There are moments online when a simple observation turns into an unexpected window into something much bigger. I bet you’ve experienced this more than once yourself. I have had this experience multiple times this past week, but there is one that really brought several issues to the forefront of my mind, and considering it led me back to this “What would you like to write about?” screen, and here we are.
This past week, I left a comment on a post about Sally Field and her film Not Without My Daughter — and what happened next reminded me why honest, nuanced conversation is becoming one of the rarest things on the internet. What started as a straightforward observation about cognitive dissonance turned into a small but telling case study in tribal reflex, selective reasoning, and the near-total collapse of nuanced thinking in public discourse.
So let’s talk about it.
What Had Happened Was…
(For those unfamiliar, “what had happened was…” is the internet’s humorous and beloved preface to any story where someone is about to explain themselves after things went sideways. Bear with me.)
Someone posted about Sally Field’s iconic role in Not Without My Daughter — the 1991 film based on Betty Mahmoody’s true story of being trapped in post-revolutionary Iran with her daughter, subject to forced veiling, loss of rights, restricted movement, and no safe escape. It’s a harrowing portrayal of what religious theocracy actually looks like when it controls women’s bodies, lives, and choices.
I left this comment:
It’s ironic (and sad, to me). Sally Field starred in this powerful film based on a true story of an American woman trapped in post-revolutionary Iran, facing forced veiling, loss of rights, abuse, and no escape without risking everything, yet today, she’s a staunch liberal Democrat who campaigns hard for progressive causes like abortion rights and Democratic candidates, with no public mention of the film’s lessons on the dangers of theocratic control over women. After portraying that nightmare, it’s disappointing she hasn’t connected it to broader realities of oppression abroad.
That’s it. That’s the whole comment. No policy position. No party endorsement. No statement about my own views on abortion. No implication that Sally Field should become a conservative or oppose reproductive rights.
I noticed a gap in logic and I pointed it out. End of story.
What I got back, though, was instructive.
One commenter came in assuming I’d missed the fact that theocracy isn’t exclusive to Islam — that Christian nationalism pushing abortion bans is also religious control over women’s bodies. I actually agree with that completely, and said so. But the assumption that I needed that corrected told me something: they’d already decided what kind of post mine was before they’d read it carefully.
Another commenter reduced the film entirely to “a personal story of a mother and daughter’s harrowing experience in a foreign country, and a husband’s abuse,” then asked what it had to do with American politics. That framing is worth sitting with for a moment, because it quietly strips the film of its entire political and societal warning — which is, in fact, the point of the film. Betty Mahmoody didn’t write her story as a personal trauma memoir. She wrote it as a warning.
Neither commenter engaged with the actual observation. Both responded to the post they assumed I’d written.
The Problem with Tribal Reflex
From a psychological perspective, tribal reflex is what happens when your brain processes new information through the filter of which side is this person on before it processes the content itself.
It’s fast. It’s automatic. And in the age of social media, it’s been thoroughly rewarded (to society’s detriment, if you want the real truth of it).
When someone reads a critique of a progressive public figure, the tribal reflex doesn’t ask “is this observation accurate?” It asks “is this person with us or against us?” If the answer feels like against us, the content gets filed under threat and responded to accordingly — regardless of what was actually said.
This is how a comment about cognitive dissonance becomes “you hate choice.” This is how noticing a logical gap becomes a political statement. The observation never gets evaluated. Instead, it gets sorted.
The problem isn’t just that it’s frustrating. It’s that it makes honest conversation structurally impossible. You can’t have a real exchange with someone who has already decided what you meant.
The Two Thoughts Problem
Here’s the thing about the Sally Field observation: it requires holding two ideas at once.
Christian nationalism using legislation to control women’s bodies is religious theocracy. It is wrong. It is a genuine threat to women’s freedom.
A person who spent months portraying the horror of religious theocracy stripping women of autonomy, and who is now very publicly vocal about women’s rights, has never — as far as anyone can tell — connected those two things. That gap is absolutely worth noticing.
Both of those things are true at the same time. They don’t cancel each other out. They don’t require you to pick a team. But for a significant number of people, holding both simultaneously is either genuinely difficult or simply not something they’re willing to do.
That’s the two thoughts problem. When identity is camp-based — when your politics are tribal rather than principled — complexity becomes threatening. If you acknowledge point two, it might look like you’re softening on point one. So you flatten everything. You pick a side. You defend the camp.
But the cost of that flattening is the ability to think clearly about anything at all.
What Honest Thinking Actually Costs
Thinking honestly — really honestly — costs something.
It costs the comfort of the camp. When you refuse to flatten complexity, you stop being reliably on side, and tribal communities don’t reward that. They punish it. You get sorted into the opposition. You get the “right-wing gotcha” label even when you’ve explicitly said the opposite.
It costs ease. Tribal thinking is fast and low-effort. Honest thinking is slow and requires you to sit with discomfort, uncertainty, and the possibility that someone you like or agree with has a blind spot.
It costs belonging. This might be the biggest one. Humans are wired for group cohesion. Questioning the group’s narrative — even gently, even with evidence — triggers social consequences. Most people, consciously or not, decide it’s not worth it.
So they don’t do it. They perform agreement. They reflexively defend. They collapse the complexity and call it taking a stand.
What actually honest thinking looks like is simpler than people make it: it looks like following the logic wherever it leads, even when it lands somewhere inconvenient. It looks like being willing to say I agree with you on this and I still think this other thing is worth examining. It looks like separating observation from allegiance — and refusing to let someone else collapse that distinction for you.
Selective Pattern Recognition
There is a quieter, but equally disturbing, problem underneath all of this: we are very good at recognizing patterns that confirm our existing concerns, and very slow to recognize the same patterns when they’re attached to something we support.
Theocracy is easy to see when it’s foreign. When it’s Iran in 1984, or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, or any context sufficiently removed from our own politics, the pattern is visible, clear, and broadly condemned. It’s rare (or used to be) for someone to defend it.
But ask someone to apply the same framework closer to home — to whatever religious fundamentalism wears their team’s jersey, for example — and suddenly the pattern recognition fails. The frame shifts. It becomes “but that’s different” or “you’re using that to attack us” or, in the case of the comments on my post, a reduction of the film to a personal story about a bad husband.
It’s not that people can’t see the pattern. It’s that seeing it is inconvenient, and inconvenient truths require more of us than convenient ones.
This selective recognition isn’t neutral. It means we hold some forms of oppression to a higher standard of outrage than others based on who is doing the oppressing and whose political tribe benefits from the critique. And that’s not justice. That’s just loyalty dressed up as principle.
Closing Thoughts: What This Is Actually Costing Us
None of this is small.
When tribal reflex replaces honest thinking at scale, the consequences aren’t just annoying comment threads. They’re structural. They mean we lose the ability to identify real problems clearly, because clarity requires following logic that doesn’t respect team boundaries. They mean the people most invested in actual change — in protecting women’s rights, in opposing oppression in all its forms, in building something better — spend their energy defending camps instead of examining ideas.
The deepest irony in what happened with my Sally Field comment is that the people who responded most reflexively would almost certainly describe themselves as passionate advocates for women’s autonomy. And I believe them. Me, too. But the moment a question arose that required holding two thoughts (agreeing on the principle while examining a specific blind spot) the defenses went up and the conversation stopped.
That pattern, multiplied across every issue we face, is how real problems don’t get solved. Not because people don’t care. But because caring has been replaced by belonging. Because the goal has quietly shifted from getting it right to being on the right side.
Those are not the same thing.
Honest thinking is inconvenient. It is socially costly. It will get you sorted into the wrong camp by people who haven’t read you carefully. But it’s the only kind of thinking that can actually produce something true… and truth is still the only foundation anything good can be built on.
Pick a side, they say.
No. Really. That’s the problem.
Twin Tree Project 