Studies have shown that having ideas challenged which you associate with your identity, and in turn your group identity, are responded to neurologically in the same manner as physical threats, short-circuiting logical thought processes and exacerbating tribalism. Our identity and status within groups is as essential to our survival as access to food and water. This response often forces doubling down on existing beliefs even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. I'd imagine that's a big part of the effect you're describing. It's the same fight or flight response we experience when we perceive a tiger on a path in the jungle, and the same evolutionary pressures apply in many ways.

I would say it comes down to intentionally constructing processes of interrogating our beliefs as a culture. What's much more important than your base level of intelligence entering into a conversation is your willingness to actually explore concepts within that conversation. To truly engage in a dialog. To not feel threatened by entertaining conflicting beliefs. If that itself can become part of our group identity, this process is no longer existentially threatening.

Again though, I'm not saying there is actually a "one true way" to view the world objectively. It's a process we can choose to attempt to engage in, which we will never perfect, but brings much better results over time. It doesn't mean we're all going to agree, but we're at least going to be able to exchange ideas and move towards a better understanding of the world, together.

I find it's much more helpful to look at the policies you would be in favour of and why, rather than trying to find a name to label your political philosophy with. After all, there very well may not be a name that actually encompasses your personal views yet.

Even the two main streams of thought in "liberal" and "conservative" just indicate a desire to move forward or backward, or stay the same, whatever those concepts mean to you - and as polar concepts in the US in particular, they completely reversed within living memory anyway. Time was Republicans abolished slavery, yet later opposed Civil Rights, etc.

There's also the apparent fact that young people seem to begin more "liberal" and end their lives more "conservative", potentially making a farce of any attempts to assign objectivity to either viewpoint outside our relative distance from death, or identifying with concepts we found appealing in our formative years. As the world itself consistently always moves to the "left" over time, unless we each also move to the left throughout our lives we will inevitably simply become more "conservative" in comparison to current culture.

So to me it does much more come down to how you would actually like to see political structures built and executed rather than how you label that: ie. in the most practicably comprehensive sense, what are your preferred policies, and why?

I honestly don't think it takes an extraordinary degree of intelligence to systematically view the world through an objective lens. What it does take is the will to embark on that journey. Which isn't to say everyone will reach the same destination either, although I do personally believe there are several irrefutable conclusions that have been proven as best courses from my own explorations, usually we are denied the ability to even discuss on this basis as the idea of forging our own path simply does not have much traction in our current culture.

Your example of r/politics is unfortunately a demonstration of furthering political tribalism, in my experience at least. It's not so much a demonstration of the average person's ability to objectively examine how they view the world so much as an indictment of how little that is encouraged by our culture.

EDIT: a word

100%. If you take the time to examine your beliefs and construct your own view of the world and how you see political structures best helping us, there should be no hypocrisy or conflict in your ideology. If you instead pick an off-the-shelf ideology from an existing party built to lure people with hot button issues and rage at their "enemies" as cover for servicing their corporate sponsors, then yeah there's going to be a lot of problems.

Very interested though - how would you describe your political ideology/philosophy?

You could call it Beat Cops because they both retired plains-clothes despite ignominious turns in detective and tactical units but their chief busted them down to the street because of their reckless insubordination, and because they're, y'know, old and busted.

Ex-cops forced to become roommates because of their crappy pension start noticing something crooked going on in the low-rent apartment complex where they now mix with the criminal class they worked against their entire careers. Also one of them might've been on the take and there's a rapscallion kid with a heart of gold and a hot grandma.