How to Belong Without Losing Oneself

Whenever someone like Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes posts “ragebait,” it’s not difficult to predict how my friends will react. Public discourse, online and off, hews to scripts. Usually, the scripts we follow are determined more by our belonging to a particular social or ideological tribe than by convictions based on reasoning or the promptings of conscience. If the libs say X, then I, as a committed conservative, must say Y, and vice versa. But at the end of the day, what—concretely—does adopting one of the available scripts change? Is it even possible in the current climate to act with real agency?