The way I see it that instinct is the cause behind so much suffering and injustice in the world.
Many of us have already overcome it! All of them are holding us back though.
FFS this is the most ignorant comment I’ve ever read. YOU all are the ones holding us back.
Anyone know a Lemmy equivalent of r/woosh?
I think they’re continuing the joke
It’s a double whoosh.
God damn. Hoisted by my own petard!
The fun thing is I can’t tell if this comment is ironic or not.
I think it was irony, bro.
I think it was irony, bro.
I think it was irony, bro.
Pretty funny ngl
As long as power hungry people exist. It is basically easiest thing to implement in your politics and get people behind you.
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
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.
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.
It’s okay to disagree or have differences. The problem arises when the response to disagreement is vilification and violence. Sadly, tolerance and tribalism don’t exactly go hand-in-hand.
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
Us ve them is just a convenient cover for me me me, so I doubt it
Follow up question, is it possible to decentralize or balance power so that no one group can cause too much harm?
Now that’s a great question!
We do need a slightly better tool than democracy, for sure
I like bitcoin. It has problem that coins have a 90/10 distribution - 10 percent of people own 90 percent of coins - but it is decentralized, you can keep your coins in offline wallets and maybe the 90/10 distribution can be fixed because it’s just code.
We get tribal over everything. Countries, gangs, skin color, sexuality, religion, even bloody brand of smartphone makes us bicker or call the other person dumb. And the budding optimistic globalism that was happening have totally reversed in the last few years, it was an illusion.
I’ve stopped watching/reading news. I can’t take it anymore. I lost hope.
Maybe in the extreme future but right now we’ve just barely started as a species, will we exist long enough to grow up?
The late rapper, “Eyedea” of Eyedea & Abilities had a really memorable verse in a song that always comes to mind when I hear this discussed.
Grinding my teeth as I’m peddling uphill / The fight against ape-hood is fate versus free will / We think we’ve advanced but there’s nowhere to go / Mammals stay captive to animal actions / So slowly we climb up this DNA brick wall / Addicted to emptiness, anger and pitfalls / Desire for space, territory, or lust / We’ll eventually turn this whole planet to dust
