Politics and Religion: Why We Fight About What We Believe
There are two topics everyone says you should never bring up at a party: politics and religion. That advice exists for a reason. These subjects don’t just create disagreement. They create heat. They trigger identity. They can fracture families. They can polarize communities. And at the extreme end of history, they’ve fueled wars.
So why do we fight—sometimes viciously—over what we believe?
Over the last few years, I’ve been studying artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decision-making systems. And oddly enough, thinking about how computers fail at decision-making helped me understand why humans fight about politics and religion so intensely.
The short version: politics and religion sit close to the core of the human operating system. When you argue about them, you’re not debating a preference. You’re touching the deepest layers of motivation, meaning, and identity.
Most People Don’t Think—They Rehearse
A lot of people believe they think. But what they often do instead is run a mental script.
They have:
- a structure of belief,
- a set of supporting arguments,
- and a collection of “approved” conclusions.
That isn’t thinking. That’s rehearsal.
Real thinking is harder. Real thinking requires that you:
- put forward an idea, and then
- generate alternatives—at least one, ideally several—especially ones that counteract or contradict your original idea.
That step is painful, because it creates cognitive dissonance. It feels like internal conflict. It forces you to become divided inside yourself long enough to test what you think is true.
And most people avoid that.
Not because they’re evil. Not because they’re stupid. Because it’s uncomfortable. And because life demands action, not endless contemplation.
Why Computers Get Stuck
Computers are brutally literal.
If a computer is running a task and it hits an unsolved problem, it may loop indefinitely—“loading… loading… loading…”—unless the program explicitly tells it what to do when it fails.
In other words, the computer needs:
- an “escape hatch,”
- a fallback decision,
- a rule for uncertainty,
- a mechanism that says: stop, skip, warn, or choose anyway.
Humans have something like that built-in.
It’s called emotion.
Emotion Is a Low-Resolution Decision System
Emotion isn’t just a feeling. It’s a function.
When full computation is impossible—when information is incomplete, the situation is complex, and consequences are uncertain—emotion helps you not get stuck.
Emotion is like a low-resolution decision-making device:
- fast,
- coarse,
- sometimes wrong,
- but useful when the alternative is paralysis.
Anger can end a conversation. Fear can stop you from touching the stove twice. Shame can prevent social exile. Pride can fuel endurance. Love can keep you loyal when rational calculation would quit.
Emotions are not the opposite of intelligence.
They are one of the tools intelligence uses to keep moving when precision is impossible.
Why Politics and Religion Hit So Hard
To understand why these two topics create conflict, you have to understand that human life operates in layers.
At the bottom (or the top, depending on how you visualize it) is the most concrete thing a human being can do:
Motor Output
Your actions. Your body in the world.
You write something. You slap someone. You hug someone. You build a company. You quit a job. You vote. You pray. You apologize. You betray. You persist.
That physical action is the most specific level.
But above action are deeper layers that guide what action even means.
The Levels Beneath Action
Think of it like a stack:
- Action / motor output
- Thought (what you plan to do)
- Subjective experience (what it feels like to think and choose)
- Philosophy (what you believe about people and society)
- Religion / ultimate values (what you believe is good, evil, meaningful, sacred)
You can flip the stack and argue that the deepest beliefs are foundational and everything is built on top of them. That works too. The direction isn’t the point.
The point is this:
Politics lives near the philosophy layer.
It’s about how society should be structured, what goals matter, what tradeoffs we accept, what justice looks like.
Religion lives near the ultimate-values layer.
It’s about what is sacred, what is good, what is evil, what is worth sacrificing for, what a human being is, and why life matters at all.
So when you argue politics or religion, you are not arguing “topics.”
You are touching the deepest infrastructure that organizes someone’s sense of meaning.
Belief Structures Are Load-Bearing
Most people don’t rebuild their worldview every morning from scratch.
If you had to reconstruct the entire universe behind every sentence you spoke, you’d never finish a conversation.
We rely on cultural inheritance:
- language,
- assumptions,
- norms,
- shared meanings,
- inherited concepts of right and wrong.
Even science rests on presuppositions:
- what counts as evidence,
- what counts as explanation,
- why prediction matters,
- what “truth” means in practice.
So belief structures aren’t optional.
They are necessary shortcuts that let humans function.
But they’re also load-bearing.
If you shake the foundation, everything sitting on top starts to wobble.
That’s why people react emotionally when you challenge their politics or religion: you’re not just challenging an idea—you’re threatening the stability of the entire structure.
Why People Shut Conversations Down
When a person is confronted with a challenge at the foundation, they face an internal fork:
- Reorganize the structure
- rethink the worldview,
- revise the assumptions,
- adjust identity,
- accept uncertainty.
or
- Stop the threat
- dismiss the person,
- mock the idea,
- get angry,
- walk away,
- “win” the argument.
Most people choose option two.
Not because they’re villains. Because reorganizing the structure is hard. It is costly. It destabilizes the self.
And human beings are not designed to sit stuck forever, “loading” like a computer.
So they use the low-resolution system: emotion.
Anger, contempt, and dismissal are psychological emergency exits.
They prevent paralysis.
But they also prevent growth.
Polarization Is a Failure of Thinking
Polarization isn’t just disagreement.
Polarization is what happens when the ability to hold multiple ideas collapses.
Thinking requires you to know:
- the other side has a point,
- even if you disagree,
- even if you’ll never join them.
It is your duty—intellectually—to understand the other side’s point.
That’s what thinking is.
Not “having opinions.”
Not “posting certainty.”
Not “declaring you don’t care what people think” while broadcasting that declaration for attention.
Thinking is the discipline of building a mind big enough to host alternatives without immediately destroying them.
That discipline is rare.
The Question Beneath “I Believe in Science”
People sometimes say: “I don’t believe in God. I believe in science.”
I understand what they mean, but the deeper question is:
Why believe in anything at all?
Science can explain mechanisms. It can model patterns. It can predict outcomes.
But it cannot supply meaning by itself.
Rationality is not a goal.
A person still needs:
- a direction,
- a value hierarchy,
- a “why.”
Otherwise, why act? Why sacrifice? Why care about suffering? Why be honest? Why be loyal? Why not exploit others?
Most people have a gut-level answer: being a good person matters.
That gut-level answer is not purely rational. It reflects a deeper structure of value.
And that deeper structure—whether religious, philosophical, cultural, or personal—is exactly what gets threatened in political and religious conflict.
Zooming Out: When Contradictions Merge
At high levels of abstraction, opposites stop looking opposite.
Ask: “Are human beings intrinsically good or intrinsically bad?”
At the highest resolution, a yes/no answer feels impossible.
Zoom out far enough, and the difference collapses.
Zoom in far enough, and the map becomes useless because it becomes as complex as the territory itself.
The right level of analysis depends on the goal.
But most debates fail because:
- one person is arguing from a zoomed-in level (specific policies, specific outcomes),
- the other is arguing from a zoomed-out level (identity, values, moral meaning),
- and neither realizes they’re on different maps.
The Real Problem: We Don’t Train People in Inner Architecture
Education often trains people from the “objective” down:
- math,
- reading,
- writing,
- science.
But we rarely train:
- subjective awareness,
- philosophical reasoning,
- moral frameworks,
- identity formation,
- emotional literacy.
So people walk around with strong emotional systems and fragile conceptual systems.
They feel deeply, but they can’t articulate what the feeling is attached to.
They fight, but they can’t explain what’s actually at stake.
And because the stakes are identity-level stakes, the fight becomes personal.
Why Art Matters More Than We Admit
Art exposes people to high-order ideas all at once.
A piece of art can carry universal meaning inside a particular experience.
Art can do what debate often cannot:
- bypass ego,
- bypass ideology,
- reveal complexity,
- invite reflection instead of combat.
Sometimes a sunset does more for your worldview than a thousand arguments.
Because it forces you to stop, zoom out, and remember: you are not just an opinion machine. You’re a human being.
What To Do With This
We will never eliminate emotion.
We should not try.
Emotion is part of the system that keeps us from freezing when the world is too complex.
But we can refine it.
We can learn to:
- pause before reacting,
- identify what layer is being threatened,
- distinguish disagreement from attack,
- rebuild internal structures voluntarily—before tragedy forces it.
Most people only re-evaluate their worldview after something earth-shattering happens:
- betrayal,
- loss,
- collapse,
- depression,
- a life reset.
But we don’t have to wait for disaster.
We can practice thinking now:
- by inviting alternatives,
- by listening seriously,
- by letting ourselves be wrong,
- by building relationships that can hold complexity.
Because if we can’t talk about politics and religion, we can’t talk about the foundations of how we live.
And if we can’t talk about foundations, we can’t improve them.
FAQs
Why do politics and religion make people so emotional?
Because they touch the deepest value structures that organize identity, meaning, and moral direction.
Is emotion irrational?
Emotion can be inaccurate, but it is functional: it’s a low-resolution system that helps humans choose and act when full reasoning is impossible.
What is “real thinking”?
Real thinking is generating alternatives—including ones that contradict you—and testing your own ideas instead of rehearsing them.
Why is polarization so destructive?
Because it collapses the ability to understand the other side’s point, which is required for genuine thought and social progress.
If you want help thinking through complex issues—strategy, systems, execution, meaning, leadership, identity, and decision-making—I work with founders, operators, and organizations that want to move from raw ideas to real structure.
Email me at [email protected] or Book a Call:
This essay is part of the broader Meaning branch here:
https://gabebautista.com/essays/meaning/ Fight About Politics and Religion: The Psychology of Belief
