Overcoming Us vs. Them (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Overcoming Us vs. Them (2017)

nautil.us

62 pointsrzk39 comments

As it has been well-known in the east for thousands of years and well preserved by the Tibetan people, the us vs them mentality arises naturally through the nature of consciousness which grasps at the notion of a non-existent self.

Through ignorance we fail to see reality for what it truly is, ultimately empty, but conventionally existent.

Thus, we reify our perceptions as real, instead of recognizing that all objects are simply names and labels imputed over aggregates and the introduction of the mental afflictions that cause protectionist and selfish thought arise.

First comes the individual, then the small group, then the group of groups, then the nation and so on - all grasping at a sense of self that isn't truly there when thoroughly analyzed.

Every human being on this planet is the same. We all would like to avoid suffering and would like the causes of happiness.

Ridding yourself of the us vs them mentality involves waking up and developing unwavering compassion for other sentient beings. This requires the realization that all sentient beings want to avoid the causes of suffering.

Does this lengthy article mention this ancient and well-developed philosophy? Not a single word on it.

I recommend listening to just some of the conversations the Dalai Lama has conducted with western scientists and researchers:

Mind & Life Session 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgcFbPTwys

Mind & Life Session 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAEEAq8idU

I highly recommend you read Pumla's book (who appears in the second conversation): "A Human Being Died that Night" which is highly illustrative of the power of compassion for others even in the midst of human rights violations.

You're falling for something which I call the falling physicist problem.

A physicist was thrown out of a plane. He is aware of the forces that currently affect him and can even estimate his terminal velocity. Hell, he even knows that the atoms he's made of will be fine, since it would take energies orders of magnitude higher than his kinetic energy to affect them.

Nevertheless he'll go splat just like anyone else put in such a position.

This is why this philosophy isn't really that successful - it doesn't create any incentive to survive and perpetuate it.

Sure, you may have achieved ultimate compassion for your fellow man. Where's the benefit in that?

I respect your assessment.

You may think I'm falling into an idealist's dilemma, however, that single statement is speaking on the nature of emptiness of phenomena and how certain thoughts and emotions arise. Objects do not exist inherently and independently. Everything arises from an interdependent network of causality.

The scientist will go splat, but why does he fear death?

I have to lightly refute your point about it not being a successful philosophy, it was very successful for thousands of years in India where it originated and very successful in Tibet and other eastern societies. Western materialism tends to be in direct conflict with Buddhist wisdom.

All beings suffer, compassion is the way out of suffering for the individual and for others. Ask the Tibetan Yogis who were imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese who harbor no resentment toward their captors after release and who say that the greatest danger they felt during their imprisonment was losing compassion toward their captors.

No one ever said it was easy to develop, as can clearly be seen by such stringent resistance to the notion of having compassion for others, even enemies.

Buddhism is a religion (along with many other religions) that allows a minority to brainwash a majority in order to exploit them. Those Buddhist temples don’t build themselves. You offer them afterlife or an end of suffering and in return they offer their independence of thought and action.

The concept of self is evolutionarily effective. For better or worse, so is the concept of us and them.

It's not based on faith and has a rich history of academic development and logistical analysis by trained Nalanda scholars of 4th, 5th, and 6th century India.

Also there is a rich history of independent development and contemplative examination of the nature of reality, consciousness, and mind.

The western mindfulness genre is almost entirely made up of bits and pieces of Buddhist contemplative practice.

I don't expect to convince you that you don't know exactly what you're talking about.

Don't think for a second I'm surprised that most commenters here are pure material realists, part of the fun I guess.

Many religions rely on the attraction of a truth to blind people to the robbery taking place. Looking solely at one truth blinds you to other truths.

If the scientist isn’t concerned with going splat and doesn’t do something about it then he or she may not reproduce.

you can have compassion for an enemy and still defend yourself against them, just like you can run from an earthquake and not have hatred towards it. As you said, everything arises from an interdependent network of causality. that means everything that is, is what is. western materialism, buddhist wisdom, it all exists. to truly overcome the notion of "self" is to accept all of this. there is nothing "wrong" with any of it any more than there's something "wrong" with any other natural activities like earthquakes, planets crashing into each other, supernovas, owls eating little mice, you name it, and of course, our egos, as paradoxically nonexistent as they are are from this network of causality too. the whole thing is all one as are all of us. We can decrease our suffering by meditating on this truth. but it doesnt mean our physical manifestations need to be stupid.

You're the only one calling anything stupid, I simply pointed out how selfishness arises from a well-known and well-developed perspective on the human mind (and how it interfaces with reality) and pointed to some contemporary discussions (with scientists) on the nature of compassion and how it has the potential to bring people together in a world that is struggling with divisiveness as it faces one collective struggle after another.

The book I recommended is particularly insightful as it probes into how a society such as South Africa can move forward after such heinous human rights violations as the apartheid era through forgiveness and compassion instead of revenge and retribution.

I'm all for forgiveness and compassion but I feel that people who are tremendous threats to society should be prevented from participating further.

Example, Jared Kushner's efforts to commit genocide, purposely sabotaging efforts to send coronavirus relief to so-called "blue" states, sending thousands of people to their deaths for perceived political gain. This person should not be free to roam about in our society as he is a threat to public safety. There is no need for "revenge" or "retribution" only that public safety be preserved by preventing mass murderers from participating.

No doubt. Threats, threatening people, and threatening regimes exist and I'm certainly not advocating for a lack of justice and ethics.

It would help if society at various levels became less divisive, that's all. That certainly involves moving beyond the us vs them mentality in a lot of different ways, which takes emotional development starting at the level of the individual.

I can tell that you feel very strongly about the ongoing political situation, but there are of course many other contexts.

hi -

I practice mindfulness. Your post is both entirely true and also total BS. Because this: we live in our physical bodies , we are deciding to live in that world. Of course Donald Trump is, like all of us, another infinitesmally small point of energy that is consciousness like all the rest of us. However, within the physical realm that pure dot unfortunately happens to be manifested inside of an orange bucket of authoritarian narcisssm, which is a threat to all the other physical entities. When we practice mindfulness we still live in the physical world. I can feel sorrow and love for the innocent dot that is inside of DT but the physical manifestation should be rotting in jail.

put another way, if you truly accept everything about manifested reality without condition, why does it matter that there is conflict? the decision to no longer suffer is to accept whatever one's fate is, not to circumvent that fate.

It's okay to admit that it's difficult to display unwavering compassion with respect to the conventional truth (there are two truths). Instead of insulting you back, have an upvote!

i display unwavering compassion within the unconventional truth. within the conventional truth, compassion is not unwavering when someone is a threat to my family. why should it be? none of it matters?

It's clear you don't quite get it and I can't force you to understand. I wish you well.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934183

I posted this to see more discussion about it.

Isn't a strong social identity, something desirable? Doesn't it result in stability and strength? Don't we all seek the belonging sentiment which necessarily implies an Us vs. Them?

On the other hand, it seems that tribal thinking can increase social tension and divisiveness, and makes people more "stupid"/less critical towards their group.

So what is the right balance here?

As your sense of "I" diminishes the more compassionate and caring you become. The more emotionally resilient you become and the less harmful your decisions are to yourself and others (including animals). This is the core of Buddhist findings.

Having said that, there are religions and ideologies that tend to become a big part of a person's identity. Then their actions become guided by those ideologies.

> As your sense of "I" diminishes the more compassionate and caring you become.

I am not sure that is always the case. I would think that, for example, the women involved in the Charles Manson murders had a diminished sense of I, but they were not compassionate and caring.

I was talking about an intuitive realization that there is no "I", rather there is an ongoing constantly changing process that is referred to as "I". This requires years of meditative training. I am not familiar with the case but I doubt very much these women were meditating.

I don't see the relevance.

Joining a cult is not the same as diminishing the ego. You don't just supplant your ego with someone else's.

Anyone who loses themselves in a cult of personality is not following the teachings of the Buddhism.

People in organizations routinely fail to acknowledge an ignored ego: The Organizational Ego

The whitepapers and salespeople going on and on about their products, services and companies that nobody cares about?

Yeah, that one! The ideologies and demagogues are even "worse". Not that ego is a bad thing, just in isolation..

This is so true. I've tried to explain why an organization is the way it is before via cause and effect and some people refuse to believe that there is any sort of subtle force that factors into how organizations turn out.

Even if you point to things like Conway's law they still won't listen sometimes!

The best organizations have compassion for their employees and customers, but it takes right-thinking from the top.

It might depend on leadership culture. Most people are unprepared for their first management position, and how can they prepare? You even see natural leaders flounder, when put in the same leadership position and culture. The positions are necessary for the organization, but I believe almost nobody has really cracked the nut generally, just for their little trible. Most impactful thing leaders can do is cooperate and bring teams together, in order to accomplish concrete goals and organization. Project Lead is sort of that, but it needs to be continuous instead of temporary and limited scope.

Very true.

Oh good, someone else who is on the right track.

Laughing at the manson family reference from the other comment, that's an example of hostile brainwashing by a cult leader, whereas what is being described here is an exploration of self and the true nature of consciousness, which is compassion.

Shamatha is calm abiding mind, single-pointed meditation, temporary emotional stability.

Vipassana is analytical meditation, wisdom, lasting mental stability through deconstructing the self and other phenomena to repeatedly discover that all is empty at the ultimate level.

Going through this you can then approach the conventional world with more mental stability than just reacting naively to every event and occurrence.

This is very easy to answer. It depends on your context, your environment!

In a family, closer connections are part of living together. We see the same proximity effects in people working in teams.

When there is a need for improved collaborations between people, teams and organizations, the environment need to kindle and support such initiatives. This is called leadership.

For some individuals and roles, it is more natural to make connections across "the chasms", but this is dependent on individuality, position and opportunity. Thus in professional organizations, you want enabling this to be part of leadership and training of an organic organization.

Everyone can't connect to everyone all the time, so there needs to be some design and maintenance of such designs. Though personal connections remains an individual experience and skill, the environment must cease to sabotage initiatives, become more mature and professional.

I don't know about balance but the person that embodied every human virtue renounced his citizenship and he lived happier than his peers, lacked nothing and stood taller than kings. We can't all be Diogenes but he's something people should strive towards.

He lacked nothing because other people produced everything for him. If you want to live in a barrel, first you need a barrel, meaning you need a safe place to assemble it, and a way to source wood and tools, and then you need it to be protected from other people who want it, and before you know it you've got a whole functioning state with a shared identity and a legal system, and guys with beards are running around plucking chickens and criticizing you for wanting rules.

From Yes, Minister, I learned the Us/Them aikido exercise of filling in social conjugations:

    I am compassionate.
    You have a strong heart but a weak head.
    They start by trying to love everyone and end up loving no one.

(I am trying to remember a web-published book I read a while ago on defusing authoritarian tendencies. What I remember most strongly was that equal-treatment laws are more effective than one might intellectually believe, not because they are "legislating morality", but because they allow large numbers of in-group members who actually would treat out-group members normally to do so without being subject to retribution by in-group hardliners.)

人之初，性本善?

I posted this to see more discussion about it.

I don't know what you are hoping for here. This is probably not it.

I spent a fair amount of time in therapy in my teens and twenties. I'm quite convinced that a lot of our identity is a mental construct.

Let's take race. What makes someone "Black" or "White"?

It's not their skin color. You can find "Black" Americans and "White" Americans with very similar skin tones.

It's not their blood. The US decided somewhere along the way that people who are 7/8 Caucasian/European ancestry and 1/8 African ancestry are "Black." I have read these same people would be classified as "White" in Brazil.

It's not their culture. Even if a "Black" person gets a good education, etc, they will still be othered by most "Whites."

Anyway, we get taught certain categories and mental models and it winds up being taboo to think too hard about where they come from and what they mean and why they were really created and we live with the legacy of those inherited mental models and then those mental models shape both how we see ourselves and with whom we identify as "Us."

In other primates, those associations will tend to be more rooted in "This group takes care of me and I have positive associations with them and I'm one of them" and "This other group is openly hostile to me and they are my enemies and they are a problem, not an asset to me."

Human culture is more complex than that and it ends up being super hard to find a way out of those traps.

Even if you can find your way out, other people will try to keep pushing you into one of the preexisting categories in their own mind.

So the real question is "How do we find a path forward on getting group think to change?" because lots of people do therapy, sort their crap ...and then find that other people are actively affronted at their failure to fit with existing mental models.

For an arbitrary mental construct, it is remarkable how closely race matches clusters in a principal component analysis of the human genome: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Worldwide_Admixture_...

Black and white was a competitive construct of us and them. It is that simple. Human culture really isn’t more complex than that. It is just strategies and tactics layered atop the same goals animals have.

No, in this case it was a simple way of saying "This group of people can be slaves and that group of people cannot be slaves" which is why we get weird demarcations about how you are still "Black" even if you are only 1/8 African: So slave owners could rape their slaves, father children upon them and treat those children as slaves for several generations.

In the US, our weird definitions surrounding "Black" and "White" are a polite euphemism for "People officially marked as someone you can victimize and people officially marked as someone who can do the victimizing."

Which I didn't really want to baldly state because it isn't something Americans really want to hear.

I liked your first post, but this one is in line with the article.

Slavery is a competitive construct.

Compassion is key.

The title is "Why Your Brain Hates Other People" not "Overcoming Us vs. Them".

Right - it does appear the browser title is the latter. The subtitle is "And how to make it think differently."

The second paragraph begins to focus on this: "And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them"

So they are both important to this article - why it is this way, and how we can improve upon it, or work around it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com