Sundar Pichai: Let’s not let fear defeat our values
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After the far more serious 9/11 attack, we decided to attack a country full of people who.... looked a little bit like the people who perpetrated the attack on us.[1] To the best of my knowledge, there was no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attack, and most of the justifications at the time seemed to focus on "weapons of mass destruction" - something that I don't think is traditionally a legitimate casus belli. Even before it was shown that said weapons were largely fantasy, I don't think there was a coherent non-race based reason to attack Iraq. In spite of this, the move had extremely broad public support at the time.
A lot of people conflate hate and fear, probably out of some attempt to make those who hate look "less manly" or something equally ridiculous, but I think you have a better handle on what is actually going on if you call a spade a spade. Maybe it's just me not being able to understand normal people, but I don't think we're actually afraid of something that kills fewer Americans than sharks most years.
I think that a lot of the American political landscape makes a lot more sense if you understand that for many people, how someone dies is way more important than how long they live.
Both sides of the isle do this. Cars kill more people than guns, and way more people if you remove the obvious suicides from the statistics[2], but while the left goes on about guns forever, they never talk of, say, increasing the requirements for operating a far more dangerous motor vehicle.
All that said, I don't have anything like a solution. I'm just saying that I don't believe that it has anything to do with fear. Fear is what I feel when I bicycle on the same road as cars. This is different. There's very little danger actually involved, from the American side.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
[2]I think you can't really understand the "pro" side of the gun debate until you understand that for many people, the right to own a gun is actually the right to a suicide they control; the right to death on their own terms. It puts "From my cold, dead hands" in a whole new light, doesn't it? The difference between suicide with a gun and doctor-assisted suicide is an interesting example, because in America, the people who think one should be a right usually think the other should be illegal and vis-a-vis
I mean, we're talking about hatred of "the other" here, right? I could argue that this supposed fear is nothing more than a rationalization to try to make the hate more palatable, more excusable...
(you may point out that it's the opposite of the rationalization I used in my previous comment. but my point is just that people relate hate and fear, when I think that the strongest hates have little to do with fear.)
It may be harder to notice in a more "metropolitan" society though, as the definition of "other" depends on childhood experiences.
again, hate is different from fear. It's similar, I know. but it's not the same emotion. I think we're wired to hate the other, not to fear them.
Fear is the emotion I feel when I'm bicycling on a busy street. I'm afraid that one of the giant trucks six inches from my left shoulder will make an error and leave me as a thin, red, road-paste, or as a head with no functional arms.
Fear, it has to do with danger.
Hate, well, I think I kind of understand the in group out group hate, but my out group is a little different. I hate salespeople. I know they pose zero physical threat to me, and they only pose a monetary threat when I talk with them, but I still feel hatred and anger that they are in my industry, that I need to see them every day.
If you want to analyze it, it probably has to do with growing up as a nerd when that was something you really didn't want to be. Generally speaking, I have a mild negative reaction to anyone who seems too smooth, too socially skilled, anyone who seems to fit in too well.
Hate, hate is an irrational emotion you feel when you see someone you don't like.
Now, I could write a paper about how salespeople have negatively impacted my life, and how they are destroying everything good, rational and beautiful about Capitalism, but it would all be a post-hoc rationalization; Hate of the other is a fundamentally irrational emotion, and while it's usually not hard to graft on some post-hoc weak-sounding fear, it's still post-hoc rationalization. If I actually want to understand my feelings on the matter, I think that they are shaped more by my idea of who "my people" are, by who I felt was oppressing and/or threatening me during my childhood.
Now, I also think that having an irrational feeling and recognizing that the feeling is irrational is way better than having an irrational feeling and coming up with a rationalization for that feeling, and I think most people disagree with me there; most people would much rather come up with a rationalization for the feeling they are having, and that's probably where this confusion of hate and fear comes from.
(to be clear, I recognize my feelings here are irrational, and I try pretty hard to look past it. Any remaining effects that get past my filter, I'm sure, are smallish. I'm just giving it as an example, because I believe it's very similar to the way racist people feel. Hell, I even have that one salesperson friend who is a really good guy even though he is in sales.)
When you hate someone, it's always because they represent something that you can't remain at peace with. Usually because of something that you are threatened by in one way or another (either physically or psychologically). Of course, I might be wrong, but I think that in the same way there's no smoke without a fire, there's no hate without fear.
This is a theory though, and one counterexample is all it takes to bring it down.
I'm assuming you are speaking of evolutionary psychology; personally, I think that most evolutionary psychology explanations are post-hoc rationalizations; it's usually difficult to actually test.
That doesn't mean that it's valueless or uninteresting, just that evolutionary psychology should be treated more the way we treat history and less the way we treat experimental psychology or neurology or what have you[1]. Yes, we can come up for reasons why the crusade happened, and we can come up with historical evidence for and against it, and that can be really interesting, but we're still building a narrative from the bits of history that remain, and have a bunch of obvious biases (in history, the biggest is that the surviving written evidence is usually, well, written by someone with their own narrow biases.)
I thought I gave a pretty good example of hate without fear (or hate where the fear is pretty secondary to the hate) from my life, which you seemed to ignore? I'm not going to come up with another example, because I work pretty hard to remove my own irrational hates, and speculating about other people's irrational hate is, well, it's much less likely to produce reasonable results.
[1] neurology and experimental psychology have their own, very different problems, of course, but it's a different sort of thing from history.
It's not ok when fear erodes our values, but, by the same token: it's not ok for profit/growth-potential to erode our values.
"That is why it’s so disheartening to see the intolerant discourse playing out in the news these days — statements that our country would be a better place without the voices, ideas and the contributions of certain groups of people, based solely on where they come from, or their religion."
^^ China's "toleration" of Tibetan monks, the truth (just Baidu 'Tianamen Square' (from a Chinese IP)), and basic encryption/privacy [3], etc manifests in ways that land countless people in political prison or worse - and should inform Pichai's stance on (not) working with that government.
Google is the flag-bearer when it comes to keeping the web (and information at large) open and accessible: let's hope it doesn't cave for a third of the world's population. We'll see in 2016.
[1] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/02/26/exclusive... [2] - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-china-idUSKCN0T91... [3] - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/business/international/chi...