The premise for this piece is that much of rapidly our "alternative subcultures" have slowly been morphing from an "ask cultures" to a "guess cultures"
What is an "ask culture"? It's a culture where asking questions where discovering a new way of being is more desirable than making assumptions about it. It also tends to be a newer culture (or subculture) where the inner workings of the culture and the "right" behavior are still getting figured out, allowing for a lot of leeway around how to interpret things and engage with people, requiring a high level of curiosity.
However, as an "ask culture" starts to settle, it slowly but surely becomes a "guess culture" where more and more assumptions are being made about the "right" way to engage, and as such people start to guess more and more how to do it.
As this transformation happens, if they "guess" right, they fit in and they engage coherently with the culture (very much expressed on social media via posts), and as a result they deepen their relationship with it and their communities around it.
If they "guess" wrong, they find themselves faced with backlash where the culture (represented by people) start to judge/shame/guilt them for not fitting in and engaging badly.
Often, this also looks like being branded (remember the scarlet letter "A"?), except this can also happen in subcultures and safe spaces in order identify who does not behave according to the (usually somewhat recent) rules of engagement.
Unfortunately, this has caught both people who behave willfully (who should be identified), as well as those who are still learning (and as such still figuring things out, yet for some reasons are behind the learning curve), as well as those who are creating adjacent yet still somewhat coherent (and friendly) subcultures.
And even more unfortunately, this has caused subcultures (and individuals) to become extremely sensitive to any mistakes and missteps, preferring outcasting than repair, often (in my experience) because repair is much more costly and requires much more awareness, maturity, experience, security, and wisdom, which tends to be less present in new or emerging subcultures as it tends to be brought forth my newer generations.
Which means that the alternative--new forms of tribalism and other'ing, tend to win the day.
This doesn't mean that humans can't create good or great new things, just that an "ask" subculture that moves towards a "guess" subculture too quickly without enough of a maturation process will create a subculture that lacks tolerance, solidity, resilience, and ability to engage with other cultures from a place of loving kindness and understanding.
Hello QAnon and other ideologies.
In turn, this will lead to these subcultures to become more and more of an echo chamber as they they take themselves more and more seriously in the absence of polarizing voices (which become untolerable, out of alignment/synergy, and too uncomfortable to be heard or listened too, and eventually begin to feel "wrong" enough that we begin to see anyone with these voices as also, inherently, "wrong", and as such they become less desirable in terms of existence, and are easily discarded, dismissed, or cancelled.
This is what ideology and ideological cults are about and where everyone on the outside becomes a "muggle".
And, this is how humans begin to split themselves away from other humans. Some of it is closeness to other humans, and some of it is as a way to protect themselves from a world that appears to be less and less resilient to differences and a diverse set of views and perspectives.
Because people who are different and have other views will not "guess" correctly, and so they won't engage or play well with us, and this makes us more and more careful and them more and more suspicious, to the degree that we'll even look back into their past to see if they ever thought things or say things that could indicate that they don't think/feel/believe like us.
In this context, everyone and anyone can be suspicious to have said or thought something they should not, and it's just a matter of discovering the crucial piece of information that will help us mistrust someone to determine whether they should belong inside the culture.
This is how tribalism works: by determining who is "us" and who is "other" when belonging rests on conformity guessed accurately by a majority, branding everyone who sticks out via words and actions as villains in a story that turns us into the heros of that story.
And unfortunately, while we can attempt to keep seeing everyone as humans doing their best, we can rarely stay completely away from the Drama Triangle where in the face of Villains, we either end up holding the roles of Victim or Rescuer, for "us" always holds moral high ground and "other" holds the lowest of the lowest ground, so close to dirt that their death might represent a higher purpose than their life.
This is a hard place to be: morally supreme on a battleground, but such things can give one purpose. But at the end of the day, what we are left with is nervous systems rendered hypervigilant by trauma, with a template that is ever more deeply and primaly oriented towards who the enemy might be.
If, instead, we had continued to ask questions, and vowed to continue to include, care, and consider others who might feel "other" as "us" instead of "them", we might have been able to hold us as a deeper community of humans, more alike than unlike, and more able to connect and collaborate via our differences.
For when we are committed to connection and trust, and learning from each other, differences no longer feel like too much to bear: they become the fertile ground that allow us to grow in directions we otherwise would have lost as possibilities.
This is what wish for: a moral supremacy that includes rather than excludes, that collaborates instead of competes.
Keep inviting those who are outside of your circles of trust. Keep inviting those who you had previously lost trust in.
And see what becomes possible as you learn to work out these differences into creative endeavors.