The Strength of Us Versus Them
nautil.us
nautil.us
All of the current POTUS' grandparents were born in Europe, and the previous one's father was Kenyan. The most famous entrepreneur of our generation was born of Syrian parents. The wealthiest self-made woman in America according to Forbes (I did have to Google it), Marian Ilitch, had Macedonian parents.
The best strategy in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is tit-for-tat [1]. The winning groups of today have found ways to cooperate-cooperate systematically, overriding the advantages conferred by the behaviour observed in the paper.
[1] It gets more interesting when both sides know how the other thinks: https://intelligence.org/files/ProgramEquilibrium.pdf
And of course there's also the terrorists. They're a strong Them used to excuse all sorts of policies.
Ethnocentrism, yeah we care less about that than we used to. We find a different Us vs Them these days. Mostly around ideas you hold to be true.
Those doing well in this social order, per the article, post-facto rationalize this with an essentialist argument: It's a meritocracy, I've earned my nice brownstone (and those I gentrified out didn't), my ability to eat at fancy restaurants (worked in the back by cheap labor of a different color), my cheap pedicures (by Korean immigrants who have no choice but to accept the toxic chemicals[2]), and the cheap nannies for my children (invariably black, hispanic or Filipino women scraping by, spending less time with their own children than the ones of their rich employers, some even moving abroad away from their own kids to give them a "better" life[3]).
Normally the reader comments under New York Times articles side with progressive politics, expressing anger at conservatives and Republicans for their self-serving disregard for the poor, for minorities, for women. But if a story points the finger at them[4], these liberal-banner-flying, I'm-with-Her touting New Yorkers, suddenly they start singing the same tune as the conservatives they disdain, justifying their ability to put their kids in the best schools at the expense of the disadvantaged kids, and blaming the families rather than the system that is rigged in their favor from the get-go. Sort by most votes and you have to get to the 15th comment or so for someone to side with the article. One reader had the gall to say:
> The good schools all have students that
Show up every day
Do their homework every night
Never miss a test, an assignment or a project
Ask for help when they need it
Students create study groups on their own to do the work
> There is no substitute for working hard everyday and delaying gratification.
This is good? That the woman who is doing her nails (see [1] if you haven't already) has to "work 7 days a week as did her husband", no doubt having less time to spend with her own kids, while this woman gets to be pampered in comfort of a pedicurist chair once a week and send her kids to exclusive schools with little effort?
The article is spot on about how we so easily switch sides, whatever it takes to maintain our cognitively dissonant views.
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[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/10980856/new-york-city-schools...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/nyregion/at-nail-salons-i...
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/the-sacrifices-...
[4] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/school-segrega...
Is that fair? No. But the people and cultures that realize that, and maintain a multi-generational view (rather than looking for comfort in their own life) are much more likely to achieve it.
Life was never fair. If you have a solution to make it more fair, I'm all ears. But just saying that it's unfair offers nothing.
If you think sexism is unfair, don't call it unfair unless you have a solution.
If you think racism is unfair, don't call it unfair unless you have a solution.
Suck it up women, people of color. If you stop complaining, and just work harder, eventually you'll make it. It might take generations, so just maintain a multi-generational view! I mean, many women say that to get the same recognition, they had to work twice as hard as men. So there you go: Shut up and work twice as hard!
If you think Capitalism is unfair, don't call it unfair unless you have devised the next generation economic system to replace it. The only person who had a right to call feudalism unfair was Adam Smith. Everyone else, especially those damn always complaining peasants, offered nothing.
These costs may be worth paying when fighting for a tangible goal (e.g. abolition of slavery), but not worth it when the solution is still a ghost.
* It's why you provide for your child first.
* It's why you root for your team over those "other guys."
* It's why you help your family before worrying about someone else's.
* It's why your city, state, or country must worry about things within its own borders first.
It doesn't mean the other child is bad, the other family is evil, or some other country is less worthy. It's a matter of "who do I worry about first?" Once those needs are met enough (think Maslow), you will worry about #2.
Do you always? You're always going to buy your kid a $50 video game before you donate to a charity or volunteer at a soup kitchen?
> Once those needs are met enough (think Maslow), you will worry about #2.
I know where I stand on your hypothetical but I won't hold you accountable to my values.
If we change those parts of ourselves we'll become less than human. The better approach is to accept our nature and work with it rather than against it.
[1]: You see this approach in people who like following a fixed, simple set of rules, rather than exercising fluid judgment. E.g. you'll see some who claim that the line for coercion falls at physical violence, that changing attitudes is "fighting nature" but technology isn't, etc..
The value judgements that the GP was describing are both rational and evolutionarily reinforced. When time, attention, and resources are scarce people choose their family or tribe first. It's a basic survival imperative - the people closest to you will help you too. Civilization can try to smooth the rough edges but without civilization our innate programming will reassert itself.
You mentioned "we" as well. What is the "we" you speak of? If you check around you'll see that not everyone agrees with you. Us v. Them surfaces again, strangely in the context of advocacy against it.
Sure, but no one is talking about brain implants. Is encouraging certain behaviors like growing wings? Political action has been phenomenally effective over the ages in shaping behavior. Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process[1] (1939) is a wonderful study of how behaviors (and even feelings) we now deem natural are just the result of a long chain of social change.
But what matters most isn't underlying sentiments (the feeling of us vs. them) but rather behavior (behaving as us vs. them). The fact that the intensity of us vs. them behavior has changed considerably (in both directions) throughout history, shows that we're not talking about essential human nature, but how that nature is channeled.
> What is the "we" you speak of? If you check around you'll see that not everyone agrees with you.
"We" is society, and I don't think anyone disagrees that societies work to improve the condition of their members. Deciding which improvements we should make and how we should make them is precisely what political debate is about, but I don't think that the ideal of improving our lives is controversial in the least.
> Us v. Them surfaces again, strangely in the context of advocacy against it.
I completely disagree. The context of us vs. them isn't the existence of groups who disagree, but the belief (and the subsequent behavior) that assumes that the debate is a zero-sum game. I don't necessarily frame the (sometimes vehement) debates I have with those I disagree with as ones where if I win they lose and vice versa.
Priorities and proximity are one thing, but the "vs" necessitates a hard separation where I feel it isn't warranted.
Even Bill Gates who has effectively infinite cash resources has to prioritize his attention.. which is probably his only scarce resource.
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html
This is a very tough problem.
Probably we all can think of a lot of instinctive behaviours that are a bad idea in what, now, are our normal contexts and that we avoid in a daily basis.
Intelligence, unlike evolution, is not blind (or, at least, no so blind).
Ethnocentrism certainly provides some meaning and purpose, but it's a shitty purpose of 'my interests at the expense of those other horrible people' and almost invariably ends in atrocities.
Globalism is simply a function of technological advancement, which is not going to go into reverse. We are not giving up instantaneous communications, or high-efficiency containerized shipping, or air travel, or GPS, or any of that other good stuff, despite the urgings of people like Aleksander Dugin.
You can have both a globalized society and meaning and purpose: there's a whole cosmos out there waiting to be explored, and the idea that there's more meaning to be had in militarizing the marginal differences between different ethnic groups is bizarre to me.
That's not to say that nature and natures way can't inform ethics, or to commit to any particular ethical outlook.
I don't think that's true. Of course you can come up with ethical systems which transcend nature but the ones that actually get adopted are simply sets and heuristics which make the group benefit the most from "just how it is."
Considering that moral attitudes are partially heritable, on a long enough time-scale, ethics that are truly separate from nature are bound to disappear or be relegated to marginal groups of people.
Almost certainly. But they transfer much more permanently genetically.
"Group" is a slippery thing, though. There is always a tendency for individuals and sub-groups to cheat on whatever wider group ethics might exist.
It's a more complex phenomena than most people give it credit for.
The problem is kind of like the species level of version of the tragedy of the commons. These different tribes/breeds/races all preferring the short term preference of saving their territory/mate/child/self versus saving the lives (and infinite potential) of their stranger neighbors.
The evolution of life shows us the grand benefit of higher and higher levels of organization. Scaling rules. It forces the previously multi-use smaller pieces to over specialize, but the gain are unimaginable as the voyager space probe is to a amoeba.
Multicellular life did not arise from cells being universalist. It arose from cells banding together with their mitotic offspring against other groups of cells. Similarly, the Voyager probe only happened because of us-vs-them competition in the cold war.
I guess I'm just partial one side of the coin, when both must be present for it to spin.
Still, it's a shame to waste all that potential... even if recent research into General Adversarial Networks hints to us that us/them is a lever buried deep.
BZZT Post hoc fallacy.
Voyager could have happened regardless.
We can't predict what would have happened, but the specific chain of events starting from agriculture (like ants and wasps and termites do) and ending with a little bit of magical metal leaving the solar system is... unique. Unless you wanna talk a sufi like constant explosion of super positioned universes. But that's silly.
Can we counteract the effect (making long-term strategies more favorable) by politics, or by changing the way the economy works?
It also shows us that complex systems are especially prone to catastrophic systems collapse. Scaling is not a better strategy, it's just a different strategy.
Us is merely what we empathise with and understand, that which is similar to how we identify with ourselves. The “Other” or Them, is farther away on this spectrum.
We see that in a more primitive time, when societal groups were based on race and ethnicity, we would identify strongly as so, and also select for it.
The brain is very good at “short circuiting” stuff we already know, and engaging with the aberrant parts of incoming information, so the brain scans should merely speak to the familiarity of information and not directly of any underlying bias, even though both may have a common source (i.e. foreign information is the underlying cause, but these variables - brain scans and biases - are merely correlated).
In today’s age, we identify based on what we are now seeing as “higher” interests. The intelligent vs the stupid, the skilled vs the incompetent, etc. These are now forming the in and out groups in our collective minds. It must be said though that it would take a significant amount of information about, say, an individual African American skilled person to change them from merely a black person to a skilled person in a White man’s head because one can be inferred trivially by a picture and the other by more time and a deeper understanding. (Take with a pinch of salt :)
The point here is that we now understand that society’s interests are better served by selecting for traits that are, in a sense, more objective. Things like skill and intelligence and the ability to contribute positively to the world we live in. By encouraging this selection, we are creating an in-group to which an aspiration is a positive thing, positive here being the same as positive for society. It also means that people are less limited by their biological circumstances, which is an equalising platform.
Hard questions remain, such as access to education and information that influences the position of a person with respect to the in-group. But I would argue that this is at least a positive evolution from where we have been.
Something also should be said about the ability to take every individual and every circumstance as unique, and be able to help each attain the maximum potential as per your own selected ideals, but this would require a radical individuality and awareness of self, and an extreme ability to understand and communicate with every other person. In this world, there would be no groups. But we’re probably not quite close to this world yet.
When you listen to the news, the line may be drawn based on geographic/state boundaries. When you talk with your coworkers, the lines are based on competitors vs partners. When you bump into that college friend, the lines are based on shared experiences, fields of study, or teams. When you go home and have dinner with your spouse, it's based on blood and marriage.
We choose, prioritize, and "optimize" based on all those lines throughout the day. We choose our values and connect and share or divide and compete as appropriate.
I was going to say "until we deny the 'Them' resources, there's not a problem" but we want to do that every day right? We want our team to get the best players, our companies to hire the best people, and our work to attract the best customers.. all of those things deny resources to the 'Them' in those scenarios.
U v T works very well in motivation and corporate problem solving.
The read reminded me of the birth order book. Tidbits of "factoids" that makes good conversation and can help predict peoples actions and emotions.
Also, any discussion of Us vs. Them should reference this article: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...