The way I see it that instinct is the cause behind so much suffering and injustice in the world.
No. That is human nature. In order to overcome that, we would have to evolve into a different species, which I would argue is less appealing than it might sound on the surface.
Instead of trying to overcome it, it makes more sense to build a society that directs that energy in a positive direction.
Maybe a solution could be getting rid of some tribes entirely, so that we’re not so divided? We can still have tribes, but we really don’t need this many of them
Are you from the future? It says this will be posted in 2 hours. Am I from the future??
Seriously though I think your admin can fix that, I’ve seen similar things before and it may be a configuration issue.
I’ll just assume you’re not talking about the people themselves, but rather the institutions that funnel people into modern day tribes. And in that case, I would agree with you, currently people are getting funneled into extremely niche groups that are inherently going to come into conflict. It might be necessary to reduce the granularity of human communities in order to arrive at a more cohesive whole. And doing that would not necessarily involve violence, but rather shutting down many of the commercial influences that create certain mindsets and desires in people that they wouldn’t otherwise have.
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.
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…
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.
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).
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?
Maybe if some mad scientist releases a virus with some CRISPR in it to edit our genes and snip out some of the tribalism drive. Otherwise, I doubt it.
“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.
Also disagreements over what programming language to use. Disagreement is a part of normal decision making that leads to diverse outcomes as opposed to being part of a single minded hive mind.
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.
Not as long as capitalist nationalism is the dominant economic system. It’s just tribalism on a global scale.
