We often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.
We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves. We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough to know what acceptance feels like. We bond together based on anything that we can - music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on.
The associations inside the group become more important than those outside.
You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them
The ideological posturing, moral nitpicking, and clique formation that occur in places such as academic Twitter have more to do with crafting a scene than building a movement. And scholars, of all people, should be able to recognize these dynamics, call them into question, and make more reasonable decisions about how to engage with their colleagues, whether in agreement or debate.
Joseph M. Keegin is an editor at The Point and a doctoral student in philosophy at Tulane University.
We separated like oil and water. In the cafeteria, you'd see a table of black jocks, table of white jocks, table of rich white kids, table of Hispanic kids, table of Chinese kids, table of druggies, table of chatterboxes, and so on. Wait! There's a diverse table over there! With a few kids of different tenacities and economic status! Oh, that's the nerds. That's where I sat. We weren't cool enough for the other tables, so we didn't discriminate against anybody.
People are more likely to help other people who look exactly like them. They will hang out at the bar and on the golf course with them.
Like attracts like, beauty finds beauty, and freaks look on from the smoking section, aching.