising partisan animosity makes compromise harder, politicizes neutral issues, and slowly erodes basic democratic functioning
Study on how consuming ideologically slanted online news increases belief in outlet‑favored misperceptions, even when people know the factual evidence
How we think about truth.
Short lines that capture what Rational Truth is trying to defend: curiosity, correction, and reality over team loyalty.
“If you never change your mind, why have one?”
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”
“People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.”
Refuse to be optimized for someone else’s power.
You are already in a system built to monetize your fear and loyalty. Cable news, social media, and primary elections all reward the loudest, angriest behavior, instead of the most honest.
The question is not whether this system exists. The question is whether you will continue to behave exactly the way it needs you to behave.
- Stop allowing pure outrage to grab your attention.
- Punish your side if they cross clear lines.
- Audit your inputs so you’re informed, not farmed.
- Doubt your side, ask questions, understand the truth behind opinion.
Verified facts and how your brain is being played.
This page exists so you can check what’s real and see the mechanics behind it—before you argue about who’s evil. Click the sources link on the bottom for a labeled source list.
How polarized we actually are.
- By 2025, roughly 7 in 10 Republicans and about 2 in 3 Democrats said the other party is “immoral.”
- Only about 1 in 5 Americans say they trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time.
- Close to a third of Americans now dislike both parties at once, up from single digits twenty years ago.
What Congress is actually doing.
- The 118th Congress enacted fewer major laws than any Congress since 1945 and presided over the longest government shutdown in modern history.
- Instead of writing laws, Congress increasingly hurls hard decisions to presidents, agencies, and courts.
What polarization does inside your head.
- Identity fusion means politics stops being “what I think” and becomes “who I am,” so disagreement feels like a personal threat instead of what it actually is–a normal argument.
- Brain‑imaging shows that for partisans, political disagreements light up threat circuits more than language centers—which is why they are quick to insult instead of reason.
- The more people accept tribal misinformation, the more tightly they fuse with the group that shares it, creating a loop: fusion → misinformation → stronger fusion.
How the system locks this in.
- Cable news and social platforms amplify moral outrage because it keeps people watching and clicking.
- Using moral language to seek status correlates with more extreme views and more daily conflict, but almost no persuasive effect on opponents.
- Echo chambers do the worst damage when people feel under attack; under high threat perception, encountering opposing views usually hardens positions instead of softening them.
How this hits left and right.
- On the left, identity fusion often centers on justice and harm reduction; on the right, it often centers on order and loyalty—both can justify breaking rules “for the greater good.”
- When each side uses media channels that only show the other side’s worst behavior, both feel existentially threatened and more willing to break norms to “defend democracy.”
Use facts to fight your own bias.
If a fact on this page makes you instantly angry or defensive, that’s the moment to pause—not scroll. The point is to give you numbers and mechanisms you can’t wave away just because they hurt you.
What’s the issue? Congress, media, and why polarization hurts.
This page is about how Congress’s incentives, media business models, and polarized brains interact to break our democracy.
Why non‑governance is the safe play.
- When a hard vote comes up, members can either solve the problem and get punished by primary voters, or avoid the vote and blame the other side; rational politicians choose avoidance.
- Committee work has been hollowed out by leadership control and media incentives for grandstanding.
- As Congress ducks responsibility, presidents step in with executive orders and agencies improvise policy at the edge of the law, which invites court fights and more distrust.
Why everything is a culture‑war episode.
- Cable news discovered that culture‑war segments pull in people who would otherwise watch entertainment so coverage tilts toward outrage on gender, race, and identity.
- Coverage choices have shifted voter attention toward cultural fights over economic ones, even when material conditions haven’t changed as dramatically as the discourse.
- Social‑media algorithms treat anger, fear, and disgust as engagement wins, so your feed quietly optimizes for whatever keeps you scrolling—not whatever helps you think clearly.
Politics is about systems, not your soul.
- When politics fuses with your identity, every policy question becomes a loyalty test; you stop asking “what works?” and start asking “what proves I’m a good person?”
- That shift makes compromise feel like betrayal, even when compromise is the only way to pass laws in a divided government.
- It also makes you easier to manipulate: if someone can convince you the other side is existentially evil, they can sell you almost any violation “to stop the threat.”
How democracies quietly rot.
- A Congress that fears its own base more than failure stops legislating; power slides toward executives and courts that were never designed to carry that load.
- As trust collapses, people don’t just disagree about solutions—they disagree about basic facts and which institutions are allowed to call balls and strikes.
- Once both sides accept that “anything is justified if they’re really that bad,” democratic norms become optional, and the path is open for whichever faction is closest to raw power.
The middle is not mushy—it’s functional.
The goal is not to meet in the middle on every issue or pretend both parties are the same. The goal is to build a political culture where you can fight hard on policy while still insisting on rules that protect everyone, especially when it’s your own side that wants to break them.
That means learning to separate “what I want” from “what a system can survive” and sometimes choosing the second, even when it stings.
Get in touch directly.
If you want to collaborate, invite a talk, share research, or push back, use this form. Messages go straight to my inbox at rationaltruth@rationaltruth.org.
I can’t promise to reply to every message, but I do read them—especially if you’re wrestling with what it means to stay principled while your own side demands loyalty tests.
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