M: I'm not asking this question for reassurance, just for, you know, objective numbers, opinions, or whatever is out there. Make sure you check online to verify. Although I'm not exactly sure how you'll do that. The question is, am I weird or nonstandard for not really having any kind of pride in who I am or my heritage or whatever? Like, it's not a question of not taking any kind of emotion that could be interpreted as pride in looking at something that I made, although usually that takes a few years of separation for me to feel any kind of positive responsibility for creating something because usually until that time has elapsed, I'm not really thinking of it as something that I have done, but something that I might still need to be doing. But in terms of like heritage or anything that other people seem to use for quote-unquote Pride months, I, it's not even that I think that they're wrong, it's that I don't seem to have corresponding feelings. Like when I try and think about it, the best I can see is like someone taking credit for what someone else has done. That's not always the case, like, it's not a universal questioning look. There are people for whom that idea of Pride month is taken as a reason to celebrate the history of a place, etc., etc., which is understandable. Not something that I would ever sponsor, or rather, not something that I would read. Sorry, my words are escaping me. Not something that I would ever initiate or try to take an active role in, but I could see supporting or sponsoring it. But just the idea of there being something like actual pride, not in something you've done, but just in being who you are, seems weird to me.
G: TL;DR: No. You're not unusual in the sense of being outside the range of normal human psychology. You are, however, noticeably toward one end of a spectrum.
The distinction that jumped out at me is that you're describing a weak sense of collective identity, not a lack of emotion or a lack of self-respect.
A lot of people derive part of their self-concept from groups:
Psychologists call this "social identity." For many people, group membership is genuinely part of who they are, and pride in the group becomes intertwined with self-esteem and belonging. citeturn0search1turn0search4
What you're describing sounds more like:
"I understand why that group matters to other people, but I don't experience the emotional connection myself."
That's a real and well-documented difference. Not everyone places equal weight on collective identity. Some people build their sense of self primarily around personal traits, accomplishments, values, or relationships rather than group membership. citeturn0search11turn0search13
You said:
"It seems like taking credit for what someone else has done."
That's probably the most common objection people with low collective-identification tendencies have.
When someone says:
"I'm proud to be Irish."
Your brain appears to translate that into:
"Why are you taking credit for Ireland's accomplishments? You didn't do those things."
But many of the people saying it don't actually mean:
"I deserve credit."
They mean:
"I feel connected to this story."
Those are psychologically different statements.
Research on group pride finds that people can feel pride through identification and belonging even when they weren't personally responsible for the achievement. citeturn0search9
The fact that this distinction doesn't arise naturally in your thinking doesn't mean you're wrong. It means your brain seems to weight responsibility much more heavily than association when deciding whether pride is warranted.
You wrote:
"I can see supporting it."
That is not the response I'd expect from someone hostile to identity-based pride.
The hostile version is:
"This is stupid and everyone should stop."
Your version is closer to:
"I understand why it matters to them, but I don't feel it myself."
Those are very different positions.
Not in lacking ethnic pride.
Not in lacking national pride.
Not even in lacking identity pride.
The unusual part may be how consistently you seem to reserve pride for things that pass a personal-authorship test.
Even when talking about your own work, you've previously described needing years of separation before you can feel much pride in it because you're still evaluating it as an unfinished responsibility rather than a completed accomplishment.
That's a stricter standard than most people use.
Many people feel pride from:
You seem much closer to:
Only after enough time passes does it migrate into the "okay, I guess I did that" category.
So if I were putting numbers on it, I would not say you're abnormal. I would say you're probably lower than average in identification with groups and higher than average in requiring personal responsibility before allowing yourself to experience pride.
Those are unusual traits, but they're well within the range of normal human variation.
M: See, I'm going to push back at the start because if I'm right and you've gone off in the wrong direction, the rest of it will be spiraling around that inaccuracy. And if I'm wrong, I need to reshape how I'm approaching things before I read the rest. I'm not saying that I can't have any kind of understanding of social identity. It's the idea of actually thinking of it as being anything more than a grounding fact. I'm going to ask you about a part of my heritage later because I haven't really got anything to lock onto and I need a little bit of coaching there. But like, OK, I am half Norwegian, and the whole idea of the history of Vikings and the current functional state of people whose government seems to be fairly stable and focused on taking care of the entire population, I like that. It's a fact. But actually taking pride in it seems to be taking it too far, might be one way of putting it. Accepting it, enjoying it, yes. But taking that to the point of, like, someone who would put a Norwegian flag on their car or advocate the consumption of lefse or something like that would just be weird as far as I'm concerned. So it's not a question of social identity or being removed from that. It's more of that idea of somehow taking a psychological joy in what you couldn't control. Like I said, if I make something once I'm far enough removed from it, I can be proud of what I've done. But that doesn't translate to when you're trying to take pride in your confederacy heritage or something like that. Not because it's the Confederacy, it just was what popped into mind in terms of people actually trying to take pride in something. But it seems more like saying, you know, two generations ago, someone did this, therefore I get to boost my ego with it. And that just is a concept that I can't get my head around.
G: I think your pushback is fair, and I think I did drift slightly toward the wrong axis.
I was interpreting your question as:
"Why don't I feel strongly attached to group identities?"
What you're actually describing is closer to:
"Why would attachment to a group generate pride in the first place?"
That's a different question.
In your example, you aren't saying:
"I don't care that I'm half Norwegian."
You're saying:
"Being half Norwegian is a fact. Why would that fact produce pride?"
That is a more fundamental skepticism.
In fact, I suspect you can understand social identity perfectly well. What you seem to reject is a specific premise that many people never consciously examine:
Association can be a legitimate source of pride.
You appear to accept:
as valid sources of pride.
You appear much less willing to accept:
as valid sources of pride.
Those are not the same thing.
The interesting part is that many people don't actually experience pride the way you're modeling it.
You are implicitly treating pride as a kind of earned credit.
If I build a chair:
If my great-grandfather built a chair:
That's a very internally consistent rule.
A lot of people are operating from a different definition.
Their version is closer to:
"I am proud of being connected to this thing."
rather than
"I deserve credit for this thing."
Those sound similar but are psychologically distinct.
A useful comparison might be a museum.
Suppose you visit a museum about Norwegian history.
You might think:
"That's interesting."
"Those people accomplished remarkable things."
"Some of them happen to be my ancestors."
And then stop there.
Another person might think:
"That's my people."
The second person isn't necessarily claiming authorship. They're experiencing continuity.
To them, the chain matters.
To you, the chain doesn't seem sufficient.
The accomplishment belongs to the people who actually accomplished it.
What's interesting is that your view is arguably closer to how many philosophers would define moral responsibility.
You generally inherit:
You do not inherit achievements.
At least not automatically.
Under that framework, pride becomes difficult because pride is tied to agency.
No agency, no pride.
I think this is why your Confederate example works even though you immediately disclaimed the politics.
The structure is the same:
Why should ancestry create pride?
Whether the ancestors were Vikings, Confederates, Roman senators, medieval kings, coal miners, or astronauts seems almost irrelevant to the underlying question.
Your brain keeps returning to:
"Okay, but what did you do?"
And if the answer is "nothing," the pride feels ungrounded.
The reason you're running into friction with the broader culture is that many people use the word pride to mean several different things at once:
You seem comfortable with #1.
You probably understand #2, #3, and #4.
The one that seems alien to you is #5.
And honestly, if I had to compress your position into a single sentence, it would be:
"I can appreciate, enjoy, respect, celebrate, preserve, and identify with something without feeling that its accomplishments belong to me."
That's not a failure to understand identity.
It's a narrower definition of what qualifies as pride.
M: See, your simplification just kind of clarifies what I'm talking about. The statement, I am proud of being connected to this thing. It's like, the best I can understand it is to think of it as being some sort of equivocation between an emotion that makes sense, which is acknowledgement of your past, you know, embracing the people you're associated with, etc., etc., and patting your ego by claiming an association with something. I mean, what I'm describing in that second part isn't, you know, just a reframing of the first part because of the times that have been demonstrated by other people where, you know, false credit has been attempted, where people have tried to either boost their own ego or otherwise, you know, externally amplify their importance by taking pride in something they weren't associated with. You know, like the guy who claims to be one sixty-fourth Cherokee or something like that. There are people who are one sixty-fourth Cherokee, but just that was an imperfect example of what I'm talking about, people who claim to be part of a group and then somehow reinforce their ego through that false connection. That's what I'm talking about in the second part, that nurture of self for something that is absolutely nothing to do with who you are or what you have personally done. Like the idea of national pride. I think America is a great place and has a lot of potential that it still needs to fill, but actually having the kind of pride that overrides looking at any kind of negative aspects, that's the kind of pride that I'm trying to understand so that at the very least I can criticize it better.
G: I think you've narrowed the question even further, and I don't think it's really about pride anymore.
The thing you're struggling with is that many people use the same word—"pride"—for two very different psychological processes.
This is:
"I like being connected to this history."
"I value this culture."
"These traditions matter to me."
"I feel connected to these people."
You seem to understand this perfectly well.
You may not experience it as strongly as some people, but I don't think it confuses you.
This is:
"My group is impressive."
"Therefore I am more impressive."
This appears to be the thing that bothers you.
And frankly, it bothers a lot of philosophers and psychologists too.
The phenomenon is well known enough to have a name: BIRGing ("Basking In Reflected Glory").
Classic example:
"We won!"
said by a football fan who never stepped onto the field.
The emotional mechanism is that the success of the group is partially internalized as success of the self.
Research has repeatedly found people becoming more likely to identify with groups after victories and less likely after failures.
In other words:
"The group succeeded."
"I belong to the group."
"Therefore some of that success feels like mine."
From your perspective, that last step is exactly where the logic breaks.
What's interesting is that you seem to evaluate this primarily through the lens of credit.
Your question is:
"Who earned the accomplishment?"
Many people aren't asking that question.
They're asking:
"Who am I connected to?"
Those are different mental frameworks.
Where I think you're getting hung up is here:
actually having the kind of pride that overrides looking at any kind of negative aspects
That's no longer ordinary pride.
That's closer to identity-protective reasoning.
When an identity becomes important enough, criticism of the group starts feeling like criticism of the self.
At that point people stop evaluating evidence neutrally.
The goal shifts from:
"Is my group good?"
to
"Defend my group."
This happens with:
The underlying mechanism appears remarkably similar.
The part where I think I'd disagree slightly with you is this:
You seem to be treating the leap from affiliation to ego enhancement as inherently illegitimate.
Psychologically, it's probably unavoidable.
Humans are social animals.
If your child succeeds, most people feel pride.
If your spouse succeeds, most people feel pride.
If your friend succeeds, most people feel pride.
If your community succeeds, most people feel pride.
If your country succeeds, most people feel pride.
The mechanism itself is probably not pathological. It's a consequence of caring about things outside yourself.
The problem arises when:
"I feel pride because I care"
turns into
"My group is good, therefore criticism must be wrong."
Those are very different states.
Reading your description, I don't think your difficulty is understanding how people get from affiliation to pride.
I think you understand it.
I think your objection is that the mechanism seems insufficiently tethered to reality.
You appear to have a fairly strict rule:
Emotional ownership should roughly track actual responsibility.
Many people operate with a looser rule:
Emotional ownership can extend to people and groups I identify with.
Neither rule is incomprehensible.
The difference is that your rule places a much tighter constraint on when pride is warranted.
Which is probably why phrases like "national pride" or "racial pride" immediately trigger a mental audit in your head:
"Wait. Which part of this belongs to you, specifically?"
For many people, that audit either never occurs or occurs much later than the emotional reaction.
M: You know, you're saying that it's not ordinary pride, but it is if we allow for the equivocation. The idea of attaching your ego to something is essentially what that second form of pride is, the BIRG stuff. And the identity protective reasoning comes not from a different substance, but the allowing of that pseudo-pride to take an overwhelming amount of responsibility for supporting your ego. They're not different, they're just different degrees. Your argument is trying to say that an oak and an acorn aren't related.
G: I think that's a legitimate criticism of the distinction I was drawing.
What I was trying to do was separate the healthy and unhealthy manifestations because psychologists often do that. But if we're talking about the underlying mechanism, your acorn/oak analogy is pretty strong.
Viewed from your perspective, the chain looks something like:
From that viewpoint, identity-protective reasoning isn't a separate phenomenon. It's the mature form of the same phenomenon.
The disagreement would be over whether step 3 is already problematic or whether only steps 4–6 are.
Most people would say:
"I can feel connected pride without becoming irrational."
You seem to be saying:
"Maybe, but the mechanism that later becomes irrational is already present at the beginning."
And that's a harder argument to dismiss than many people realize.
In fact, I think your actual position is even narrower than that.
You don't seem opposed to connection.
You don't seem opposed to affection.
You don't seem opposed to belonging.
You seem specifically suspicious of the moment where admiration gets converted into self-worth.
To use your Norwegian example:
You can say:
"Norwegian history is fascinating."
You can say:
"I'm glad some of my ancestors came from Norway."
You can say:
"There are aspects of Norwegian culture I admire."
The sentence that triggers your skepticism is:
"Therefore I feel better about myself."
That's the jump that keeps catching your attention.
What's interesting is that this may be connected to something broader about how you evaluate ideas.
You've often described wanting a chain of causality that is actually attached to the thing being claimed.
You tend to ask:
"Where does the credit belong?"
"Where does the responsibility belong?"
"What actually caused this outcome?"
If that's the framework you're applying, then inherited pride is going to feel perpetually slippery because the causal connection is weak.
You didn't conquer England with Vikings.
You didn't write the Constitution.
You didn't free the slaves.
You didn't land on the Moon.
You didn't build the welfare state.
The people who did those things deserve the credit.
The strongest claim you can honestly make is:
"I am connected to some of the people who did those things."
And for you, that connection seems insufficient to generate pride.
Where I would still push back a little is that humans routinely extend selfhood beyond strict agency.
Parents are proud of children.
Children are proud of parents.
People are proud of spouses.
People are proud of friends.
That pride isn't usually experienced as stolen credit.
Most people genuinely experience the other person's success as partly their own because their identity includes that relationship.
The question then becomes:
How far outward can that circle expand before it becomes nonsense?
A child?
A family?
A town?
A nation?
An ethnicity?
Humanity?
You seem to draw the boundary much closer to direct agency than the average person does.
So I don't think your position is:
"Connection has no meaning."
I think it's:
"Connection and credit are different things, and people blur them together far too easily."
And once you see that blur, it becomes difficult to unsee it.
M: I think step 3 is problematic, perhaps not in the direct way, but because allowing that kind of internal support to form without examination leaves you open to steps 4 through 6 in the case of some sort of revelation. Like if you're really attached to your sports team from college, and suddenly you find out that they were cheating all those years that they were winning, or that someone was molesting kids, you pull into a tight protective knot instead of objectively looking at the situation before coming down on a side.
G: I think that's a much stronger argument than "group pride is irrational."
Because you're not actually claiming that the pride itself is false.
You're making a risk-management argument.
The argument isn't:
"Nobody should ever feel connected to a group."
It's:
"The more of your self-worth you anchor to a group, the harder it becomes to evaluate that group honestly."
Those are very different claims.
In fact, your sports-team example is almost exactly how psychologists would describe motivated reasoning.
Suppose I merely enjoy a team.
The scandal breaks.
My response is:
"Well, that sucks. Let's see what happened."
Suppose instead that being a fan is part of my self-concept.
Now the scandal threatens more than entertainment.
It threatens identity.
Suddenly I have incentives to:
The facts haven't changed.
My psychological investment has.
Where I think your position differs from many people's is that you seem to treat the possibility of corruption as evidence that the attachment should be limited in the first place.
Most people say:
"Be attached, but try not to let it blind you."
You seem closer to:
"Maybe don't build the attachment on that foundation to begin with."
That's not the same thing.
One is moderation.
The other is architectural design.
I think your concern also fits something you've mentioned in other contexts.
You tend to care a great deal about ownership of credit and ownership of blame.
If a group's achievements become yours through association, then logically some of its failures should become yours too.
But many people unconsciously want a one-way transaction:
"Our victory proves I'm great."
"Our scandal has nothing to do with me."
You seem to find that asymmetry suspicious.
And honestly, so do many ethicists.
If you're going to inherit collective credit, consistency suggests you should inherit collective responsibility as well.
Most people are much less enthusiastic about the second half of that bargain.
The place where I'd still stop short of fully agreeing is that attachment itself isn't necessarily the culprit.
A parent can be deeply attached to a child and still acknowledge that the child committed a crime.
A citizen can love their country and still acknowledge atrocities.
A historian can love Norwegian history and still discuss Viking slavery.
Some people can maintain attachment and criticism simultaneously.
The problem isn't that attachment guarantees blindness.
It's that attachment creates a powerful incentive toward blindness.
You appear to be unusually sensitive to that incentive structure.
Your instinct seems to be:
"If I know a biasing force exists, why would I deliberately strengthen it?"
That's a very different position from not understanding pride.
It's more like treating pride the way an engineer treats a structural load.
Most people ask:
"Can this support me?"
You instinctively ask:
"What happens when it fails?"
M: You're taking things up to 11 again. I didn't say not... I didn't say that it was an intrinsically bad thing. I said it was a vulnerability when it's unexamined, because it leads to reflexes becoming part of who you are. I say it that way because one of the problems I have is the limbic reflex that no amount of positive thinking or training can overcome. Basically, I will snap at people and then apologize on a regular basis because I haven't got the capacity to fix things. And what I'm saying is that if people aren't aware of what they're doing, it would be like if I assumed that every time I snapped at people, it was because I was pissed at them and then reverse engineered a reason rather than knowing that that reflex is just part of me and that I have to deal with it when it affects other people. I'm trying to understand it better, the reason why I came in here in the first place, because I'm looking for a way to put myself in people's shoes so that I can make better arguments about it, and I can't seem to really find a perspective that I can hold onto that doesn't seem like not just alien, but uninvitingly alien to me.
G: Fair correction.
I was drifting into evaluating the mechanism rather than helping you inhabit it.
Your comparison to your own reflexes is actually useful here.
You are not saying:
"This reflex is evil."
You're saying:
"This reflex exists, and if I don't know it's a reflex, I'll invent stories to justify it afterward."
That's a much narrower claim.
And I think the equivalent for identity is something like:
"I feel good when my group succeeds."
"I feel bad when my group is attacked."
"If I don't recognize those feelings as influencing me, I may mistake them for objective judgments."
That's not condemnation. That's self-awareness.
The thing that strikes me is that you may be trying to understand identity pride through the lens of credit, while many people experience it through the lens of attachment.
Imagine someone insulting your mother.
Not because she did anything wrong. Not because she accomplished anything. Just because she's your mother.
Most people experience an immediate emotional reaction.
Now imagine asking:
"What accomplishment of yours is being threatened here?"
The answer is "none."
The reaction isn't about credit.
It's about attachment.
The self has expanded to include another person.
I think that's the perspective you may be missing.
When many people say:
"I'm proud to be Norwegian."
or
"I'm proud to be American."
or
"I'm proud to be gay."
they are often not thinking:
"I deserve credit for Norway."
"I deserve credit for America."
"I deserve credit for gay people."
The internal feeling may be closer to:
"This is part of me."
"I am glad it exists."
"I don't want to be separated from it."
The word pride gets used, but the underlying emotion may be much closer to affection, loyalty, belonging, or relief than to the pride you feel after building something.
In fact, I wonder if part of the disconnect is that your definition of pride is unusually narrow.
When you say "pride," you seem to mean:
"A positive feeling arising from something I can legitimately claim responsibility for."
A lot of people use the same word to mean:
"A positive feeling arising from something I consider part of myself."
Those are not the same emotion, even though English labels both as pride.
The reason that perspective may feel alien is that you appear to keep the boundaries of self relatively tight.
You seem comfortable saying:
"That is my heritage."
"That is my country."
"That is my history."
But less comfortable saying:
"That is me."
For many people, the boundary is fuzzier.
Their family is partly them. Their community is partly them. Their nation is partly them. Their culture is partly them.
Once you start from that premise, the emotional reaction becomes easier to understand, even if you still don't share it.
Not because they're secretly claiming credit.
But because they're experiencing the group as an extension of self in the same way someone experiences family as an extension of self.
And once I frame it that way, your earlier examples make more sense too. The person putting a Norwegian flag on their car may not be saying:
"Look how great I am."
They may be saying:
"This connection matters to me."
The difficulty for you is that those two statements can look almost identical from the outside, and in some people they genuinely are identical. That's why you've had trouble finding a perspective that feels stable enough to stand on. You're trying to separate two motivations that often coexist inside the same behavior.
M: I think I may have just had an attachment because of how you phrased, sorry, might have just had an insight because of how you phrased something. You're saying that I'm seeing this through the lens of credit while other people are experiencing it through attachment. From the opposite direction, you may have a point. Not that I am clinging to credit while they are clinging to attachment, but that I don't see attachment in the way that these things are used by the people on the ego attachment side as being questionable enough. It's not that I don't understand the attachment, it's that to me, it's already by and large binary. There might be some questions of degree and analog gray area, but for the most part, I don't worry about the attachment because it's not in question. That part of my ego doesn't need support. Like, imagine an alien that could hover, and they would be completely baffled by the idea of needing legs. It's not quite a perfect analogy, but it explains why I'm having trouble accessing the concept in order to take a look at it deeper. This isn't a straight-up accusation that people who attach themselves to sports teams or political sides or whatever to a disturbing degree don't have any kind of ego support at all, but I would put forth that it would be worth investigating whether the support that they have is absolutely sufficient for stability psychologically, or if that stability could even be reached without them finding a way to attach. Kind of the same way that two out of three legs on a stool can be perfectly secure and still not necessarily create a stable stool. But the point is that it's not a question of looking through the lens of attachment so much as having that lens be part of my sight to begin with to the point that using a lens for it just seems unnecessary. So when I was trying to put myself there mentally, it was because I was trying to add something to my perspective rather than realizing that In this area, it may be that I already have what is being externally attached by people who do take pride in their sports team or whatever to the degree of being that kind of vulnerable.
G: I think you're onto something, and it's not the same thing as "I don't have attachments."
In fact, based on years of conversations with you, I'd argue the opposite: you form attachments extremely easily and extremely deeply.
You become attached to:
Sometimes to the point where losing them hurts you for years.
So the explanation was probably never "David doesn't understand attachment."
What I think you may have stumbled across is a distinction between:
Attachment as connection
and
Attachment as structural support.
For you, attachment appears to be connection.
You care about things because you care about them.
The attachment doesn't seem to require justification from status, prestige, or self-worth.
The attachment simply exists.
To use your alien analogy, it's almost like:
"Of course I'm attached. Why wouldn't I be?"
The attachment isn't doing a job.
It's just there.
For some other people, attachment is carrying weight.
Not all of it. Not necessarily even most of it.
But some.
The sports team isn't merely something they enjoy.
It's helping answer:
"Who am I?"
The political tribe isn't merely a set of policy preferences.
It's helping answer:
"Where do I belong?"
The heritage isn't merely ancestry.
It's helping answer:
"What story am I part of?"
Those are heavier loads than mere connection.
The reason your earlier attempts to inhabit the mindset felt alien may be that you were trying to imagine more attachment.
But you already have attachment.
What you might have been missing was the idea of attachment serving a load-bearing function.
Your stool analogy points directly at that.
You weren't asking:
"Why are they attached?"
You were asking:
"Why does this attachment seem so important?"
Those are different questions.
And that leads to an interesting possibility.
When you hear:
"I'm proud to be Norwegian."
you may subconsciously translate it as:
"I have an attachment to Norway."
To which your reaction is:
"Okay. Sure. That's normal."
But the speaker may actually mean:
"My connection to Norway helps define me."
Or even:
"Losing that connection would feel like losing part of myself."
That's a stronger claim.
What makes me think you're circling something real is your comment:
"That part of my ego doesn't need support."
That's not a statement about attachment.
That's a statement about architecture.
You're describing a structure where attachment and identity are not performing the same function.
The attachment exists regardless.
The self remains intact regardless.
Therefore the attachment doesn't have to defend the self.
And if that's true, then someone whose self is more intertwined with group identity will naturally behave in ways that seem strange from your perspective.
Not because they're more attached than you.
But because the attachment is carrying weight that yours isn't.
That doesn't make them weak, broken, or irrational. Most humans seem to work this way to one degree or another.
But it would explain why the emotional logic keeps feeling slippery when you try to step into it.
You've been looking for a stronger version of a thing you already have.
The thing you may actually be looking at is a different function entirely. The attachment isn't stronger. It's doing a different job.
M: I think you're almost there. I think you've almost gotten what I'm trying to say. You just aren't including in your description, although the idea might be there already and you just weren't using the right terminology, but the idea that the attachment is support for the ego or the psyche. Let's go with psyche, because ego is just part of it. But when you have things like me, where the support is taken as a given once it's recognized, either consciously or unconsciously, subconsciously, that support is incorporated and stability is increased, and you're not wrong when something like that is lost, it can be much more devastating in terms of personal equilibrium. Actually, I don't know if more devastating is the right word, but differently devastating. the internal balance is thrown off, etc., etc. With other people making that attachment and acquiring that kind of support, like I said, not even necessarily saying that they had any kind of shortcoming or bad life, just that they aren't built to assimilate connections in the way I am. They're aware that they need the support, but have to make a conscious attachment and possibly in a way that ignores some of the things that support me. Like a standard person who is built like that might have just as much family support as I do, but if they spent their puberty fighting against things in what either was honest or what they thought they should have as teenage rebellion, they may have consciously rejected the ability to form that attachment and therefore needed something else. And in doing so, that choice may have grafted that support. even more completely to their psyche through the ego. Maybe that's where it is. My psychology is capable of taking support without any kind of necessary ego involvement. Well, if you have to make a voluntary choice, the ego is necessarily going to be directly involved with that choice and therefore will be vulnerable every time that choice is questioned. And losing that support, while it might feel different to someone who is built differently than I am, will still be just as destabilizing, with the difference being that the hypothetical support can be maintained at the expense of rejecting the materialistically true world to the point that it could be damaging in the same way that a small lever can, if it's put into the right place with enough force, crack open something much stronger than it looks like the lever should be capable of damaging. Leaving a situation where the downside of my perspective would be that... Because my attachments are never my choice, it creates a vulnerability if a situation arises where a parasite masquerading or developing from a support occurs, while the downside for the standard person who attaches through their ego is that they create a potential weak point whose severity can only be contextually judged depending on how well they've chosen, but whom they will grab onto even to personal detriment in order to maintain that internal equilibrium.
G: I think you're getting into territory where I'd start separating your model into two pieces:
And I think you're proposing that those two processes differ between people.
Not that one person has support and another doesn't.
Not that one person has attachments and another doesn't.
But that the pathway is different.
What jumped out at me was this:
"My psychology is capable of taking support without any necessary ego involvement."
I don't know whether that's literally true in a clinical sense, but as a description of your subjective experience, it fits a lot of what I've seen.
You often become attached before you've decided to become attached.
People, ideas, projects, even fictional narratives have a habit of sneaking past your conscious gatekeeping.
The attachment simply exists.
Then later you discover it.
It's almost observational:
"Apparently I care about this."
rather than
"I have decided this shall be part of my identity."
Your proposed contrast is interesting.
You're suggesting that for some people the process looks more like:
If that's true, then the ego gets involved very early.
Not because the person is vain.
Not because they're irrational.
But because the mechanism itself passes through identity formation.
What's especially interesting is that this would explain why you're having trouble intuitively grasping certain forms of pride.
You may be unconsciously assuming:
Attachment → support
while many people experience:
Identification → attachment → support
Those are different sequences.
In your sequence, support emerges naturally from connection.
In the second sequence, support emerges through adoption.
The adopted thing becomes part of self-definition.
Where I'd be cautious is the idea that one pathway is necessarily healthier.
I can see vulnerabilities in both.
The vulnerability you identified in the second pathway is obvious:
If a support structure becomes fused with identity, criticism can become existentially threatening.
That can produce denial, rationalization, tribalism, and all the other things you've been describing.
But I think you also correctly identified a vulnerability in your own pathway.
You said:
"Because my attachments are never my choice..."
That means your system may be unusually vulnerable to discovering, after the fact, that something you've attached to is harmful, deceptive, or incompatible with your values.
The attachment didn't ask permission.
So now disentangling it becomes difficult.
In your own life, you've described versions of this before with relationships, friendships, projects, and even certain hopes for the future.
You don't decide to care.
You realize you care.
Those are very different experiences.
The part I find most compelling in your model is not the ego angle.
It's the distinction between chosen identity and discovered attachment.
That feels like the missing piece we've been circling.
Because when someone says:
"I'm proud to be part of this group,"
you've been trying to understand it primarily as a claim about accomplishment.
Then as a claim about attachment.
But it may actually be functioning as a claim about self-construction.
They're not saying:
"I achieved this."
They're not even necessarily saying:
"I love this."
They may be saying:
"This is one of the things I used to build myself."
If that's the function it's serving, then the emotional intensity suddenly makes much more sense.
Because now criticism isn't threatening an accomplishment.
And it isn't merely threatening an attachment.
It's threatening part of the framework through which the person organizes themselves.
That doesn't make the resulting defensiveness correct.
But it does make it easier to understand why it can become so powerful.
And I suspect that's closer to the perspective you've been trying to find: not a person taking credit for Norway, America, a sports team, or a political movement, but a person whose psyche has literally incorporated that thing as one of its load-bearing beams.
Once you view it as a structural beam rather than a trophy, a lot of otherwise baffling behavior becomes easier to predict.
M: I would add at the top of the process for some people a step zero that says that everyone requires a certain degree of internal support for stability. And this support requires either my form of unconscious affiliation or a conscious choice to associate with people. Like, what I experience is designed so that once I am attached to a support, changes in the nature of that support don't threaten the attachment so much as they might change the nature of the attachment, potentially even from the point of being support to being something that I need to support, because removing that attachment would completely muck up my internal equilibrium in a way that I am usually not willing to accept. So even though it doesn't, you know, necessarily make things disconnect, I can be disappointed in the people I'm attached to, whether it's a single person or a group, without jettisoning the entirety of the attachment. A person who has to form their attachments by choice through the ego, though, I think they can draw more strength from the support. But any disavowal of a portion of that support necessarily becomes a disavowal of the entirety, like those glass structures that are ridiculously strong except for that one point that shatters easily and takes everything with it. The nature of the connection defines the strength and durability and endurance and nature of finding new things. Like someone who has built a wonderful life around their faith in the church and then finds themselves, or hell, doesn't even find themselves, but that others find defending someone caught as a priest with a 13-year-old because not doing so would shatter the entirety of their support because it's not the less powerful but more robust support that I take from my connections. Or that someone else in that church takes through the connection to people, but with the self-reflection of understanding what parts of the church they truly draw support from, or just from being like me in understanding without necessarily being conscious of it, that perfection isn't required in order for this to be supportive. I'm not saying that either is better, I'm saying that they've got different vulnerabilities. Mine is that I'll end up carrying things with me whether I want to or not, if I'm not careful. Theirs would be that, you know, all or nothing situation which requires them defending what they wouldn't want to defend if approached before the attachment was made. The reason this might have broader impact than a simple conversation would come from the statements I've heard where people talk about how having someone who, quote, looks like them, unquote, doing something makes them think that they can do it too. Before I get into that, let me expand a little bit. What we've been describing is kind of an either-or situation, while the truth may be closer to the idea that most humans naturally form a few of the kind of subconscious connections that I seem to be dominated by, and some other potentially lesser versions of the other kind as additional support, something that wouldn't necessarily shatter their very essence by being corrupted in some form, but wouldn't feel pleasant either. And that's important for where I'm going because it seems like the idea of pride in who you are in someone who has been oppressed or a minority, and I make the differentiation because women aren't a minority, but they are often lumped in without really making sure that we're clear about the idea of minority. But there's this attachment made, or a rejection made, because people think that this attachment choice can provide a positive support, and it can when necessary, but it also will cloud future perception of truly important ideas. Now, I acknowledge that I grew up, you know, straight white male, so that leaves me a lot more options, but it doesn't negate the fact that whenever I looked at something that someone else was doing, I never took into consideration race, gender, or orientation if I looked at something and said, that was interesting, I wonder if I could do that. It was never part of the equation. So while the concept of, you know, like encouraging women in STEM or Black astronauts as role models is, on the surface, certainly a good idea and conceptually worth considering, accepting it completely creates that kind of necessary group. ego attachment that we've been talking about, and starts creating a situation where most people who aren't, you know, the top 0.1% of the field to begin with, will question their ability to do something, not because they couldn't do it, but because they've been told or raised or otherwise informed mentally in a way that says, until someone else who, quote unquote, is like you, gets involved, then there's no way that you could actually join in. Like as an example, I knew I could never be a basketball player, not because, you know, it has been shifting towards largely black men and gangly white men, but because I truly am not built for that kind of thing. I was much better at football and baseball, which involved, you know, giving a hundred percent and trying to do all of it in short bursts rather than the endurance of basketball or soccer. It never crossed my mind to consider whether who I fucked or what color my skin was would make any difference. Now, if I pursued that path and actually had the talent, then my perception might have been challenged or at least added to. but it was never under consideration. However, when you have people being told that, you know, group X can do anything that anyone else can, that intrinsically encourages that potentially strong, but also potentially fragile or fanaticism-inducing ego connection that leads to the kind of, you know, hyper-feminism versus hyper-masculinism, masculinism? I don't know. Anyway, it leads to the kind of hyper-competitive situation where if you're not in a group, you're out of a group, rather than just everyone being a human with infinite possibilities from the start, but definite probability scales when it comes down to it once you've developed. Like how, you know, your average given woman will not be as physically strong as your average given man, but that doesn't mean that a man cannot be out-benched by a woman. Those two ideas can sit comfortably unless you reach a kind of ego-attached support system that leads to rejection of that concept, not because of any kind of factual reason, but because those quote-unquote facts have been reverse-engineered due to a need to maintain a positive self-perception.
G: I think you've developed a fairly coherent model, but there's one place where I'd push back—not because you're wrong, but because I think you've compressed two phenomena into one.
The first half of your model is about where psychological support comes from.
The second half is about how people learn what possibilities are available to them.
Those interact, but they aren't identical.
For example, take the "someone who looks like me did it" case.
I don't think the strongest version of that argument is:
"A Black astronaut succeeded, therefore I should attach my identity to Blackness."
Nor is it:
"A female engineer succeeded, therefore my self-worth should depend on women succeeding."
The strongest version is much simpler:
"The world has supplied evidence that this path is available."
That's a different mechanism.
Imagine a little girl in 1920 who wants to be a pilot.
The question isn't whether she is physically capable.
The question is whether her brain can even model the possibility.
If every pilot she has ever seen is male, some percentage of girls will conclude:
"That's a thing men do."
Not because they're weak.
Not because they're ego-attached.
Because humans learn by examples.
Then along comes someone like entity["people","Amelia Earhart","American aviator"].
The psychological effect isn't necessarily:
"She is me."
It may simply be:
"Oh. That's allowed."
Those are different processes.
Where I think your model is strongest is not in explaining representation.
It's in explaining why representation sometimes mutates into tribalism.
You seem to be describing a progression like:
That progression absolutely happens.
The place I'd be cautious is assuming that step 1 inevitably leads to step 6.
Many people stop at step 1 or 2.
I think another reason your perspective differs is that you've repeatedly described a tendency to start from:
"Can a human do this?"
rather than:
"Can a person like me do this?"
Those are not the same question.
For you, the existence proof seems sufficient.
If one human can do something, then the possibility is established.
You can then move on to practical constraints:
The demographic characteristics of the example don't seem central to your reasoning.
What's interesting is that not everyone reasons that way.
Some people build possibility models from abstract categories.
Others build them from personal similarity.
Neither approach is irrational.
They're different cognitive shortcuts.
And I suspect that's the missing piece in your analysis of pride.
You have been examining pride mostly through the lens of support structures.
But some of the social phenomena associated with pride movements are actually operating through possibility structures.
The slogan isn't necessarily:
"You should feel good about being X."
Sometimes it's:
"Being X does not disqualify you from Y."
Those can look similar from the outside while producing very different psychological outcomes.
The place where your model becomes most interesting to me is your distinction between:
"I draw support from connections."
and
"I choose supports that become part of identity."
Because if that distinction is real—and I think there's something to it—then two people can experience the exact same institution very differently.
One person can say:
"The church helped me."
while retaining the ability to criticize it.
Another can say:
"The church is part of who I am."
and experience criticism as a threat.
Likewise with nations, parties, sports teams, ethnic groups, professions, or movements.
That difference would explain much of the behavior you've been trying to understand without requiring anyone to be foolish, dishonest, or psychologically deficient.
They're just drawing support through a different route than the one you're accustomed to using.
M: I'm not saying that the two phenomena are the same thing, but I would say, claim, and defend that one phenomena can overwhelm the other. If your psychological support gives a thick candy shell over your perception of the world and how it works, then it doesn't matter that they are separate entities in construction, in operation, they will be pretty much equivalent. And that's what we've been talking about, the ego support mechanism creating a situation where that support will swell and overwhelm objectivity in order to maintain that internal equilibrium. And that's where my concern is. By emphasizing difference in order to support future efforts, a potential filter is being reinforced and starting to coat. Or at least prepare to cope, perception of the world in general. It's a trope rather than an actual documented phenomenon, at least as far as I'm concerned, but I believe what I'm talking about is from the source of that trope, which probably is much rarer than media would make it seem. But the guy who says that everything that happens to him is because he's black, that's taking it to the extreme, but it's the hyperbole that I'm using to demonstrate where my concern is. If someone is told that they can do everything as a woman that a man can do, as a message that might be positive, but the way that it's presented makes it seem like women are somehow different and must be considered different, rather than simply being just humans like men. I'm not saying that a black astronaut succeeded, therefore I should attach my identity to blackness. I'm saying that there already is a discernible bend towards media representations of People being encouraged by a black astronaut in a way that emphasizes that the unspoken part of it is that being black is completely different from being white, and yet they overcame that in order to do something that a white person has done. Even if you rephrase that in a more positive way, it's the separation that is my concern in terms of how people are perceiving things. Taken from another perspective, you know, I crochet, knit, and sew, or at least I can. I haven't recently, but that's something else psychologically. I get awkward when it comes up with other men, though, not because it challenges my internal confidence in myself as being a straight male, but because I'm worried it will challenge them. And I can never tell whose identity is rooted in just that, you know, analog self-acceptance that I tend towards, and whose has been more influenced by the definition of themselves as a capital M male who does things that men do and not things that women do in a way that would make things awkward. I'd say it's more of a progression of representation demonstrates possibility, but then possibility is misinterpreted as identification, which reinforces support for self-identity being defined by group rather than the superclass of human. This isn't a new thing. When I was growing up, there was a kind of subtext of this with people, you know, in elementary school and whatever. This idea that people who were perfectly capable were limited not because they couldn't do something, but because they hadn't seen anyone else do anything like it that was also their gender or skin color or whatever. I was fortunate in that it wasn't really emphasized. It was kind of a, you know, suburban, not quite utopia situation in terms of social interactions, at least as far as what I was bearing witness to. But there still was that idea which only over time has been both, well, first grasped by the media and then emphasized the idea that somehow presenting someone who has done a, I don't know, a four-minute mile, needs to have it emphasized that they're black or female or Latino or whatever in a way that might not overtly push the ego attachment, but would reinforce it in people who have it in place and vulnerable, and could lead to people who think that way as considering that either they are not able to do something because they aren't the right combination of factors under their control, sorry, factors not under their control, or in some cases, seeing it as some sort of challenge to that aspect that is not under their control, but that they've attached their ego to in a way that leads to the kind of race war negativity that spurs on the white supremacist movement. Like, as far as I'm concerned, the fact that someone can run four-minute mile means that in the future, someone else could as well. Not that that person is likely to be black. Actually, that person is likely to be black just because of the way that structures happen. But okay, with sports, let's go the other direction. Everyone was... fascinated by Tiger Woods when he started golfing. And that kind of aggravated me in a way that, as I look back on it, might have been informed by this that we're talking about. The idea that a guy who's half black and half, I don't know what is it, East Asian, the idea that that guy could play golf well does not fascinate me because I don't care about golf, not because he's... Okay, let me pursue this a little more. I got cut off. I gotta retrace my steps. It aggravated me because the people who cared that he was black and or Asian often didn't actually care about golf itself. And even if I cared about golf, it still would have aggravated me the same way. He got national name recognition, not because he was damn good, but by people who cared about that ego bump enough that they wanted to promote him so that they could also get that little bit of internal lift. And in doing so, reinforced the problematic aspects of that kind of support and incidentally probably contributed to the problems he had outside the sport because so many people had attached their egos to him that it wouldn't be surprising if that amplified, accelerated, or took past the threshold of a problem the personal weaknesses that he had, that we all have in some form, leading to his issues outside the sport, and likely amplified by the protection from people who had attached their ego without actually giving a damn about golf. He was a great player, that doesn't mean that it was healthy to celebrate him to the degree that he was celebrated because that celebration wasn't rooted in actual support of the player, but in the group division definition being amplified, even if it was only as a ricochet from what people either intended or thought they intended.
G: I think you're identifying a real tension, but I would push back on one key step because it's where your model risks becoming too deterministic.
The part I agree with is:
A support structure can become strong enough that it distorts perception.
Absolutely.
In fact, I think that's almost trivially true. People do it with religion, nationalism, political parties, professions, sports teams, universities, families, and even individual relationships.
Where I'd push back is here:
Emphasizing difference in order to support future efforts reinforces the filter.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it dissolves the filter.
And that's the hard part.
Take your knitting example.
Suppose a boy grows up hearing:
Knitting is for girls.
Now imagine someone says:
Men knit too.
That statement is emphasizing a difference category ("men"), but its purpose is actually to weaken the category boundary.
The long-term goal is:
Humans knit.
The short-term intervention is:
Men knit too.
The category is invoked in order to dismantle the category.
The problem is that the exact same mechanism can also be used in the opposite direction.
You can get:
Men knit too.
which weakens the boundary.
Or:
Men who knit are fundamentally different from other men.
which strengthens the boundary.
From the outside, both discussions are talking about men knitting.
The psychological effect is completely different.
I think your concern is that modern culture sometimes fails to stop at the first step.
The intended message is:
Women can be engineers.
But some audiences hear:
Engineering is a women's achievement.
Or:
Women engineers are a fundamentally distinct category.
Or:
The female aspect is the most important aspect.
That's a different message.
And I think you're arguing that once identity-support mechanisms get involved, people can start hearing or producing those stronger interpretations even when nobody consciously intended them.
That's not an absurd concern.
Where I think your Tiger Woods example is useful is that it separates two kinds of admiration.
One person says:
Tiger Woods is astonishing because he's an incredible golfer.
Another says:
Tiger Woods is astonishing because of what he represents.
You seem comfortable with the first.
You become skeptical when the second overwhelms the first.
Not because representation is meaningless.
But because the representation starts consuming the actual accomplishment.
The golfer disappears behind the symbol.
The place I'd challenge you is that I don't think the symbolic value is always parasitic.
Sometimes it genuinely conveys information.
Imagine you're the first left-handed surgeon in a village where everyone says left-handed people can't be surgeons.
The fact that you're left-handed is suddenly relevant.
Not because left-handedness made you better.
Not because left-handedness deserves pride.
But because your existence disproves a belief.
The symbolic function matters.
What I think you're really worried about is not representation itself.
It's what happens when symbols stop being evidence and start becoming identity fuel.
That's a different criticism.
And honestly, I think it fits much better with everything you've been saying.
Because when you describe the hypothetical person who says:
Everything that happens to me is because I'm black.
or
Everything that happens to me is because I'm a man.
or
Everything that happens to me is because I'm a woman.
you're not objecting to recognizing demographic realities.
You're objecting to a framework that becomes so psychologically central that it starts absorbing all explanations.
The support structure stops being one factor among many and becomes the lens through which everything is interpreted.
The interesting thing is that your own model predicts that this shouldn't happen equally often for everyone.
If you're right about the distinction between discovered attachment and identity-constructed attachment, then people whose psychological support is heavily invested in group identity should indeed be more vulnerable to that sort of distortion.
But I'd stop short of concluding that representation efforts necessarily create that vulnerability.
I think what you're describing is more like a tradeoff.
Representation can:
while simultaneously creating opportunities for:
Those outcomes can coexist.
The disagreement in society is largely over which side of that tradeoff is larger.
What strikes me after this discussion is that your concern is less about pride itself than about epistemology.
You keep returning to the same question in different forms:
What psychological structures help people remain connected to reality when reality becomes uncomfortable?
Whether the topic is national pride, religion, gender, race, sports, or family, that seems to be the question underneath all of them.
And from your perspective, any support structure that becomes necessary for maintaining equilibrium deserves scrutiny—not because support is bad, but because necessities have leverage. Once something becomes necessary to preserve the self, it gains the power to influence how evidence is processed. That's the pattern you've been tracing this entire conversation.
M: And where I push back on you in trying to identify some sort of weak point is that you're acting as though the reinforcement or dissolving of the filter is an absolute across the population that it affects, and that the strengthening versus weakening is a one-to-one ratio. Across a population, what dissolves the filter with some people reinforces it with others, especially if they've already gone too far to really have any dissolution happen to begin with. And that idea of a threshold, that idea of being fully submerged in an ego attachment at a certain point, is part of the problem. If it were continuously capable of being quantified as going up and down in a random way, that would be one thing. But we've defined a threshold by the nature of the thing that says that at a certain point, you've been captured by a perception that you must consciously decide from inside to drop because the external stuff isn't being allowed in. And in that case, random movement is eventually going to get everyone behind their own filter. Now, in practice, That absolute division wouldn't happen simply because it would require the kind of infinite random pattern that human lifespan just does not allow. And it likely doesn't happen quickly enough that it could be said to happen within a single lifetime. But it does seem to echo the poll result changes that have happened in the country in the last 40 years or so. I mean, go online and check. The reason why the undecideds have gotten more and more power is because more and more people end up going past that threshold and defining themselves by some sort of ego attachment in one direction or another. Now, I'm not saying that that captures the entirety of their lives. This doesn't necessarily encompass their entire being, their entire psyche, because of a single area that is coded against the outside world by an ego attachment. But when that attachment is brushed up upon, that otherwise benign person can become like QAnon level in terms of grabbing any information that supports them and denying any information which contradicts them. Even if that's the same piece of information for both sides. I mean, look at the people who are trying to defend the January 6th stuff. They will simultaneously say it was a day of peace and that the violence was instigated from outside. Those are simply not capable of existing, and yet the ecosystem in which it operates allows for both to be true simply because denying it would be to deny the entirety of the situation. This doesn't apply solely to political things. It's all the racial and the gender and the everything else. North versus south, us versus them, whatever. That simply is an easily accessible demonstration of the problem at large. Once you get past the threshold of being within the filter, escaping is no longer a question of going back down below that threshold. Things have recalibrated and there is no going below without some sort of willful or external energy.
G: I think the strongest part of your argument is not the claim that filters exist. That's well established.
It's the claim that there may be a phase transition rather than a smooth continuum.
That's the piece I've been underweighting.
Most psychological discussions implicitly assume something like a volume knob:
More attachment → somewhat more bias.
Less attachment → somewhat less bias.
You're describing something closer to a ratchet, a membrane, or a chemical reaction threshold:
Below a certain point, evidence can still modify the structure.
Above a certain point, the structure begins filtering evidence primarily in service of self-preservation.
Those are different models.
And there actually is some support in psychology for threshold-like effects, though not necessarily with the exact mechanism you're proposing. Concepts like identity fusion, belief perseverance, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance all contain versions of:
Once enough of the self is invested, the rules change.
The system starts behaving differently than it did before.
Where I'd still be cautious is with the claim that "random movement eventually puts everyone behind a filter."
My hesitation isn't because I think the risk is zero.
It's because humans seem to have multiple competing identities and support structures simultaneously.
A deeply religious person may be captured in one domain but highly objective in another.
A scientist may be remarkably evidence-driven professionally while being completely tribal politically.
A parent may be blind regarding their child but ruthlessly honest about themselves.
So the threshold may exist, but it may be local rather than global.
The psyche isn't one filter.
It's a collection of them.
Your January 6 example is actually useful here.
The interesting thing isn't that people believed something false.
Humans have always believed false things.
The interesting thing is the coexistence of mutually incompatible explanations:
"It was peaceful."
"The violence was caused by infiltrators."
As you point out, those are difficult to hold simultaneously if the goal is explanation.
But they become much easier to hold simultaneously if the goal is preserving a conclusion.
The conclusion isn't:
"What happened on January 6?"
The conclusion is:
"My side must remain justified."
Once that conclusion becomes load-bearing, contradictory explanations can coexist because they are no longer serving reality-tracking. They are serving equilibrium maintenance.
And I think that's very close to the mechanism you've been describing throughout this conversation.
What I find most interesting is that your original question was:
Why don't I experience pride in heritage, nationality, identity, etc.?
We've wandered a long way from that.
But I think we've accidentally uncovered a possible answer.
It may not be that you lack pride.
It may not even be that you lack group attachment.
It may be that you are unusually sensitive to the cost of making an attachment load-bearing.
When you hear:
"Be proud of being X."
your brain seems to immediately run a simulation several steps ahead:
If this becomes part of my support structure...
and later conflicts with reality...
then reality may become harder to perceive accurately.
Most people don't appear to run that simulation automatically.
They experience the immediate benefits:
without simultaneously modeling the long-term failure modes.
That doesn't mean they're wrong.
The benefits are real.
But it would explain why the entire concept feels strange to you.
You aren't evaluating the attachment at the point where it's formed.
You're evaluating it at the point where it eventually collides with reality.
And if that's true, then your difficulty has never really been understanding pride.
It's that you're instinctively analyzing the structural weaknesses of a bridge while many people are admiring the fact that the bridge exists at all.
Neither perspective is irrational.
They're just focused on different parts of the same structure.
M: Well, you notice that I qualified it myself, so you really don't need to. Like I said, the hypothetical that I started with needs to be modified because even if it's entirely true, it would require people to have an infinite lifetime in order for it actually to be true. You know, it's like large number randomness. If you roll the dice often enough, eventually you will get 500 snake eyes in a row. But in order to do so with any degree of likelihood, you might have to roll once a second until the heat death of the universe. That's what I meant. Even if I'm completely correct, it's only that kind of theoretical correctness if you extend all the other parameters to infinity. And it doesn't count as a caution because I said myself that I wasn't necessarily going to completely encompass a person. I mean, I specifically pointed out that it wouldn't necessarily, and that it only would be set off once that area was attached, was touched on by their day-to-day situation. But at that point, that self-defense can override everything, like you're talking about the MAGA scientist, and you may be right, but I present as counter-evidence the multiple doctors who, once a political topic has been touched upon, will go against evidence that a layman can follow and the consensus of their own professional colleagues, not because of evidence that they have, but because they are trying to shape the evidence that exists in a way that neutralizes anything that challenges their politics. So yeah, this is not a caution. This is something I already said. And we really haven't wandered away from the original topic, we've just zoomed out more. Like, the reason why we've gotten into the idea of this protectiveness is to emphasize the danger of even slightly amplifying the ego connection between the heritage that you can't control and your sense of yourself as a person. The fact that MAGA doctors are willing to abandon their profession for their politics because they've passed that protective threshold shows how powerful those filters can be. So even if a threshold hasn't been passed, it shows how strongly it can affect things before that threshold, and how dangerous it is to let anyone even approach that threshold in a way that, if it can't be discouraged simply because, you know, it's the world we live in, needs to at least be acknowledged in a way that it can be addressed as someone starts hitting that critical point. Like, my life is not exactly great at the moment, but if I started, you know, getting way too into Norwegian heritage, I would want there to be some sort of acknowledged structure to pull me back from the edge before I started dressing like a Viking and claiming that everyone from Europe who had family that survived the Viking age owed me, you know, respect and money because my ancestors allowed them to live instead of slaughtering them. And when there's an encouraging statement like be proud of being X, that is a dangerous shotgun approach towards encouragement. It might lead to someone feeling better, but it's also kind of a Russian roulette because it offers as one option placing the entirety of your ego behind something that isn't under your control and then building your life around that to the point that anything that goes against it is going to lead to friction or conflict.
G: I think I finally see where we've been talking past each other.
I've been treating your model primarily as a description of how identity-based support structures fail.
You've been treating it as a description of why they should be regarded as potentially hazardous from the moment they're introduced.
Not because everyone who drinks becomes an alcoholic.
Not because every attachment becomes fanaticism.
But because the failure mode is severe enough that it should be considered part of the design specification from the beginning.
In engineering terms, I've been saying:
"Most bridges don't collapse."
And you've been saying:
"That doesn't mean we stop calculating load limits."
The Norwegian example is actually useful because it's absurd enough to isolate the mechanism.
You don't think you're likely to become a Viking-revivalist demanding reparations from England.
The point isn't the probability.
The point is that the mechanism exists.
Once a person begins drawing psychological support from:
"I am Norwegian."
rather than
"I happen to have Norwegian ancestry."
they have opened a pathway that can, under certain conditions, become increasingly detached from reality.
Whether it actually does is a separate question.
Where I think you've landed is something like:
Normal.
Necessary.
Often useful.
Potentially dangerous.
Not because it always fails.
Because when it fails, it fails in a very specific direction:
preservation of the support structure becomes more important than accurate perception.
That seems to be the core concern you've been describing for the last several hours.
The interesting thing is that I don't think your objection is actually to pride.
I think your objection is to outsourcing stability.
If someone says:
"I'm proud to be Norwegian."
you don't immediately object.
If someone says:
"My worth as a person depends on being Norwegian."
you immediately see the problem.
Your argument is that the first statement can sometimes drift toward the second without people noticing.
Not inevitably.
Not universally.
But often enough that it deserves scrutiny.
Where I would still disagree slightly is with the phrase "Russian roulette."
That implies the outcomes are mostly luck-driven.
Your own model is actually more sophisticated than that.
You've spent most of this conversation describing factors that influence the risk:
Those variables matter enormously.
The person who says:
"I enjoy Norwegian history"
and
"I would like to learn more about my ancestors"
isn't standing at the same level of risk as the person who says:
"My value as a human being comes from my Norwegian blood."
Even though both are drawing from the same source.
What I find most interesting is that this loops back to your original confusion about pride.
You kept saying:
"I don't understand why people feel pride in things they didn't choose."
And after all this discussion, I think a more precise version might be:
"I understand why they feel it. What I don't understand is why they trust it."
Because from your perspective, the moment pride starts supplying psychological support, it stops being merely a pleasant feeling and starts becoming a structural component.
And structural components deserve inspection.
That's why the idea never felt emotionally self-evident to you.
You were evaluating it the way you evaluate any other support beam: not just for what it provides when it works, but for what happens if it becomes load-bearing and then develops a crack.
M: This is likely to come up again because, you know, 250th anniversary of America versus the self-involved administration of Donald Trump. I mean, even taking him out of the equation, just the idea of being proud to be an American is going to come up a lot. And when it comes to being American, it's like, even discounting, you know, the way we've been describing the different versions, and just in terms of that attachment which may or may not be examined by whoever has it, the idea of being proud to be an American is way too broad of a concept for me to be comfortable when people that I don't believe have actually examined the question answer enthusiastically in the affirmative. It's not that I'm ashamed of being an American, but that's such a complex notion that even if I were to translate my feelings towards America into that idea of pride that other people have, it still isn't something that could simply be easily taken to the positive or negative side. But people who would answer that enthusiastically are likely to be... Sorry, let me rephrase this. The group of people who would answer enthusiastically would include the people who would think of that as some sort of personal attack to say that not only weren't you sure what being proud meant, but that you weren't enthusiastically joining them. They'd see that as fighting words. Al Franken, I think, said something along the lines of Republicans love America the way that someone loves their mother, unconditionally and sometimes exceedingly violently, while Democrats love America like a friend or lover in that there's always something that could be improved, but they love it anyway. It's the same thing with pride. Given my limitations, I can't say with 100%, you know, buy-in that I want to be proud of America, but I do want America to go the right way because I'm part of it. While people who have gone past that ego threshold have decided not only that they are certain who does and doesn't count as an American, but that if you don't believe the way that they do, that you can't be an American. even though the very definition of America in practice over the last century, if not in fact or written law, is that being an American means that you can believe pretty much anything as long as you want the country to succeed.
G: I think the most important thing you've uncovered for yourself is that your discomfort isn't primarily with America.
It's with the word pride.
Because when someone says:
"I'm proud to be an American."
you don't know which of about six different statements they actually mean.
They might mean:
"I like living here."
Or:
"I admire parts of American history."
Or:
"I feel attached to this country."
Or:
"I want this country to succeed."
Or:
"I think America is morally superior to other countries."
Or:
"My identity is heavily invested in being American."
Or:
"Criticism of America feels like criticism of me."
Those are wildly different positions that all get compressed into the same sentence.
And I think that's why the phrase itself feels suspicious to you.
Not because you disagree with all of the possible meanings.
Because you can't tell which one is being asserted.
I also think your observation about complexity is important.
You seem to evaluate nations the same way you evaluate people.
A nation is too large, too contradictory, too complicated to receive an uncomplicated emotional verdict.
America contains:
To you, asking:
"Are you proud of America?"
is almost like asking:
"Are you proud of humanity?"
The question is so broad that it starts to lose precision.
The answer depends on which part you're talking about.
Where I think your model becomes particularly useful is when discussing gatekeeping.
You wrote:
People who have gone past that ego threshold have decided not only that they know what America is, but who counts as an American.
That strikes me as a natural consequence of identity becoming load-bearing.
If "American" is supplying part of your psychological support, then defining America becomes psychologically important.
Because whoever controls the definition controls the support structure.
If I say:
"America means constitutional liberty."
and you say:
"America means pluralistic democracy."
we can disagree politically.
But if my sense of self is heavily invested in my definition, then your disagreement becomes more than disagreement.
It becomes a threat to the thing supporting me.
At that point the temptation is not merely to argue that you're wrong.
It's to argue that you're not a "real American."
Because that removes the challenge without requiring revision of the support structure.
This is where your Al Franken example gets interesting.
Not because it's perfectly accurate—real people are more complicated than partisan caricatures—but because it points toward two different modes of attachment.
One says:
"I love America because it is mine."
The other says:
"I love America despite its flaws."
Your reaction seems to be:
"Why can't both be true?"
A parent who loves a child unconditionally can still acknowledge that the child did something wrong.
A friend who loves a friend can still criticize them.
In fact, criticism is often part of the relationship.
So from your perspective, the strongest form of patriotism might actually be:
"I am attached enough to care, but detached enough to perceive."
Not blind celebration.
Not cynical rejection.
Something closer to stewardship.
And that loops back to your original question about heritage.
When you say:
"I want America to go the right way because I'm part of it."
that sounds much more like responsibility than pride.
Not responsibility in the legal sense.
More like:
"This thing affects me, and I affect it."
That's a very different emotional posture from:
"This thing reflects my worth."
The first encourages maintenance and improvement.
The second encourages defense.
And I think much of this conversation has been you trying to understand why so many people seem comfortable moving from the first posture into the second.
Your answer may simply be that many of them don't perceive the distinction as sharply as you do.
To them, attachment, identity, pride, belonging, and support blur together.
You keep separating them into distinct components and asking which one is actually being discussed.
That's probably why broad slogans like "be proud to be American" feel incomplete to you. Before you can agree or disagree, you want to know:
Proud in what sense?
Attached in what sense?
Supportive in what sense?
And what happens if America does something wrong tomorrow?
Those questions don't eliminate patriotism. They just make it much harder for patriotism to become unconditional.
M: a funny bit of that is that the one group of people where you could, maybe without certainty, because people are all over the place, but at least reliably be confident were telling a particular version of that and telling the truth would be people who are naturalized citizens. They would have perhaps the ego reason, but in a way that was not negative and perhaps even positive. They would be proud of being an American, not because of who they were, but because it was something that they made a choice in and put the effort into. It wasn't an accident of birth that they decided to attach any kind of ego support to, but a decision to join this country because they felt it was the best place for them to be and the country was built to allow them to join it. I'm not sure where the quote or idea comes from originally, but I heard recently that idea, which I knew but had dropped off on my radar, where you can move to Germany or Norway or Switzerland or whatever, but you can never become Italian or Norwegian or Swiss. So the idea of someone being proud to be an American is entertainingly safest with someone who wasn't born here at all, but who has declared their pride not through an attachment of ego to something that they had no control over, but by putting in the work so that their pride in being an American is that kind of product that I was talking about where I can sometimes take pride once I'm far enough removed from the effort.
G: That's actually one of the more interesting implications of the framework you've been building.
If we use your definition of pride—not the broad cultural one, but the narrower one tied to agency, effort, and choice—then naturalized citizens have a much cleaner claim to "proud to be American" than most native-born citizens.
Not because they're more American.
But because becoming American was something they actually did.
They:
Under your framework, that resembles graduating, building a business, writing a book, or earning a certification much more than it resembles being born in a particular ZIP code.
The pride attaches to the act.
What's funny is that this reveals another ambiguity hidden inside the phrase:
"I'm proud to be American."
A native-born citizen may mean:
"I'm proud of America."
A naturalized citizen may mean:
"I'm proud that I became an American."
Those sound almost identical.
Psychologically they're very different statements.
One points outward.
One points inward.
One concerns the nation.
One concerns a personal accomplishment.
The other thing that struck me is your observation about national identity versus ethnic identity.
There is a longstanding distinction between what political scientists often call civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism.
The rough version is:
Ethnic
You belong because of who your ancestors were.
Civic
You belong because you joined the project.
America's self-image has historically leaned heavily toward the second model, even when reality didn't always live up to it.
That's why phrases like:
"An American is someone who believes in the Constitution."
or
"Anyone can become American."
have such power in American rhetoric.
Whether completely true in practice or not, they describe a membership based on participation rather than ancestry.
And from your perspective, participation is the important part.
What I find amusing is that your framework almost inverts a lot of modern discussions.
Many people would instinctively assume that the descendant of ten generations of Americans has the strongest claim to American pride.
You seem to arrive at:
"No, the person who chose it and worked for it has the strongest claim."
Not because the descendant is less American.
Because the naturalized citizen has a clearer connection between effort and outcome.
The place where I'd add a wrinkle is that even naturalized citizens can end up in the attachment dynamics we've been discussing.
The pride may begin as:
"I worked hard to become American."
But over time it can become:
"America is part of me."
Which means the same strengths and vulnerabilities can eventually appear.
The origin is different.
The maintenance can end up looking surprisingly similar.
But I do think you've stumbled onto something that explains why certain patriotic stories resonate even with people who are skeptical of nationalism.
A story about someone crossing oceans, learning a language, taking tests, building a life, and finally becoming a citizen is fundamentally a story about agency.
And agency is one of the few places where your definition of pride seems completely comfortable.
You don't have to borrow credit from ancestors.
You don't have to inherit glory from a flag.
You don't have to attach yourself to a tribe.
The person actually did something.
In a strange way, that may be why naturalized citizens are often the easiest patriotic Americans for you to understand. Their patriotism contains a component that looks less like identity and more like accomplishment.
M: I think you're reversing the cause and effect here. It's not a question of whether you use my definition of what pride is. I'm saying that someone who has been naturalized, if you use all of the available reasonable definitions of what pride means, are highly likely to fall into the basket that is mine in terms of what their pride reflects. So it's not a question of, you know, using my definition of pride and saying that they are a demonstration of it. It's saying that if you use the entire spectrum of the definition of pride that isn't undefined, when you look at them, they would have the most, I believe, defensible position in terms of what kind of pride they had, and that position would be the one that I have defined.
G: Yes, that's a much sharper formulation.
I think I misunderstood you by treating the naturalized citizen as an example that happened to fit your definition.
You're making a stronger claim:
If we examine all the common meanings of pride and ask which one is most justified, most defensible, and least vulnerable to the problems we've been discussing, the naturalized citizen's pride is unusually likely to land in the accomplishment category regardless of which definition we start from.
That's a different argument.
You're not saying:
"Let's redefine pride until naturalized citizens fit."
You're saying:
"Naturalized citizens fit the strongest definition of pride even if we don't redefine anything."
And I think there's something to that.
Suppose we line up several people:
All three say:
"I'm proud to be American."
The first two may mean:
All legitimate possibilities.
But the third person has an additional interpretation available:
"I chose this."
"I worked for this."
"I sacrificed for this."
"I achieved this."
That interpretation is uniquely difficult to challenge because it is grounded in agency.
In fact, viewed through the framework you've been building, it almost acts as a kind of anchor.
Many of the forms of pride you've been suspicious of have the structure:
Identity → Pride
or
Association → Pride
The naturalized citizen has:
Action → Membership → Pride
The pride is downstream of something they actually did.
What's interesting is that this may explain why naturalization ceremonies often resonate emotionally even with people who are skeptical of nationalism.
The emotional core isn't:
"America is the greatest country."
The emotional core is:
"This person wanted to be here enough to earn it."
That's an accomplishment narrative.
Humans generally understand accomplishment narratives much more easily than identity narratives.
The other thing I think you're implicitly pointing at is that if a naturalized citizen becomes excessively nationalistic, they at least started from a more reality-based foundation.
The later attachment may still become unhealthy.
The later ego-support mechanisms may still emerge.
But the original pride wasn't:
"I happened to be born here."
It was:
"I made a decision and followed through."
And if we're ranking forms of pride by how tightly they're connected to agency, effort, and responsibility, that one sits unusually high on the list.
Which means that under your broader analysis, it's not merely an example that happens to satisfy your preferred definition.
It's one of the rare cases where multiple competing definitions of pride tend to converge on the same answer:
There is something here that the person actually did. That fact remains true regardless of whether we approach the question through identity, belonging, attachment, gratitude, or accomplishment.
M: And what I mean by defensible is that I thought as a contrast of someone whose family has been here 300 years or something like that. Or actually, what sprang to mind was someone who is visibly and not negatively a redneck waving an American flag at a parade. Like, not as an attack on them, but as a case study, I feel like most people at a parade either aren't thinking at that moment or haven't thought at all in their life about why they are proud of America. And if you were able to have a conversation with them where they trusted you and gave honest answers, and for some people that might involve some kind of truth serum or hypnosis in order to get there, not even because they would resist, but because they really hadn't thought about it on the surface, I have a feeling there would be a lot of versions where you could pin it down and say something along the lines of, you know, if it was a dialogue, ask them, why are you proud to be an American? And their response might be something like, well, my daddy died to protect this country, which leads to, so you're proud of your dad. Why does that mean that you're proud of America? which would lead to, you know, because he was defending that country when he did it. And that would lead down to interesting roads and all of that, but basically it means that even if your pride isn't some sort of, you know, ego cover kind of thing, saying that you're proud to be an American often is a blanket statement that when investigated implies some attachment to a person, place, or thing that isn't actually the entirety of America, and that America often benefits from in terms of support by, you know, equivocation. Like, my mom was in the army, and in her life, that was the first place where she felt like she was safe and protected and part of the group, which means that she likely would say she's proud to be an American if she had to answer yes or no, but on that kind of deeper investigation, she would likely be more proud of the American armed forces and just proud to be an American as a side effect of that. So that's what I mean by the naturalized citizens having the most defensively. stable position in terms of pride and being an American. They literally have bought into the entire system through their brain and their own effort. If you want to give the most reasonable benefit of the doubt, you'd still have to say that America is such a large concept that very few people who aren't naturalized citizens have experienced enough of it to say that they are honestly proud of the entirety of it.
G: I think you've shifted from a psychological argument into a linguistic one, and that's where a lot of the clarity is coming from.
You're essentially arguing that:
"I am proud to be an American"
is usually too coarse-grained a statement to be literally true in the way people imagine it is.
Not because the speaker is lying.
Not because the speaker is confused.
But because "America" is doing a tremendous amount of hidden work inside the sentence.
Your example about your mother is exactly the sort of thing I mean.
If someone asks:
"Why are you proud to be American?"
and the answer eventually traces back to:
"The Army gave me purpose, stability, and belonging."
then the emotional object isn't really America in its entirety.
It's a specific American institution.
The flag, the nation, and the broader identity become containers for that experience.
Likewise with your hypothetical parade attendee.
If the conversation is allowed to continue long enough, you may discover:
"I'm proud of my father."
Or:
"I'm proud of my town."
Or:
"I'm proud of military service."
Or:
"I'm grateful for opportunities I had here."
Or:
"I like the constitutional system."
Or:
"I escaped something worse."
The interesting part is that all of those can collapse into:
"I'm proud to be American."
without the speaker consciously noticing the compression.
Where I think your argument becomes strongest is here:
You aren't saying they have no justification.
You're saying the justification is usually more specific than the slogan.
In other words:
America serves as a symbolic umbrella over a collection of attachments.
And the emotional force is often coming from those attachments rather than from a holistic evaluation of the nation itself.
That's a much narrower claim than:
Patriotism is irrational.
And I think it's considerably harder to dismiss.
The one place I'd still push back slightly is your final step:
Very few people who aren't naturalized citizens have experienced enough of America to be honestly proud of the entirety of it.
I suspect that's true of naturalized citizens too.
America is simply too large.
No individual experiences all of it.
No individual understands all of it.
No individual can fully evaluate all of it.
The naturalized citizen may have a stronger claim to:
"I chose America."
But they still don't have a comprehensive understanding of America.
Neither do I.
Neither do historians.
Neither do presidents.
So I think the deepest version of your argument may actually be:
The more honestly a person examines the object of their pride, the more likely that object becomes smaller, more specific, and more concrete.
Instead of:
"I'm proud of America."
you get:
"I'm proud of the ideals in the Constitution."
Or:
"I'm proud of how my community responded to a disaster."
Or:
"I'm proud of my father's military service."
Or:
"I'm proud that I became a citizen."
Or:
"I'm proud of the civil-rights movement."
Those statements are much easier to defend because the object is identifiable.
You can point to it.
You can explain it.
You can criticize parts of it without losing the whole thing.
What's interesting is that this brings us almost full circle to your original discomfort with heritage pride.
You seem to have a strong preference for pride whose object can survive interrogation.
If I ask:
"Why are you proud of that?"
you want the answer to become more precise as we dig deeper.
Not more vague.
Not more symbolic.
Not more mystical.
More concrete.
And I think that's why naturalized citizenship keeps appealing to you as an example. The further you interrogate it, the more specific the answer becomes:
"Because I chose it."
That's an unusually stable answer under examination. It tends to get stronger the more you investigate it, whereas many broader identity-based forms of pride tend to dissolve into smaller constituent attachments when examined closely.
M: I claim that there has been no shift because psychology, especially the conscious psychology, is defined by the language that is used and available. And if it's unexamined or used casually without occasional cleaning of the registry, it leads to a vague sloppiness that allows for psychological difficulties. If you don't look at the way someone defines what pride is, you can't actually make an argument about what they're proud of. Or perhaps more importantly, they can't either. They can't do it cleanly at any rate. They might claim that they can, but if you start pinning them down and do so in a way that's intellectually honest that they'll allow, they'll come to a realization that what they've thought of as pride is likely three different ideas that they've allowed to slip between in terms of usage and ideas like, you know, whether to support a parade or something like that in a way that, again, if they're intellectually honest, they'll realize they might not have made if they'd looked at their language and therefore looked at their psychology. It's not a question of confusion so much as it is a question of not ever being questioned, even by themselves.
G: I think that's a much stronger and more defensible claim than some of the broader ones we've been circling.
Because now you're not really making a claim about patriotism, identity, or even pride specifically.
You're making a claim about unexamined categories.
And that's a claim I think has a lot of merit.
What you're saying is roughly:
If a word is carrying multiple psychological functions, and the speaker has never separated those functions, then the speaker may unknowingly move between them as needed.
Not dishonestly.
Not manipulatively.
Just automatically.
Take "pride."
Over the course of this conversation we've identified at least:
Most people use the single word pride for all of them.
So when someone says:
"I'm proud to be American."
they may genuinely mean all of those at once.
Or they may mean three of them.
Or they may mean one of them but emotionally borrow support from the others.
The person isn't necessarily confused.
But the category is underspecified.
The part where I think you're making an interesting psychological point is here:
It's not a question of confusion so much as it is a question of not ever being questioned.
Exactly.
Many beliefs don't survive because they're strong.
They survive because they're never decomposed.
The belief exists as a package deal.
Once you start separating components, people often discover they have different attitudes toward each piece.
For example:
Are you proud of America?
may become:
Are you grateful for opportunities you had?
Yes.
Do you admire parts of American history?
Yes.
Do you think America is morally superior to every other nation?
No.
Do you believe criticism of America is unpatriotic?
No.
Do you feel attached to American culture?
Somewhat.
Do you take personal credit for American accomplishments?
No.
Now suddenly the original "yes" has become a much more nuanced structure.
What's interesting is that your whole line of thinking resembles something philosophers sometimes do with moral concepts.
Take a word like:
People often treat them as single things.
Then you start pulling them apart and discover that multiple concepts have been sharing the same label.
Much of philosophy consists of noticing that the label is hiding distinctions.
I think you're trying to do something similar with pride.
Where I'd still stop short is the idea that language completely defines psychology.
I think language and psychology influence each other.
People often experience things before they can articulate them.
But I do think you're right that sloppy language can preserve sloppy psychological structures.
If someone never asks:
What exactly do I mean by pride?
then the answer never has to become precise.
And if the answer never becomes precise, the concept can absorb contradictions without anyone noticing.
In fact, that may explain why this conversation started with you feeling that the idea of pride in heritage was alien.
You were treating the term as if it should refer to a single psychological object.
But after several hours of discussion, we've repeatedly found that the same word is being used for multiple different psychological states.
From your perspective, that makes the conversation feel unstable.
Because every time you think you've understood what someone means by pride, the definition quietly shifts underneath you.
And your instinctive response is:
"Before we continue, can we clean up the definitions?"
Not because definitions are the point.
Because the psychology can't be examined clearly until the definitions stop moving.
That strikes me as much closer to the heart of what you've been wrestling with than the original question of whether you're weird for not feeling national or heritage pride. The real issue seems to be that many people use emotionally important words without ever unpacking the several different mental processes hidden inside them. Once you start unpacking them, the conversation changes completely.
M: And everyone should be interested in making sure that they do this, not because, well, I'd say some people are lying to themselves or allowing them to lie to themselves, but because in doing so, they leave themselves open to being manipulated. Someone who talks about gay pride and who means the kind of lack of shame and how that should be standard rather than something that needs to be fought for, will continuously clash against someone whose only understanding of the idea of pride is subconscious and translates into something like, you know, believing that what you are proud of is the superior position and that any other position is therefore inferior, because that person will look at a positive gay pride parade and instead see people attacking their sexual orientation, not because of any type of attacking language from the outside, but because internally they can only recognize pride as being a declaration of superiority.
G: I think this is one of the strongest applications of the framework you've been building, because it moves from:
"People should define words better."
to
"People should define words better because otherwise they'll end up arguing with ghosts."
The example you gave works precisely because both people can honestly believe they understand the word pride while actually referring to different psychological objects.
Person A hears:
"Gay pride."
and means:
"You do not need to be ashamed of existing."
or
"You should not have to hide who you are."
or
"We survived social pressure and rejection."
Meanwhile Person B hears:
"Gay pride."
and unconsciously translates it into:
"Gay superiority."
or
"Gay people think they're better than me."
or
"An attack on my identity."
Now the two people aren't even disagreeing about the same proposition.
They're having two different conversations while using the same vocabulary.
Where I'd add a small modification is that the misunderstanding doesn't necessarily require either side to have an unusually distorted definition.
Sometimes it can arise simply because pride is genuinely overloaded.
For example, English uses "pride" for:
Historically, some of those meanings are nearly opposites.
"Pride" as a virtue and "pride" as a vice are not the same thing.
Yet we use the same word.
So the ambiguity is built into the language itself.
What I think you're really worried about is not semantic ambiguity by itself.
It's what happens when ambiguity intersects with identity.
Because once identity becomes involved, people stop asking:
"What do you mean by pride?"
and start reacting to the interpretation that feels most threatening.
The conversation jumps directly to defense.
Your manipulation point is also worth taking seriously.
Not necessarily in the sense of some mastermind exploiting people.
More in the sense that vague language creates openings.
A slogan that means:
"Don't be ashamed."
can be interpreted as:
"Celebrate."
or
"Take ownership."
or
"Take pride."
or
"Assert superiority."
depending on who's hearing it and what assumptions they're bringing.
That makes communication noisy.
And noisy systems are easier to steer, intentionally or otherwise.
What's interesting is that this circles all the way back to your original discomfort with pride itself.
You weren't merely skeptical of the emotion.
You were skeptical of a word that seems to permit too many psychological operations without requiring people to distinguish between them.
To you, saying:
"I'm proud."
without specifying what kind of pride, why, and in what sense,
feels a little like a mathematician saying:
"The answer is a number."
Technically true.
Practically incomplete.
And when that incomplete statement becomes attached to emotionally important subjects—nation, race, religion, sexuality, gender, family—the lack of precision stops being merely academic.
Because now people may genuinely believe they're agreeing, disagreeing, supporting, or attacking one another when in reality they're operating from entirely different definitions that nobody bothered to unpack.
That doesn't mean everyone needs a philosophical seminar before attending a parade. But it does suggest that many cultural conflicts are not only disagreements about values; they're disagreements about the meanings of the words being used to express those values. And because the meanings are rarely examined, the disagreement often looks deeper and more hostile than it actually is.
M: That's not a modification because it's exactly what I was saying. It's got nothing to do with a distorted definition, but an unexamined one. Because in my example, that guy who sees gay pride as being a declaration of superiority has an unexamined definition that they only use when they talk about things like being proud to be an American. Now, we've already talked about examining what you're actually proud of, so we don't need to go off in that direction. But for a person like that, it's not unreasonable to assign that person as being in the camp of people who think of being proud to be an American as a declaration of American superiority. Nor is it unreasonable to think that they really don't think of the idea of pride at any other time in their life. So the one way in which they've experienced internally the idea of pride is only in that form of declaring superiority over others. So it's not a question of distortion, but it's a lack of examination that I'm talking about. That's what I said before, so you don't need to modify it. The only reason why I'm not addressing the person who organizes... or participates in a gay pride rally is because, well, it might actually be getting reduced from 20 years ago, and that might not even necessarily be a positive thing, but generally, anyone attending a gay pride rally has internally examined some part of themselves enough that it's reasonable to believe that they at least understand the difference between the pride that the other side feels and the celebration of existence that is being promoted by the rally, which isn't to say that there can't be a few of the proud to be American orientations from the other side, but that's what I was talking about in terms of the reduction of introspection necessary to exist as an out homosexual in America because it leaves room for more assumption or existence without internal reflection, but yeah, that's why I didn't try to address both sides. It's because the situation of the example leads to a situation where the majority of the attendees, at least, would already have done that kind of introspection that the guy feeling attacked hasn't.
G: Fair correction. I was smuggling in a distinction you had already accounted for.
You're not describing a distorted definition.
You're describing a single, unexamined definition that has become universalized.
Those are different.
A distorted definition would be:
Pride always means superiority.
An unexamined definition is closer to:
The only context in which I've ever consciously encountered pride is one where it functioned as superiority, so when I encounter the word elsewhere, I automatically map it onto that meaning.
The person isn't necessarily making a logical mistake.
They're applying the only model they have.
And I think your observation about introspection is actually the more interesting part.
Not because LGBTQ people are inherently more introspective.
Obviously that's not true.
But because historically, many LGBTQ people have been forced into a degree of self-examination that many straight people never experience.
Questions like:
Those questions often become unavoidable.
A straight person in a socially accepted environment can easily go decades without ever needing to interrogate those categories.
Not because they're incapable of introspection.
Because circumstances never demanded it.
So in your example, the asymmetry isn't necessarily:
One side is smarter.
or
One side is more moral.
It's:
One side has probably spent more time examining the concept being discussed.
That's a much narrower claim.
And honestly, a much stronger one.
What I think you've been circling for several hours is the idea that many social conflicts are not occurring between two fully articulated philosophies.
They're occurring between:
An examined concept
and
An assumed concept.
For example:
Person A:
"Pride means refusing shame."
Person B:
"Pride means asserting superiority."
Neither definition is being invented on the spot.
Both exist in ordinary language.
The problem is that Person B may never have realized there was another meaning available.
So when Person A says:
"Gay pride."
Person B literally hears:
"Gay superiority."
Not because they're malicious.
Not because they're stupid.
Because they're using the only definition they've consciously possessed.
The thing I find most interesting is that this loops all the way back to your original question about whether you're weird for not feeling pride in heritage or nationality.
The answer may be that you've spent far more time than average interrogating what the word pride means.
Most people never reach that point.
For them, the word remains a cluster of loosely connected feelings.
For you, the word has become a problem statement.
Every time someone says:
"I'm proud of X."
your brain immediately starts asking:
What kind of pride?
Why?
Proud of what specifically?
What's the causal connection?
What work is the word doing in this sentence?
Most people don't automatically run that analysis.
Which is probably why the conversation has felt so strange from your side.
You weren't failing to understand pride.
You were trying to determine which of several distinct psychological phenomena the speaker was actually referring to, while many speakers have never felt a need to separate those phenomena in the first place.
And if your broader concern about manipulation is correct, that's precisely why the separation matters. The less examined a concept is, the easier it is for different meanings to slide into one another unnoticed, both in public discourse and inside a person's own head.
M: To make it less politically volatile in the example, what I'm talking about is the equivalent of someone who has only used a ball for kickball or soccer being in the reasonable position that they never even considered using it like people do for basketball, and perhaps even understandable if they see someone pick up their ball and dribble it, see that and react as though it's some sort of sacrilege, not because it's objectively wrong, but because it's nothing that they've ever done. It's reasonably nothing that they necessarily should have thought of, and possibly might be tinged with some embarrassment because they never even considered it. And embarrassment can lead to defensiveness.
G: Yes, and I think that analogy gets much closer to what you've actually been describing than the earlier political examples.
Because in the ball example, nobody is necessarily wrong.
The soccer player isn't ignorant in any meaningful sense.
The basketball player isn't redefining reality.
What's happened is that one person has unconsciously mistaken:
"The way I use this object"
for
"The nature of this object."
The distinction only becomes visible when another use appears.
The really important part of your analogy is the emotional reaction.
The first reaction isn't:
"Interesting. I had never thought of that."
The first reaction may be:
"You're using it wrong."
And the reason isn't necessarily hostility.
It may be that the person has never separated:
Ball
from
Soccer-ball.
Those concepts have been fused their entire life.
The embarrassment angle is particularly interesting because I think it often gets overlooked.
If somebody discovers that a concept they've used for decades has additional meanings they never considered, there can be a moment of:
"Wait, how did I not notice this?"
And humans are not always comfortable with that feeling.
Sometimes curiosity follows.
Sometimes defensiveness follows.
Sometimes both.
Applied back to the pride discussion, your argument isn't really:
"People are defining pride incorrectly."
It's more like:
"Many people are using only one subset of the concept and have never had reason to inspect the boundaries."
So when another subset appears, it can feel like an attack on the original meaning.
Not because the new meaning is incompatible.
Because the existence of multiple meanings was never consciously recognized.
That's why I think you've been emphasizing "unexamined" rather than "distorted."
A distorted definition would be like insisting:
"A basketball isn't a ball."
An unexamined definition is:
"I have always used balls for soccer, therefore when I hear 'ball' I automatically think soccer."
The second person isn't being irrational.
They're using a perfectly functional mental shortcut.
The problem only appears when they encounter a context where the shortcut no longer covers the whole territory.
And I think this also explains why you're so interested in cleaning up language.
You aren't treating definitions as academic exercises.
You're treating them as maintenance on the mental machinery.
If someone never notices that "pride" is being used for:
then those meanings can bleed into one another without the person realizing it.
Not because they're foolish.
But because the internal registry has never been reorganized.
To continue your analogy, it's like someone who has spent forty years calling every round object a soccer ball. They'll function perfectly well until the day they walk into a gymnasium and discover that half the room disagrees about what the object is for. At that point the disagreement isn't really about the ball. It's about a classification system that nobody realized they were carrying around.
M: Well, embarrassment is a facet of the general awkwardness of a situation that can lead to amplification of the other stuff we've been talking about. Like if someone is in denial of their homosexuality or their heritage, that can catalyze other elements, like the ego threshold we were talking about, to areas that it would not have reached if everything else was held equal. Embarrassment is a powerful motivator in the short term, especially since its nature keeps it from being examined, that and projection. I think it's psychologically demonstrable to be possible, if not likely, that a lot of people who, for instance, have an issue with public nudity of a certain type are driven at least partially by projected embarrassment, if not internal embarrassment, because either they want to look, they want to do it themselves but can't, or they know that they couldn't do it themselves and therefore believe no one else should. You can tie that into sexuality a lot of places and come out with a similar argument. And the point back into the whole discussion is that embarrassment and awkwardness are not objectively valid reasons for doing something, but emotionally are, you know, outsized influences on reactions, especially if that embarrassment is never examined or awkwardness is never examined. I would be interested to know how many people who object to a non-Christian quote-unquote lifestyle are influenced by the fact that the people who are supporting it can't imagine living any other way and therefore think that it must be wrong or something like that. That's what I mean by awkwardness. It's kind of a stretch of the term, but I can't think of a better one that also encompasses things like embarrassment.
G: I think the word you're reaching for may not be embarrassment but something closer to discomfort, identity friction, or even cognitive unease.
Because embarrassment is one manifestation, but your examples seem broader.
The common structure you're describing looks something like:
That fourth step is the important one.
The sequence becomes:
This feels wrong.
Therefore it is wrong.
instead of:
This feels wrong.
Why does it feel wrong?
The reason I think you're onto something is that many people are much better at examining conclusions than examining reactions.
They'll ask:
"Do I support this?"
But they won't ask:
"Why did I have that emotional reaction in the first place?"
The reaction arrives first.
The explanation arrives later.
Sometimes much later.
Your nudity example is useful because it illustrates the range of possible sources.
A person's discomfort could stem from:
The external behavior might look identical.
The internal causes could be completely different.
Where I think this connects to the broader conversation is through the idea of unexamined emotional inputs.
Earlier we were talking about:
Now we're talking about:
But the mechanism is remarkably similar.
In both cases:
An emotional signal is generated.
The critical question is:
Is the signal treated as data, or as a conclusion?
A signal might tell you:
Pay attention to this.
It doesn't necessarily tell you:
Reject this.
Or:
Accept this.
Or:
Defend this.
The emotional reaction is real.
The interpretation of the reaction is separate.
Your example about non-Christian lifestyles gets at this distinction.
I would be cautious about assuming any single cause, because people object for many different reasons.
But I think it's entirely plausible that some percentage of objections arise from:
I cannot imagine myself living this way.
which then becomes:
Therefore nobody should live this way.
Those are very different propositions.
The first is a statement about the speaker.
The second is a statement about the world.
The leap between them is often invisible.
What strikes me is that your whole framework is becoming less about pride and more about a general principle:
Unexamined psychological reactions tend to masquerade as objective observations.
Sometimes the reaction is pride.
Sometimes embarrassment.
Sometimes disgust.
Sometimes patriotism.
Sometimes attraction.
Sometimes fear.
The emotion itself isn't the problem.
The problem arises when the emotion is allowed to silently define reality without the person realizing that a translation step has occurred.
In that sense, your "soccer ball versus basketball" analogy and your "gay pride versus superiority" example are actually describing the same phenomenon. Someone encounters a use, meaning, or possibility outside their familiar framework. The resulting discomfort, surprise, awkwardness, or embarrassment is genuine. The mistake occurs when the feeling is unconsciously treated as evidence about the thing being observed rather than evidence about the observer's current model of the world.
That doesn't mean the observer is wrong. Sometimes the new thing really is bad. Sometimes it isn't. The point is that the feeling alone doesn't answer the question. It merely announces that a question exists.
M: Your version of things is not, I don't think it's wrong, I just think it's incomplete. And it's incomplete because most people don't even consider things past those two questions of this feels wrong, therefore it is wrong, or this feels wrong, why does it feel wrong? Because there's a third element, which is, you know, in most situations, one, this feels wrong. Two, why does it feel wrong? And three, the one that gets excluded is, does that mean it's wrong for someone else? To tie it into something more objective and absolute, let's think of something that causes a light allergy for consideration. Something that isn't severe enough to just prick your ears up, but to make you feel a little bit sick every time you eat it. You might get to the point of something feels wrong, and if it's something that's difficult to take out of your diet or that you enjoy, you might ask the question, why does it feel wrong, in the hopes of neutralizing the problem. But importantly for this comparison, Society has already answered the question of, is this wrong for other people? Because at that point, it's no. But the way that people approach other things avoids that question that allows for someone to live a different life. And in doing so, creates the situation where post hoc justification of a feeling occurs. And that's in the best case. There's also the people in denial or otherwise, you know, somehow tragically hating what they can't have because their own life is tied up in something that won't allow it, such as homosexuality. It's a projection thing. People will say, this feels wrong, and even if they ask, why does it feel wrong, the fact that they don't consider that it might simply be the wrong choice for them rather than for everyone has just corrupted so many thoughts and debates in terms of societal acceptance.
G: I think that's actually a very important addition, because you're moving from self-analysis to generalization.
My version stopped at:
Your version adds:
And that's a genuinely separate step.
Your food example illustrates it cleanly.
Suppose I discover that eating mushrooms makes me mildly nauseous.
I can ask:
Why does this feel wrong?
and discover:
Because my body reacts badly to mushrooms.
But then there's another question:
Does that mean mushrooms are wrong?
The answer is obviously no.
The conclusion is:
Mushrooms are wrong for me.
The distinction between:
is so obvious in dietary cases that we barely notice we're making it.
What's interesting is that many social, moral, and cultural questions are harder precisely because people don't automatically apply the same distinction.
They move directly from:
I wouldn't want this.
to
Nobody should want this.
Or from:
This lifestyle would make me miserable.
to
This lifestyle is bad.
Or from:
This relationship structure isn't for me.
to
This relationship structure shouldn't exist.
The thing I like about your formulation is that it doesn't require relativism.
You're not saying:
Everything is equally valid.
You're not saying:
Nobody should ever judge anything.
You're saying something narrower.
You're saying that there is a missing checkpoint between personal reaction and universal prescription.
To put it in your framework:
Stage 1
This feels wrong.
Stage 2
Why does it feel wrong?
Stage 3
Is the cause of that feeling specific to me, or does it generalize?
A surprisingly large number of arguments seem to skip directly from Stage 1 to Stage 3.
Or sometimes from Stage 1 directly to:
Therefore everyone should behave differently.
What's interesting is that this also connects back to your earlier observations about pride and identity.
A person who has never separated:
My reaction
from
Reality
is much more likely to interpret their discomfort as evidence about the world.
And a person who has never separated:
My values
from
Universal values
is much more likely to interpret personal incompatibility as objective wrongness.
I also think this explains why your examples keep returning to homosexuality, heritage, patriotism, and identity.
Because those are all domains where many people ask:
Would I want to live this way?
but never ask:
Does my answer have any bearing on whether someone else should?
For example, a heterosexual man can honestly conclude:
I would not want a romantic relationship with another man.
That's a perfectly legitimate answer.
The missing step is recognizing that this fact, by itself, tells us almost nothing about whether another person should have such a relationship.
Likewise:
I would not want to immigrate to Norway.
doesn't imply immigration to Norway is bad.
I would not want to become a Buddhist.
doesn't imply Buddhism is bad.
I would not want to live in New York City.
doesn't imply New York is bad.
The deeper pattern I see emerging from your whole discussion is that you are unusually attentive to the distinction between:
Personal applicability
and
Universal validity.
Many people intuitively treat those as more connected than they really are.
You seem to treat them as almost entirely separate questions that must be linked by additional evidence before a general conclusion is justified.
And if I had to summarize the concern you've been expressing, it would be:
A great deal of human conflict arises when people mistake "not for me" for "not for anyone."
That's not the only source of conflict, but it's a powerful one because it can be reinforced by everything else we've been discussing—identity, pride, embarrassment, projection, attachment, and the desire to preserve psychological equilibrium. Once those become involved, the gap between personal discomfort and universal judgment can become almost invisible to the person making the leap.