Identity and Democracy

​​I've been thinking a lot about Dannegal B. Young's description of how Social Identity impacts our ability to acquire new truths about the world that she summarized recently in this presentation.
 
According to Dannegal, identity shapes our Values/Theories/Beliefs, which in turn shape our observations about the world.  Our observations are thus motivated by what she calls "the Three C's": comprehending the world to feel good about our "team", control the world to benefit our team, and create community centered around our team.  As we sort more and more by identity, strong "mega-identities" form that include strong political and ideological stances.  These mega-identities are then target rich environments for politicians and propagandists to manipulate, providing us observations about the world designed to align with our identity-based hopes and fears.  This further reinforces our identities in a virtuous cycle of activation and control.

Her final slide shows the recursive way in which identity-targeted observational propaganda input realigns and shapes identity to allow for more coherence to ideological control.

As new information, carefully crafted to a particular social identity valence, is absorbed, the identity itself evolves to a baseline more coherent with the target ideology, thus encouraging future acceptance of additional manipulation.
 
A big problem in political (and factual) discourse is the seeming intransigence of belief.  No matter how many facts or bits of evidence are presented, people seem immune to adjusting their beliefs according to new information.  Dannegal's description explains this intransigency as rooted in observations/facts about the world being filtered primarily through identity and - most importantly - the degree to which the new information represents a threat to our identity.  
 
But it seems that not all Theories/Values/Beliefs (in relationship with social identity), have the same susceptibility to identity threat.
 
The history of modern pluralistic, democratic, and multicultural thought is defined in large part by a determined project to strengthen itself against identity threat by actively embracing other identities.  This can be summed up in the term "tolerance", which is designed to separate mere religious, cultural, or racial/ethnic identity from actual harm.  That is, throughout history humans have blurred the lines between real threat and other identities.  This has allowed us an easy, simply way of exploiting a seemingly innate human susceptibility to in-group preference such that populations can be consolidated behind particular political power and projects of domination and submission. 
 
A classic example would be slavery, in which slaves were seen as an out-group (reinforced by tradition, and then the more powerfully destructive race-based pseudo-bio/social science) that could be exploited and fit into a "natural" hierarchy of subordination.  Another example would be women, considered an out-group of sorts in relation to men (again according to traditional and pseudo-science).  By placing them in a position of subordination, men could dominate 50% of the population by default, enjoying the fruits of their labor and submission.  Some groups, such as LGBT, were simply dealt with by absolute taboo - their sexuality was too dangerous to be exploited, and better to be considered entirely taboo and unthinkable, for fear of cultural contagion.
 
While the notions of pluralism and democracy - and even multiculturalism, were long established by the 20th century, they were highly blinkered with caveats and carve-outs designed to overcome obvious contradictions, e.g., if all men were created equal, people of color were simply defined as "subhuman".  Yet as the century wore on, the progressive movement for civil rights was slowly able to enlarge definitions so as to draw the circle of who is "in-group", and thus entitled to dignity, respect, and human rights ever-larger.  Nearing the first quarter of the 21st century, our old habits of oppression of out-groups through legal and social means have weakened, but still remain strong.   
 
A fundamental impediment to true pluralism, multi-cultural and democratic society seems to still reside in the space where theories/values/beliefs still do not accept these fundamental principles and are even designed by opposition to them.
 
We see in the US - and globally - an allergy to the notion that a healthy society, one in which all citizens enjoy the same access to basic human rights - requires active embrace of out-group identities, and a separation between identity and real harm.  Those opposed to this project maintain that certain religions, racial or sexual groups are inferior or dangerous.  Their social identities - with no small amount of help from various propagandists - are still defined by this anti-pluralism and anti-multiculturalism.
 
This seems to be the soft underbelly - the weak spot in the well-armored vehicle attacking democracy.  New information and appeals to reason, or even empathy seem unable to penetrate this armor.  But if the identity itself is designed to require fear of the out-group and taking as its sustenance pseudo-science/sociology that serves to reinforce its defense (and offense), then maybe striking at this deeper identity is a fruitful strategy for prying off the subsequent defenses that have built upon it.
 
An identity that embraces pluralism and multiculturalism as essential for human rights, democracy and human flourishing is resistance to identity threat from out-groups.  A larger identity that is not merely concerned with its own limited religious, ethnic, and cultural form, but expands to include those of out-groups, not by requiring their assimilation or exclusion, but by summoning the humility to stand beside them as equals, and together confronting real threats and harm to all peoples, is an identity that can resist devious and toxic manipulations of propaganda by those who would seek to divide and conquer.