 The things that people used to source their identity have withered in this civilization. One of them is to be of a place. To be of a place meant that you knew the stories of that place. You knew everything that happened there. You knew going back many generations. You knew the real and fictional stories about every stream and every hill. You knew the habits of the plants and the animals that lived in that area. Like you belonged to that place. And you could say, I am of this place. No longer can most people say that. Even regional accents have become homogenized under the impact of mass media. So many, many different, and well, so that's one to be of a place, but also people normally get their identity through their human relationships. And these too have contracted down to the nuclear family and a few friends. Maybe I'm over-generalizing a bit here. And there are certainly places, rural places and outside the industrialized countries where there still is connection to extended family and clan and place and so forth. So yeah, this breakdown in identity makes people really vulnerable to those who offer them a temporary or a false identity. Makes them vulnerable to political fascism, for example, to nationalism, to xenophobia, bigotry, all of these things. Here's a way to identify yourself. Here's a way to know who you are, to belong, to political polarization. Makes people vulnerable to political polarization because here's another way by which you can belong. And that's why people react so defensively when any of the pieces of their makeshift identity are attacked, because it is a threat to yourself. In that context, nobody's gonna be willing to change their opinions when they're so identified with them.