You don't actually care about being accurate, realistic. You care about your side winning. Those are not the same thing, and you've never once stopped to notice the difference.
You will defend a lie if it came from your camp. You will attack a truth if it came from theirs. You've outsourced your reasoning to your identity and called it conviction. You haven't had an original thought about reality in your entire life, just reactions, just reflexes, just the primate satisfaction of seeing the enemy hurt.
The uncomfortable fact is that most people don't have beliefs. They have loyalties dressed up as beliefs. Epistemology cosplay. You couldn't tell me how you know what you know, because you don't know; you were told, and it felt right because everyone around you nodded.
And the anger. As if the intensity of your feelings is evidence of your correctness. As if volume is argument. You're not passionate about truth; you're addicted to the war. Truth would actually end it. You don't want it to end. The genuinely reality-oriented person is nearly extinct in public discourse. What's left is two mirror-image tribes, each convinced they're the rational ones, each using reason as a weapon rather than a compass, pointing it outward, never inward.
It's not a political problem. It's not even a cultural problem. It's a cognitive failure. And the worst part?
Most of you are proud of it.
Disgusting.
