Tesla sales in Europe fell by 45% in early 2025.
In Germany, 60%. In France, 63%. In Sweden at one point, 81%. The drop happened across the same months when sales of other electric vehicles in Europe rose by 30 to 40%.
What changed was not the cars. What changed was Elon Musk, who had started supporting far-right parties in those countries and made that salute everyone remembers.
The car became a tribal marker. Driving one had meant something specific: tech-optimistic, green-coded, urban, well-off. Now it meant something different, to the same buyer. Once a thing has a team attached to it, picking it up or putting it down becomes a tribal act.
We are wired for picking teams. The in-group/out-group machinery kept our ancestors alive. It still gives us things we need: belonging, purpose, a sense of being on the right side of something.
We cannot choose to not have the machinery. The choice is to what extent we are aware of it, and know that it is actually running.
Most of the sides we end up on were not actively chosen. The Real Madrid or Barcelona supporter inherited the choice from someone close. The vegan perhaps had vegan friends first. The Apple person rarely turned out to have started on Android. The conservative in rural Spain and the progressive in Berlin grew up surrounded by people who already held those positions, and would probably have held the opposite ones if they had grown up in the other place. The Christian was usually raised Christian. The Muslim, raised Muslim.
The wiring is most visible in religion. Most religious people will agree with this. The logical next sentence is harder to say out loud; if your faith would have been different had your geography been different, what exactly are you sure about?
In my late twenties I was an active atheist. Board member of the Norwegian atheist association. Spent Saturdays on Oslo's main street, arguing with people who wanted to argue back. Wrote opinion pieces. Read the books, knew the talking points, sometimes enjoyed the certainty.
I still hold most of the same views. I still think organised religion does more harm than good and that their supernatural claims are man-made and do not survive scrutiny.
What changed is the team. The fervour. The willingness to spend a Saturday trying to convert strangers. Part of it is realising that the version of religion I grew up next to, the dark, sin-focused Christianity of the bible belt in south Norway, is not religion in general. In Málaga most people who consider themselves religious also celebrate life. They have a different relationship with the same word. If I had grown up here I might never have joined a side at all.
Plenty of forces above us have an interest in keeping us in side-picking mode, because they need our tribalism to thrive.
Political movements work the same way. Movements like AfD in Germany, Reform UK, Vox in Spain, and the militant identity-politics wing of the activist left all run on the same machinery. Often the team matters more than the policy. The other side is not just wrong; the other side is the threat that justifies anything you do in the name of your side.
Plenty of people on the left who fought fiercely against conservative Christianity went quiet when the same conservative ideas about women's rights showed up later through Islam. The discomfort of criticising a religion associated with a minority outweighed the discomfort of being inconsistent. The ideas are no less outdated when they come dressed differently.
Social media platforms profit from all of this without believing in any of it. Their leaders know that outrage keeps you scrolling more than nuance. Whatever the topic, the version of the conversation that the algorithm shows you is the polarised one. It is what the business model selects for.
Sometimes refusing to pick a side becomes harder than picking either one. I do not want to be on a team in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I despise both governments while feeling sympathy for the people they rule. That position is hard to hold in some conversations, where the room expects you to pick. Refusing reads as cowardice or as picking the other side, depending on who is asking.
The list is long. Pro-immigration or anti-immigration, where the actual question is which immigration, from where, how many, on what terms. Climate alarm or climate denial, where the real argument is about tradeoffs that neither team wants to have. Politicians happily set unrealistic climate targets ten or twenty years out, knowing they will not be in office to be measured against them. Free speech, where "free speech" usually means "speech my side approves of" regardless of who is saying it. For each one there is a team uniform and an expectation that you will wear it.
The usual axis people use to sort this is left versus right. It is partly outdated, and perhaps a more useful axis might be the one between building identities and tearing them down.
Building identities is what populist movements on the left and right do, when they tell you that you are a real European, a true believer, a proper member of whatever the group is. The point of building an identity is to make it harder to leave. The thicker the identity, the more it costs you to disagree with your own team, and the more reliable a soldier you become for the people running it.
Tearing identities down is the opposite move. Reducing how much of you is tied up in the team. Holding views without holding them as flags. Letting religious institutions have less weight on the rest of society. Letting political affiliation be a position rather than a personality. Smaller identities, held lightly enough to update, firmly enough to live by. The problem is not having positions. The problem is welding them to identity.
This sounds backwards if you are used to "building" being the constructive word. But the building most movements do is not constructive. It builds the walls around the team, not the bridges between teams.
The tearing-down version is not indecision. It is room to disagree without losing belonging. Room to update without feeling betrayed. Room to be inside a position without becoming the position. Updating a view based on new information is a strength, not a weakness. Inside the team frame, it looks like betrayal. That is the problem.
We will never stop picking sides, our biological wiring does not change quickly. But we can pick less often than we are told to, and pick smaller, and refuse the binary when both options are bad. The cost of refusing is real for many people, though not for everyone. If you have already paid for your seat in life, refusing to join a team is mostly free. If you still need acceptance from a tribe, refusing costs more.
If your team decided tomorrow that black was white, how long would it take you to say so?