The way I see it that instinct is the cause behind so much suffering and injustice in the world.
As long as power hungry people exist. It is basically easiest thing to implement in your politics and get people behind you.
Looking at any kind of politics and how it changed over the last 10 or so years, it’s a clear no from me.
Hey man, we’ll quit fighting when they do.
“Ape alone… weak. Apes together…. strong”
So no, it’s baked-in the DNA of how we survive. We group to fight threats. Early days, that threat is protection from hostile wildlife like bears.
You scale that to a modern civilization - and you have groups of people fighting for resources, food, money, opportunities, land, etc. Sometimes they’re gangs. Sometimes they’re entire countries. Sometimes they’re groups of allied countries.
And heck, you see it in stupidly small scales too. “Coke v Pepsi”, “N64 v PlayStation”, “Rock Fans v Disco Fans”.
Sunni and Shia believe 98% of the same stuff. But the bit they don’t agree on pushes fringe lunatics to terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing, etc.
Same deal with Protestants and Catholics.
The only thing could make us drop “us versus them” mentality is a giant alien force more violent and sick than anything you can imagine.
Then maybe, humanity will be the “us” finally.
The only thing could make us drop “us versus them” mentality is a giant alien force
That you, Ozymandias?
The only thing could make us drop “us versus them” mentality is a giant alien force
Mankind, that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the 4th of July and you will once again be fighting for our freedom not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution but from annihilation.
The only thing could make us drop “us versus them” mentality is a giant alien force more violent and sick than anything you can imagine.
Even if this’d unite humanity, it would in the end still be us vs. them (us being humanity).
In my opinion, the result of our tribalism tendency that we are currently discussing has very little to do with “instinct”, and it is rather the result of generational social conditioning we are exposed to since the day we are born; values and biases adopted unquestioningly from our caretakers, educators, and the culture and political reality that we grew up and associate with.
If a child without preexisting established knowledge or exposure can naturally make friendly associations toward an abstract-looking plushie that has one big eye and 10 legs, which has nothing similar to the appearance of a human, then the reason they would fear or hate people of different skin color or cultures is apparent.
I don’t quite agree because children will also readily make other children or trees or stones or the sky their enemy if they feel like it. And they will go out of their way to recruit other people to fight against said perceived enemies.
I don’t think so. I think the universe is too harsh for a complex, truly altruistic species to survive. But it is possible for us to get to a point where socially we’re better than our base instincts. We’re partway there, although we’ve been backsliding lately.
So you think if we all cooperated, made sure everyone was safe and healthy, ended war, and devoted all our time to ensuring each person reached their potential (whether that be scientific, artistic, etc) it would make us less likely to survive?
I think they’re saying if you start out that way naturally (like a peaceful sapient race on a peaceful planet) they’d be an easy resource for something less peaceful (it would just take one aggressive race to extinguish them). If peacefulness and powerfulness scale together during a species’s development, they may learn to learn strategies for peaceful coexistence before the stakes are too high for screwups.
No. The very tribalism that has allowed us to survive now works against us because we were too successful at survival. The solution is to be aware of and constantly fight against our base selfish instincts through things like what you said. The problem is that we seem to always go back to “fuck you, got mine” as a species. Perhaps the great filter is that a species that’s successful enough at survival to get to the point where space travel is possible will always be betrayed by the tribalistic behavior they needed to survive the harshness of life.
Ok, I agree it’s not likely we’ll get there. That’s certainly and sadly true.
I’ll get more basic than everyone else here:
Unless the human brain collectively evolves in a very short period to function differently than it has since we first started throwing shit at other hominids, no. We, collectively, as a society, can aspire to be better than our animal nature but that hardware is still there and it will never, ever, stop pushing people to tribalism, selfishness, and aggression.
We can’t fix us. We can only do the best with what we have and keep moving.
So you essentially claim humans are basically “bad” (willing to harm others for unnecessary gain), and maybe there are a few good people but it doesn’t matter?
I think you can more accurately say that human nature is to cooperate and share and there are a few psychopaths that fuck things up when allowed to gain power (and implement their extractive tooling like capitalism).
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity-david-graeber/15873078
That’s a bit of a reductive take on the parent comment.
Human nature to cooperate and share is not mutually exclusive with forming in-groups and out-groups.
Isn’t the internet wild?
The product of literally 1000 generations worth of human cooperation, asking if humans will ever transcend tribalism on what is arguably humanity’s most collaborative innovation?
Depends how we define ‘overcome’ really. I mean, if cooperation is evidence of overcoming it then the question doesn’t need to be asked.
If we’re talking about our biological instinct for tribalism, well that’s why we’re having the conversation isn’t it.
That’s a bit of a reductive take on the parent comment.
Sure, but that was my intention, to distill the essence which I think I did fairly well. Was I wrong?
Human nature to cooperate and share is not mutually exclusive with forming in-groups and out-groups.
Agree, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in our nature to also cooperate and trade amongst groups rather than default to making enemies. Humans forming groups/tribes etc doesn’t imply that those tribes have to have exploitative interactions.
As a maybe silly analogy, thing of two families visiting Disneyland together. They maintain group membership, the parents only buy lunch for their own children, as the other kid’s parent’s can provide for them fine. But they enjoy the day together, and maybe buy each other treats. Then they go home to their separate homes, to maybe cooperate on another day.
But then think of two families where each has a psychopath that has effectively gained control of the family. Then the Disneyland trip is less likely to happen, especially being fun, even if the rest of the family is the same. Instead, there might distrust, competition, and attempts at exploitation between the families.
Which one of the above scenarios is “human nature”? Both? What’s the difference? Resource contention and/or effective psychopaths preventing cooperation IMO (sorry I keep editing).
Yes. Reductive in a crude way, not clarifying. I don’t think the parent comment at all implied humans are inherently bad and the occasional good doesn’t matter.
Rather inversely, humans are tribalistic but achieve good in spite of tribalism.
Ah, maybe so, I’m definitely not immune to mischaracterizing on occasion.
Ahem, we can champion a culture that teaches us to resist the negative aspects of our nature and embraces the positive aspects. Victory over our nature is celebrated, and when nature wins it is understood and dealt with, but with understanding and reasonable consequences, not vengeful malice.
Some day…
Us ve them is just a convenient cover for me me me, so I doubt it
it’s what kept us alive during our early days as a specie. I think is it baked into our essence as a human. but if it can be controlled or diverted then yeah. fund us an alien and we’ll be an earth tribe against aliens.
Ozymandias was correct
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Now that’s a great question!
We do need a slightly better tool than democracy, for sure
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Never. We will even discriminate against people with different ear length if it get that’s far. Conflict is inevitable, it’s in our genes, our memes.
We will not evolve out of our petty differences until we have UtopiaTech like Star Trek Replicators that can satisfy every basic need, and allow people to pursue dreams, ideas, and hopes, free of the burden of having to run the orphan crushing machine just to desperately survive another day.
No because there is no natural selection happening for that trait. But in once case aliens. If there where aliens discovered and they where hostile maybe even not I could see humans banding together as a group but it would still be an us vs them situation.
Remove? No. Overcome? We’re already doing it.
Our society is far more accomodating than it has ever been. Different sexes, ethnicities, skin colors, religions, sexual orientations, gender identities and whatnot enjoy more acceptance and equality now than ever before. Something like the EU - a voluntary alliance of this size - would have been unthinkable probably just 100-200 years ago. And for all its flaws the participating nations have grown closer through it.
We still got ways to go particularly internationally and we must be ever vigilat against those that want to drag us backward but the progress is undeniable.
Ever is a long, long time. We won’t live to see it, but I’m not confident that it will never happen.
