For instance, working as a professional Buyer for a chain of bike shops, I was a racer, I commuted everywhere on a bike. I regularly worked with a bunch of racers, I was the supplier for an international cycling team and the hub for all of their bikes and gear. It is easy to get into the mindset that I was normal, that everyone around me was average, that a minimum entry level bike capable of competitive racing is relevant. That is a major fallacy to assume that is obviously false. As a Buyer, it was my job to interpret the statistics and follow them. I will sell 20 $300 bikes to one $1500, and three times that for one $3000 bike. All products are like this. The cheapest goods greatly outsell anything else even when just a few dollars more is several times the quality.

The reason people make these impulsive decisions, despite everything indicating they should spend a little more is dogma. You could have bought one floor pump for $60 that lasts a lifetime. But you didn’t buy one for years, and ended up spending $150 in tubes from under inflated tires. Then you bought the $25 floor pump four times in a decade, (yes, projecting). Almost everyone does this. I can see it in the tube sales numbers.

Like okay, you want to buy a bike. You infer a desire to do this for years. Buying a serviceable bike should be a thing you research, but countless people buy big box retail junk from Walmart, and those are not serviceable as they are often made with non standard junk that is not replaceable. If you want to do something for years, waiting a month to have an extra $100 is nothing. Cultural dogma underpins the miser mentality and stupidity of impulsive instant gratification. In the USA, this is the dominant consumer dogma. I’m not saying everyone should be buying expensive or race bikes. That would be equally stupid.

What I am trying to illustrate is how tribalism and dogma are present in all systems. It is a bias that is hard to intuit. The spectrum of people that exist is far greater than any of us fully comprehend.

However, politics is a performance art. For some people, it may be important to see traditions upheld. Just look at the United Kingdom. The role of the monarchy is ridiculous and has no real role in governance. The entire thing is a performance to sate a tribalistic dogma and desire for tradition.

Ask yourself why political leaders always attach themselves to a religious base. Dogma and tribalism are powerful because they reject outside sources of information in favor of the beliefs of the group from accepted sources within the tribe. I was raised in a cult like order. I know the mechanism well. I have escaped it.

The primary reason someone swears on a book is for tradition. The only reason a politician would publicly change religion is for the performance value. The reason swearing on a book is still a thing is because it holds some dogmatic and tribalistic meaning to some fraction of the polity. These are primarily the bottom dwellers. They are not visible in the demography that crosses your own slice of life. It is very easy to assume you are nominal, but I am telling you, that very idea is one of your tribalistic scopes of bias. Normal is only someone you have not gotten to know yet. It is an oversimplification and fiction of the mind. There are people somewhere that value this, but they are not here in this place and tribe. In reality, religion is nothing more than a self policing caste enforcement mechanism. That is why leaders go through the motions to validate it before the peasantry by performance while never actually believing in or practicing some particular faith.