What people very often do is start out with a set of political principles, join a tribal war side that preaches those principles, and then put the tribe ahead of the principles. People will sell their souls in a second just to be loyal to their political groups. That is a major threat to civilization.
You know, when I was younger, I used to find it weird how so many people had the same opinions about politics. And not just the same opinions, but entire sets of the same opinions. What were the chances of that?

But, having eventually determined that agreement was overrated, I discovered my favorite method of getting opinions: reading books by dead people and disagreeing with them. It has many advantages, one being that they don’t try to appeal to your emotions so much – or, if they do, they’re appealing to the emotions of another time and place, and so it misses the mark. And, as unintuitive as it might seem, the distance actually makes it easier to empathize with them and to get a good feel for where they’re coming from and the assumptions about human nature that underlie them, which are rarely mentioned outright but seem to me to be central to just about every political question.