↖ Homepage of the site 'What to do with your life?'
      

What is populism?

In the majority of humans, whether they are small people or powerful people, the main innate motivation is social ambition, that is to say the desire to rise in the social hierarchy. Our homo-sapiens species shares this instinct with many large primate species.
Social ambition is expressed mainly in the form of participation in the game of alliances, which we call widespread nepotism. Generalized nepotism imprisons each individual in a set of social groups of increasing size, a bit like a Russian doll; family, business, corporation, nation state. Within each group, the individual is allied with other members of the group, against those outside the group. These alliances become very powerful, instinctively, as soon as a threat arises. This is what we call 'us versus them'.

Populism consists of seeking to obtain the support of the people by exacerbating the instinct of 'us against them', by embedding in the collective culture more or less imaginary groups presented as threatened.
Us the little ones against the elites.
We the natives against the immigrants
etc.

In terms of the conquest of power, such a system, which does not address reason, but instinct, makes it possible to obtain a stronger and more stable level of support than a political system based on a project. common based on reason.
On the other hand, at the level of the exercise of power, it only produces the exacerbation of social tensions, which can lead to civil war.

Go deeper

Refer to question 'What is a human?'
Then 'What are the consequences of social ambition? The notion of generalized nepotism'
and finally 'Why do humans reason massively wrong?'